The Adventure of the Banished Demons

In which I have a breakthrough...

The familiar golden arches welcome me through the door. Like thousands of other people every day I'm sitting down to enjoy a treat from McDonald's. My friend Louise and her kids are with me and I'm holding down a table whilst they organise what they are going to order. This particular McDonald's holds many memories. Here I've been drunk, hungover, poor, excited, exuberant and exhausted. But above all these, there is one moment which is particularly clear in my memories...

<WISTFUL HARP MUSIC>

March, 2014. I'm broken. The most challenging thing I've ever done has come to an end in the worst possible way. For the last eleven weeks I've been on teaching practice, the final one I needed to overcome after three and a half years at university to gain a teaching qualification. For the entire eleven weeks, I'd been repeatedly told how shit I was and had received helpful advice from the people that were supposed to support me such as "I don't know how to help you" and "You don't seem like you care". I'd never cared as much or worked as hard and it had all been for nothing as today it had been declared that I'd failed. As I half-heartedly ate a Creme Egg McFlurry I wondered where to go from here and the future looked bleak and hazy. 

The sound of a baby crying brings me back to the here and now. Since then the restaurant has been modernised with touch screens and wireless charging points. Louise is married and has four children. My situation couldn't be more different from what it was nine years ago.

In those intervening years I'd worked as a special needs teaching assistant and gradually worked my way up to cover classes. I found a niche that I was good at and began a short teaching qualification. I still had my doubts but the feedback I was receiving was overwhelmingly positive in a way I never would have imagined. But even then, I knew I had the challenge of a mainstream teaching placement ahead and I had no idea whether I could get through, not least because of the trauma I'd been through previously. The similarities with that nightmare placement were ominous. It was exactly the same time of year, the school's name was incredibly similar and the catchment area was also very similar. 

One thing was different though and that was me. It took a few weeks to adapt but suddenly I was receiving really positive feedback once again. The best I felt I could hope for at the start was just making it to the end unscathed but instead, I came out the other side lavished in compliments and awkwardly not knowing how to respond. I've firmly defeated my demons, knocking them out of this plane of existence once and for all. 

Regular readers may have noticed that this is my first blog post for some time. It felt alien to me to be able to say my life was going really well and there was a fear that would look stupid if my mainstream placement had ended in failure which genuinely felt like a very plausible outcome. There are a few hurdles left to jump but even I will concede that failure is now improbable. There are all sorts of things happening in my life right now that I'm very excited by and you'll likely hear about some of them here- I shall now be writing regular blog posts again. 

At this point, I should say how much the support of friends, family and colleagues has meant to me. They have believed in me far more than I believed in myself. When I was starting my placement and trying my best to hold back the nausea of anxiety the messages of support I received meant more than the people who sent them could ever know. I honestly am not sure that I wouldn't have panicked and given up if it hadn't been for those people- thank you so much. 

Anyway, if you remember this is all happening in my head whilst I'm at McDonald's. I've finished my McPlant and a thought occurs to me. It turns out sadly that Creme Egg McFlurrys are not available yet. Still, you can't win them all.

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