The ending I deserve

I have discovered that I’m like a kid when it comes to movies. I can watch the same movie every day and not get tired of it. This is not a recent discovery either. The fact that the movie “You’ve Got Mail” only feels right to watch on a Saturday is a tribute to the fact that for nearly my entire teaching career, I have put that movie on every Saturday afternoon while I sat on the couch and wrote lesson plans for the upcoming week. I love that movie and I can’t even explain why it’s that particular movie that is the perfect background noise for doing something like school work when I’m at home. Maybe I never grew out of that phase from when I was a kid. I watched movies repetitively like most kids did and still do from what I hear. It’s the reason “Dirty Dancing” and “A Christmas Story” are so engrained in my mind. I was not a kid who watched typical kid movies, by the way, and my parents were not the kind to restrict me from watching anything. That is, until I told my dad to eat my shorts and I was banned from watching “The Simpsons”. But I digress.

One of the movies that can easily be interchanged with “You’ve Got Mail” is “The Devil Wears Prada”. For many years, I watched that movie and felt that I could relate to the main character, Andy, played by Anne Hathaway. In the movie, she works incredibly hard to please a boss who is manipulative and just mean. Her personal life “is hanging on by a thread” as her character states at one point. Something about the movie motivated me to keep working hard at my job. My job was similar in that I had a lot of responsibilities at work that bled over into my home life, most teachers have that. My boss also was someone who was a hard person to please and had very strong opinions and a blunt/abrasive way about expressing those opinions. As I watched this movie over the years, I watched the end and wished so badly that I could do what Andy did, turn and walk away from the job that caused her so much stress. To make that decision and feel the relief that comes with putting it behind you. There certainly has never been anything stopping me from walking away from my teaching job. Our contracts are for one year and it’s always our choice whether to come back or not. We turn in a letter of intent each year that says if we plan to come back and I always turned one in. My boss, for all her faults, was someone who favored me. She was definitely the kind of person who had favorites. But she always made sure that I knew I was valued and that it was worth my while to stay at our school year to year.

That changed this past year. To make a very long story short, she retired as principal and I took her place. I was the principal of my school this past year while she mentored me from behind the scenes so I could complete my master’s degree at the same time. I had to have a mentor for my last year of grad school because this year as principal was also my internship year. There’s a lot to be said about why I agreed to pursue school administration. But there is also a lot to be said about why I am leaving the education field after only a year as principal. Without getting into the details of how this school year seemed to be personally determined to kill me, I am now less than a month away from the end of my contract and having the “Devil Wears Prada” ending I have always wanted.

I watch this movie now and can relate to it even more than I could before. I still understand completely about working hard and trying to please a boss that makes it nearly impossible to do. And I understand why Andy didn’t quit before she did. Her goal was to stick it out for a year and then move on. She wanted that experience under her belt to make it easier to get a job doing what she really wanted to do. But the part of the movie that really speaks to me now is the end before Andy makes the final decision to leave. She has gotten into the good graces of Meryl Streep’s character, and is even going out of her way to do something to help her out of a situation she felt was detrimental to her boss’ career. Ultimately, she finds out that her boss already knew about the situation and had done something to fix it, despite the fact that it meant screwing over a loyal employee just to save herself. Andy and her boss end up having a conversation about it afterwards and her boss tries to get Andy to see that she (Andy) is very much like her, though Andy disagrees and proclaims that she doesn’t want to be like her. How much that conversation parallels my own job situation with my former principal is insane! My old boss wanted me to follow her footsteps and be a principal like her, so I did. I went to grad school, got my masters degree, did a year of being the principal, did everything she said to do. But what I discovered about her this year, as she “mentored” me through my first year as principal, made me decide that this is not for me. Again, without getting into the details of how absolutely terrible this year has been, and just how much the stress and anxiety did to my body physically and mentally, I have made the decision to leave because I don’t want to be her. In fact, after my contract ends, I don’t want to have anything to do with her anymore. And I won’t.

The first time that I watched “The Devil Wears Prada” after making the final decision to leave my school…and by leave, I mean really leave. I’m not even going back to teaching. The first time I watched it, I cried when Andy turned and walked away at the end. I’ve never cried when watching that movie, but I did then. By quitting my job, I finally got to do what Andy did. I walked away from a job that was slowly killing me from the stress. Literally. I’ve never seen my blood pressure and a1C so high. Granted, this is just a movie, loosely based on a real life boss in the fashion industry from what I’ve read, but still. I now know how Andy felt. The intense feeling of relief is one that I couldn’t have ever imagined to be as good as it is. It feels like I have been holding my breath for at the very least, the past two years that I have been in grad school. Since making this decision, I can breathe again. Each milestone since making that decision has felt incredible. I successfully finished my masters and graduated at the beginning of May. The school year ended for the kids just before Memorial Day. Workdays for the teachers ended the week after. Now, it’s a countdown to the end of my contract. There’s not much left for me to do at work. A new principal has been hired and much of what there is to do, he’ll do it when he takes over on July 1st.

The great thing about finally getting the ending I deserve is that this happiness, this relief, this almost euphoric feeling of freedom, is that it isn’t fleeting. It hasn’t gone away yet. I am still as happy now as I was when my decision became public knowledge. I’m not going to worry about when that feeling might end. Instead, I’m going to ride this wave as long as I can. As Andy’s boyfriend says at one point in the movie when she says she’s going to quit, “Congratulations, you’re free”, yes, yes I am. Congratulations to me.