​

📖Turn the Page📖

Happy Friday, [FIRST NAME GOES HERE]!

​

I want to talk about some of the ways we keep ourselves stuck.

Because they can be habits that are hiding in plain sight.

I’ll warn you, today’s share is a bit vulnerable.

It’s a thing I don’t talk about much.

But if I’m going to be transparent about my journey From Classroom to Copywriter, I can’t stay silent about this part.

Teaching TBH, was not something I set out to do orginally.

I kind of “fell into it” by default. I didn’t really know what else I wanted to do.

And, well, summers off? Sounded good to me. (LOL—IYKYK).

I taught from 2006-2023. That’s 17 years— in case the-math-on-a-Friday of it all ain’t happening.

​

From the first month of my very first teaching job, I knew it felt off.

The energy required to be “on” all day, to manage a whole host of behaviors, and to stay on top of so much in order to ensure that each student was getting their (sometimes vast number of) needs met was something I had to dig deep for from the jump.

I think I always assumed I was an “extrovert.” Until I fully understood the meaning of those words:

An extrovert (as I understand it) feels energized and refueled by their interactions with people. They find energy in a group.

An introvert, often feels exhausted by a lot of interaction and refuels or draws energy from time alone, in quiet.

While I now understand that most people sit somewhere along this spectrum, it turns out that I sit much closer to the introvert side than the extrovert side.

I would finish my work day feeling SO INCREDIBLY DEPLETED there wasn’t much I could do.

Work out? Definitely not.

I literally didn’t even want to talk to other humans.

My first year teaching, I was easily convinced to head to the bar after a long day at school.

I would have a few glasses of wine.

End most nights crying.

I knew I wasn’t OK, and, I did nothing about it.

Everyone around me was doing the same thing (OK maybe not the crying).

Eventually, pretty quickly, I realized I couldn’t go to the bar like that. But I also couldn’t do much else either.

My running/workout habit? Non existent that first year.

Most weeknights, all I wanted do was sit like a vegetable on my couch.

And what was my almost constant companion?

A glass of wine. Or 2.

Half a bottle of wine most nights of the week.

This felt like a completely normal thing for me to do. I would tell myself, at least I’m not at happy hour anymore like the rest of my colleagues 3 nights a week.

I functioned “just fine.” I stayed busy. I shoved aside my knowing that this wasn’t what I was meant to be doing anymore.

I had another glass of wine to quiet the noise.

When I had my daughter in 2019, I couldn’t keep up that lifestyle. Not entirely anyway.

But in 2020, a year into her life (exactly a year actually), the pandemic hit.

And then everyone was drinking too much, eating too much, using all sorts of perceived “comforts” to compensate for the loss of normalcy in any way we could.

But when we rounded summer of 2021, things started to crack a bit.

I decided to stop drinking that summer/fall. And when I wasn’t drowning out the voice inside of me anymore, it got very LOUD.

Suddenly I could see and feel all the ways my life had stayed on a track that wasn’t mine to ride anymore.

By October of that year, my soul was screaming at me. I was enraged by so much I had spent years trying to ignore or rationalize.

It didn’t seem rational anymore.

And promised myself I would begin building something different.

The thing is, I didn’t see myself as someone that had a “drinking problem.”

But I absolutely was using it as a way to ignore what I knew to be true.

It was keeping me stuck in ways I couldn’t see or hear until I cut it out.

And when I did?

What started out as a firey rage, quickly turned into a productive burn.

And my belief in myself and what I was capable of filled the empty space that was left behind.

Please know I’m not saying you have to give up your nightly glass of something.

But I am saying that if you know you’re unhappy, if you’ve even heard a whisper of something from deep inside that says:

…there is more for you on the other side of this…

It might be worth exploring if it’s true.

I’d love to know if this resonates with anyone.

Hit reply and tell me where you are on this journey… I read everything single email and would love to chat.

Sometimes just saying something out loud (or writing it on the page) is the tiny first step that can launch something much, much bigger.

Have a restful weekend, friends! I’m here if you need someone to remind you of what you’re capable of.

MC