What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?
I can answer this question with one word…survive.
I don’t really set goals for myself, as silly as that sounds. In 2019 I decided I was going to run a half marathon and got pretty close to accomplishing that goal. Covid cancelled the race before I could do it. But honestly, that goal wasn’t that hard. At the peak of my running game, I was able to run 8 miles without stopping and it wasn’t too challenging. I had worked up to that point and I really liked running. So as I tacked on more and more miles, it was an easy progression.
I set a goal one time to quit smoking. Some would call that hard, but I had those Nicoderm patches and I was able to quit in only two weeks. That wasn’t too difficult either.
But going through two years of grad school was something else. The first year was brutally stressful because of the classwork in addition to my full-time teaching job in which I still had to maintain all the extra responsibilities and duties I had. Once I got through that first year, I had my internship year to go. A year that saw me as a full-time grad student AND a full-time school principal. The “mentor” I had made things worse than I could have ever imagined. There came a point when I knew I was going to quit my job. And I did. But I also agreed to finish out my contract. I also didn’t want to throw away the money I had spent on grad school. I wanted to finish out the school year and have that masters degree to add to my resume. At the point where I made the decision to quit, there were still about two months of grad school left and one more month and a half after that left on my contract. All I had to do was survive.
Surviving meant putting up with the stresses of being a principal, and of that, there were too many to count. It meant gritting my teeth through every interaction with my “mentor” and doing my best to calm my anxiety both before and after those interactions. It meant doing the big assignments reserved for the end of grad school that proves you’re worthy to be given a masters degree. It meant being “camera ready” and smiling for everyone because nobody knew what I was going through behind the scenes. Nobody knew how my “mentor” was really treating me. Nobody knew that the stress and anxiety of it all almost killed me because my pre-existing issues with high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes really didn’t respond well to what I was going through.
I just wanted to survive. And survive I did. Now I’m happy to tell anybody who was there that year what really happened and why I really left. Now I have boundaries. Now I have a job that I leave at 5. Now I walk down the halls at work with my arms covered in tattoos and feel braver and stronger than I ever have in my life. And that’s because, as cliche’ as it is, what didn’t kill me made me stronger.
No other goal that I could set for myself right now could be harder than the one I had just last year. I don’t ever want to be forced to survive something again. But if I have to, I will. I did it once, I can do it again.
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