Thoughts on Corona and mental health

Good morning all,

I recently saw a post on Facebook about what we can be grateful for during Corona/Covid19.  It made me think about what is good in my life during this time.  It also made me think about my disability, and what I can do to manage it during this time.  I recently had to go to more intense care, IOP, to battle my depression over losing a job.  It wasn't a good fit for me, but I blamed myself and my depression for losing the job instead of realizing it was making me incredibly unhappy.  I think I belong in an urban teaching environment.  It was where I was trained, where I learned about students and teaching philosophy, and where I felt I was doing good. 

In essence, I lost some of my identity when I taught at a suburban, more affluent place.  I was always the farmer, the lumberjack, the fisherman . . . things that my Hartford students were always incredulous at.  At my new school, this was all commonplace; many of my students were Ag-Ed, so they do as much or more of those things than I do.  I stopped donating laptops to my students, since not many of them had need, or I was too new to know what students needed it.  I wish I had tried to keep that @gr8fullyfeclub charity alive, by asking for donations from my students and parents and bringing them to Hartford or Waterbury, or even Torrington.  I felt like my students were going to succeed with or without my help, so I started feeling useless. 

It's impossible to say how much of that was my depression talking and how much of that was the school being a bad fit for me.  It's the first time I've really admitted to my bipolar disorder being a disability.  Through my career in Hartford, it usually helped me to be enthusiastic about my lessons, care about my students, and keep a positive attitude despite many reasons to become negative.  I've become a bit too excitable at times (manic) and that has led to problems, but with FMLA and proper care of my disability I was always able to return to work to fight another day.  My depression sometimes made it hard to do an effective job, but I was always able to work through it before, lean on coworkers who understood, and make it through.

Anyway, what has helped me fight off my depression this time is the strange new freedom that we are experiencing.  I now get to spend time with my family all living under one roof, which is new (a custody issue which I won't get into here), and see nature every day.  My 8 year old is in love with fishing and wants to go every day, so that helps me focus on beauty and get outside in nature every day.  My 18 year old just built a computer, and is helping me do tech projects around the house, which keeps my technology brain active.  I like living vicariously through his energy at building his own gaming desktop, and working with him to snake cables, or learning about whatever video game he's passionate about and why.  All of this keeps me from self pity, and has let me have the confidence to start applying for jobs and thinking about what's next in my career.  It may be teaching, but I think it will be an urban setting like Hartford.  If it's not, I'd like to work with computers - programming, help desk, crunching data.  Either way, I need to have an identity that isn't wedded to my work.  Losing a job shouldn't tear me down to my foundations the way losing this job has.  I suddenly wasn't a teacher, I was just a guy who failed at teaching.  Again, I think this was the depression talking, but I lost an essential part of who I was when that teaching job didn't pan out the way I'd hoped it would.  I felt like I'd let everyone down (my family, my friends, coworkers who believed in me, my students, their parents).  Teaching is hard, and teaching in a new place after 15 years of one type of teaching is harder.  I guess I have learned to cut myself some slack.