24. Chapter 19: Wanting to Leave is Enough

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Transcript

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Chapter 19. Wanting to leave is enough. Yoga Sutra 1.4 is a warning of what will happen if you aren't regularly practicing yoga. Vritti Svarupyan Itratra. When we're not regularly returning to the present moment to study ourselves, we get lost in our thoughts. We get sucked into the external world. Our thoughts, our words, and our emotions become our identity. According to Pantanjali, this attachment to our thoughts is the root of all suffering. When we aren't practicing yoga, we can't separate ourselves from the chaos around us. We become this chaos. And that's what happened to me. I was gradually becoming the chaos over a period of time, but the breaking point for me occurred one day in October when I walked in on a colleague stealing from me. Because I didn't have a lockable cabinet in my classroom, I tended to leave my bag on a shelf, trusting that the people around me would do the right thing. However, I soon discovered that my trust was misplaced when I entered my classroom on that fateful day, and I found my colleague standing behind the front door with my purse in his hands, money on the top. I reported the incident to William, who didn't believe that it had happened at all, and claimed there were no security cameras to check. This blatant dismissal of my experience both upset and also infuriated me. When I recounted this story to my other colleagues, everyone seemed to shrug their shoulders. It turned out that theft was a normal part of life in our particular workplace, where it felt to me like consequences were not enforced. Many colleagues even recounted stories of their valuables being stolen right out of their locked apartments by school maintenance staff. One person's cat had even gone missing out of her apartment one day while she was at work, unaware that anyone would be entering the apartment as she hadn't been notified of any scheduled maintenance. Get used to it was the attitude. Theft was not normal in the public realm. In malls, resorts, and public spaces, you could leave your things everywhere and they'd be safe. The normalization of theft and misbehavior was an issue at my specific workplace. Stealing had become commonplace as a result of theft reports not being followed up within the school. For a long time I harbored resentment towards the administrative team at this school at the time that I worked there. It was almost as if I thought that all of these leaders were intentionally trying to harm us teachers, students, and parents by not caring about our daily experiences there. I recently realized that they too were probably doing the best they could in the circumstances, just like I was. Human beings make decisions based on our situation more often than our disposition. The leadership team were probably under-resourced, understaffed, and struggling to solve problems that they didn't have the solutions for. It wasn't that they didn't care that people were reporting theft to them. It was likely that they just didn't have a way to solve the issue. So it was easier to sweep under the rug. For instance, the administrative team said that they didn't have working security cameras in the school to check what happened in my classroom that day. This was probably true. But it was not the administrator's fault. They weren't the owners of the school or the people in charge of buying and installing security cameras. I do know that the staff were very underpaid too, so they probably feared firing the person I'd caught stealing from me and not knowing where they could find an adequate replacement who would accept the job conditions. The administrative team was not responsible for any of these larger scale school-wide issues. They were simply the people who were hired to run the school. They were not bad people. They were just doing the best they could in the circumstances in which they found themselves. This does not negate what happened or how it made me and other teachers feel, but it has helped me make peace with the story. I have many, many friends who accepted jobs around the world as international educators. From Vietnam to Honduras to Suriname, to Mexico, to Jordan, to China, to Indonesia. Some of these teachers had incredible experiences at their schools, and some of them experienced similar issues to me. I've come to realize that these mixed experiences had little to do with the countries where people relocated and more to do with the individual work environments of each teacher. I know people who stayed in Kuwait for over a decade and had a wonderful time there at the school where they worked. Similarly, although I speak very highly of my time in Abu Dhabi, where I later stayed for four years, I also know people who stayed in Abu Dhabi for a few months and had a negative experience. I emphasize the vastness of these experiences because I want to be clear. The problems that I faced at my school were not because of the country of Kuwait itself. The problems stemmed from the for-profit international teaching system and the particular school where I was working. Due to the fact that there were no unions to protect teachers, many of the for-profit international schools are cutting corners and profiting large amounts of money off tuition instead of investing some of their earnings into resources, facilities, and staffing. Your employer is also your landlord. Your public life and private life become mixed in an unhealthy way. You lose all of your support systems. What I've concluded is that the individual experiences of teachers who work overseas have less to do with what country they choose to work in and more to do with what school they accept a job offer at, and who is in leadership at the time at the school where they teach. Additionally, how resilient they are at the time they accept the job makes a difference too. I say this because I want to be clear that the issues at my workplace are not reflective of Kuwait as a country on the whole or my former workplace on the whole. Looking back at this stealing incident with hindsight, I now recognize how easily our communities can modify and normalize codes of behavior that aren't normal elsewhere. By a lockable cabinet was the response from everyone with whom I worked. You don't have any Wasta. I quickly learned that one of the most important things you needed in Kuwait was Wasta, meaning power or connections in Arabic. It's like the white privilege of the Middle East, and teachers did not have it. I walked into my colleague Connor's classroom sobbing. He sat down on a desk, looked at me, and asked with sincerity, Alex, are you gonna make it till the end of the year? Or are you gonna be a Christmas runner? Between sobs, I said to him, I have to sob, stay until March, sob, because my mom's already sob. Books your flight here. I knew there were lots of runners. They existed, and technically, I could leave if I wanted to too. No one was holding a gun to my head saying that I had to stay. But I felt like I couldn't leave. I felt like I could never bring myself to be one of them. There were rumors around the school about what would happen to runners. We were told that teachers who quit their jobs before the school year ended would be banned from teaching recruitment websites and that they wouldn't get another job after they quit. I was young and naive, and it was my first job. I didn't understand that there was no way any of that could be true. In reality, it was tremendously difficult to recruit teachers to come to Kuwait. So they did everything they could to keep us there once we'd arrived. I realize now that quitting, leaving, and making career path changes are a normal part of lots of people's lives, but I believe the runner rumors, and I didn't want my career to be ruined. To me, quitting was not an option. In the 1990s, I was raised with the slogan, quitters never win and winners never quit. Women especially are taught to stay and to stick everything out, no matter how hard things are. I thought it would be shameful to leave, and I cared too much about what other people would think. Instead of looking inwards and saying, Does being here make me happy? I looked outwards and said, What would people think of me if I leave? Years later, after having to muster the courage to quit my relationship, resign from my job, and leave an entire life that I'd created for myself, I realized that I had to unlearn this philosophy that I'd inherited during my childhood. It's okay to quit. It is okay to leave. After two and a half months in the Gulf, I really wanted to leave. At the time, I wasn't conscious of just how many difficulties I had endured during such a short time frame. The school had let me down on so many promises. I'd caught a teacher stealing from me, and management didn't believe me. I felt alone, I was separated from my family and friends, I was struggling with my mental health and had no tools or resources. On top of all this, I'd moved into an apartment that was more like a dungeon as the queen of the addition, and then been upgraded to a family-sized apartment full of cockroaches, an improvement that many of my colleagues found unfair. I was struggling with the overall behavior of the children in my classroom. I was in a toxic relationship which was going nowhere. I couldn't leave the country and visit my friends in Dubai because my passport was still in the school's possession, and I felt like I didn't have a home in the country. It didn't occur to me that I had a very long list of valid reasons as to why it would be okay to quit my job at this point. I blamed everything on myself, as if there was something wrong with me or something lacking within me to not be able to survive the circumstances. In reality, it would have been okay to leave. Connor said to me at the end of the year, if I could give an award to someone who I thought would have been a Christmas runner but stayed, it would have been you because so many challenging things happened to you, yet you somehow found the resilience to stay. I hadn't looked at it that way, but he was right. Everything was stacked against me and everything was going wrong. I wanted to leave. But I couldn't bring myself to understand that if I quit my job, it wouldn't be over. When I finally quit two years later, opportunities were arising all over the world almost every day. But I couldn't see this. I was convinced that I had to stay. I couldn't bring myself to realize that I didn't have to stay just because I had signed a paper saying that I would. It didn't matter what paper I signed. If you want to leave somewhere, then leave. You don't need a long list of reasons why. As Cheryl Strade wrote in a poem that I love, wanting to leave is enough. A few days after the stealing incident, I got another email from William. He asked me to come to his office on a Thursday afternoon. Apparently, there'd already been a Christmas runner in October. A turkey ditch would probably be a more appropriate name because it was right around Canadian Thanksgiving. She was a middle school English teacher. She hadn't lasted at our school for more than a month before she quit. She was there for such a short period of time that I'd never even met her. She'd lived in a single apartment inside the oasis. After she quit, they quickly found a replacement for her within the country, but the new teacher had a family, and the only extra family-sized apartment was the one in which I was living. So when William started our conversation with, Alex, you're gonna have to move apartments, and I learned that I would be moving for the third time since I'd arrived in the country a few months earlier. I felt even more overwhelmed than I had before. Back to the edition, I asked. I desperately did not want to end up back there. William reassured me that no, I wasn't moving back to the addition. He was giving me the runner's apartment, which was in the singles building inside the Oasis compound. By the end of my first term there, I'd probably be the only staff member in the history of teachers to live in all three of the apartment towers that were provided for us. The addition, the family building, and the singles building. A fact that I'd laugh but also cry about. The school gave me 24 hours to move, but they'd promised they'd send me some movers to help. Eight to ten men was specifically what William said. I called Dave, who I was still dating at the time, and asked him to come help me move, but it was Thursday night and he had a party he wanted to go to instead. I asked my teacher friends to come over, but no one was available to help. Once again, I would pack up and move on my own. I tried to go with the flow as I took on such a big change with so little support, but all that changed when I saw the new apartment where I was moving. No wonder this woman had lasted such a short period of time at the school. I opened the door and there was garbage strewn throughout the apartment. The kitchen had lime green paint with holes in the cracked walls that were stuccoed over with white adhesive. The living room walls were a shade of brown along with hues of bright orange and baby blue. The kitchen had beads hanging across the doorway as if it were an episode of that 70s show. How could they make me move without even bothering to clean the inside of my new apartment? I could tell just by smelling the inside of the apartment that a smoker had lived there previously. I left and walked back to my family apartment to continue to pack up my things. And at this point, I truly could not stop crying. Tears were uncontrollably pouring out of me. As I threw my belongings into suitcases, I didn't know how to make the tears stop. I was in what I now know as a state of depression. I decided that I needed to take a break from packing, so I got changed into gym clothes, called Ragu, and asked him to take me to the hotel for a spinning class. Maybe some endorphins would help. As I walked through the courtyard to get into his taxi, I ran into a group of friends returning from dinner whom Ragu was dropping off. It was too late for them to help me with packing at this point. Are you okay? They asked me. I couldn't stop my sobs as I said, yes, I'm fine. I just need to go to spinning. The following morning, the eight to ten men that William had promised would help me move did not show up. Again, I was on my own. I called William, furious about the situation, demanding that the school fix all the issues with the apartment that week. He strolled in hours later with his takeaway coffee and announced, it's not that bad, while attempting to rip the beads off from the doorway. He tried to pull them off several times before giving up. Yeah, I'll have to get maintenance to deal with that. He cracked open the window to air out the smell of smoke and trash, and as the apartment heated up, I said, Oh my God, you have to be kidding me. Is the air conditioning broken in this apartment too? Fortunately, it was not. When I asked for the walls to be painted, he said that it wouldn't be possible in a week and I'd have to live with these colors for the rest of the year until the summer. He tried to convince me that the apartment was livable and that I was overreacting. I demanded that the school, at the minimum, repaint the apartment within the next week, and William finally agreed. When I told Connor about this later on, he smirked and tried to stop himself from laughing. Alex, do you really think the school's gonna paint the apartment for you? They promised they would, I said to him, and they've let me down so much that they can't let me down again this time. I'm just saying, Alex, do not get your hopes up. While William sat at my dining room table that morning sipping his takeaway coffee, I paced back and forth in front of him crying. I can't remember much of what I said except the following line: You're lucky that the school still hasn't given me back my passport from the visa process. If I had it, I'd be on the next flight home. At this point, William wasn't even listening. He was typing on his iPhone underneath the table, as if I couldn't see him. I've always joked that he was online posting job available for a grade three teacher at an international school in Kuwait. Not long after, an anonymous review was posted about the school online. As a result of this post, I learned that there was an online database of international school reviews, and my school had over 50 reviews that I probably should have read before I moved there. We all speculated that the review was from the runner whose apartment I moved into. At the end of her write-up about the school, which covered her one month of employment there, she warned, if you do come to this school, keep your thoughts to yourself and pray a lot so you can get through it. At the time, my friends and I all gossiped about this woman behind her back. We thought she was overreacting. I can't believe she quit. I can't believe she had the audacity to write this about a school she only stayed at for a month. Looking back now when I read this post, I can't help but think all power to this woman. She was not a bad person for leaving. She was a brave person. She wanted to leave, and so she left. She didn't stay just because. She didn't care what other people would say about her behind her back for quitting. She just left. Santosha is the second Niyama in the Pananjala Yoga Sutra text and refers to the practice of contentment. The intention is to find contentment wherever you are. However, I teach my students with a caveat. And the caveat is even though our culture will want to convince us otherwise, knowing when to quit, changing direction, leaving a toxic situation, walking away and moving on are all signs of courage and wisdom. Being able to quit is the sign of a winner. If a situation constantly feels misaligned and your happiness there is rare, then leave. Seek contentment elsewhere. I didn't understand all this at the time, but I see it now. I thought the most courageous thing was to stay, but leaving is an act of courage too. You don't need a long list of reasons to give you permission to leave. Wanting to leave is enough.