When I first got my current job teaching, I decided this was going to be an ultimatum year. I had decided that if I didn't like teaching at this new school within the first couple months, I was going to leave education for good and sell my soul to corporate America for a bigger paycheck. My college background isn't formally in education, but my work experience at various teaching/mentoring jobs before was enough to get me in the door to teach temporarily. I liked doing it, but wasn't really sure if I could see myself doing it long term. To make a long story kinda short, my first job teaching was in first grade in a very rough part of West Philadelphia. I taught both the school day and extended school day (7:30am-6pm), which was exhausting but paid really well. My entire life during the work week was nothing but going to work, going to the gym, and sleeping. As a 22 year old with all that responsibility and stress, I turned to partying and sex to relieve the pressure. Despite the sub-par working conditions, long days, and general craziness of working in an inner-city school, I loved what I did, loved my kids, and loved the people I worked with. A month before the end of the school year, I was notified my position was being reduced to hourly, part time. I felt stabbed in the back, and lost a lot of my motivation.

That school year ended, and I went unemployed for the whole summer. I got really depressed, lonely, and again turned to partying and sex to give me some sense of being useful for something. I hit rock bottom when, on August 15th, 2015, my bank account was near zero. I was too prideful to ask my parents for money, and had only a loaf of bread, peanut butter, and jelly in the fridge. Instead of using my last $30 to go grocery shopping, I decided it would be better spent on a night at the club and bathhouse forgetting about the fact I felt totally useless. I woke up that next morning brutally hung over with somebody in my bed who I had no recollection of. I lived on PB&J sandwiches until I scrapped enough money together to buy real food again. I found a Teaching Assistant job, but we were basically nothing more then glorified babysitters to high-needs, mentally disturbed children. It was a huge pay cut and I wasn't much of a teacher at all. It was a long year where I basically just worked for a paycheck.

I hated it and decided to give myself one more year to figure out what I wanted to do. The only job I was really qualified for that didn't pay entry level, crap wages, was still education. I came upon a teaching opening at one of the top schools in the city, and almost didn't apply because I thought I had no chance. It is one of those schools where it is very rare to even have an opening, and when they do, they get flooded with applications from qualified people. I decided to give it a shot. To my surprise, I got the interview, and in an event that shocked me beyond words, they offered me the position. It was like a miracle. I was just happy to get a good paying job again, and planned to use it as a year where I could figure out what I wanted to going forward. I was ready to sell my soul to an office cubicle for a fat paycheck.

But things started to change. As I began to actually teach again, I started to remember why I loved teaching in the first place, and why I love working with kids on a daily basis. I remembered why teaching was such an important role, and how much of a difference one could make for kids who desperately needed it in the city. In just a matter of months, I had gone from being completely ready to jump ship to corporate America, to starting to look at Masters in Education programs so I could make teaching my career. I decided to apply to a lot of programs I knew I could get into, and a few that I had little chance of getting into. My grades in undergrad weren't bad, but they certainly weren't stellar either, and I thought that would hurt me a lot. But luckily for me, I have solid work experience in education, and got a letter of recommendation from one of the most respected principals in the city. To my surprise, I ended up getting into my reach school, and will be starting my Master's in the fall.

I won't lie, I'm nervous as hell about all of this. I'll be working full time still, and going to grad school at night. My life is basically going to be consumed by those two things. It's also nerve-wracking because by doing a masters in this, I am basically committing myself to this as a career for the next 25-30 years. I wrote about this previously, but I fiercely value my independence, my lack of firm roots in anything, and my somewhat libertine/hedonistic lifestyle. A lot of that is going to be sacrificed on the Alter of Adulthood, but it is basically now or never. I can't be the person I am now forever, so it's time to begin that metamorphosis (or whatever you want to call it).

I intend to live it up for the next 5 months as sort of a 'last hurrah'. Since I have summers off, I'm going to go spend a few months traveling through East Asia. Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Bangkok, and Pattya. In my head, I'm sort of billing it as the last trip of my care-free twenties. We shall see what the coming years bring.