Work that matters

Two weeks ago I started work again, as an English teacher, a job I’d initially trained for 17 years ago, when I moved to Vietnam. I loved the training, the sweet Vietnamese teenagers we taught, and my fellow teachers in training. When I started teaching however, I quickly got bored. I wanted to do ‘bigger,’ ‘better’ things. I wanted to write a book and be a writer. I’d always wanted to be a writer ever since my teenage years, in fact, I can remember thinking when I was younger how life just wouldn’t be worth living unless I became famous. 

 I felt unenthusiastic in my English teaching, and I felt like students could pick up on it. I was also going through a very difficult time emotionally, after having a traumatic and harmful medical procedure that doctors think is ‘safe and effective.’ I was trying to heal through journaling and doing various spiritual practises, yoga, meditation, theta healing, and Tantra. I’d often cry after meditation sessions, and my husband would say, ‘’I thought meditation was meant to make you calm, but it just seems to make you upset.’’ I explained to him that I was ‘processing stuff,’ that the meditation was bringing up all the pain, and trauma, and that it was a way of working through and healing it. 

Often by the afternoon when I had English lessons to teach my head would feel so fuzzy and foggy, like I was unable to think. I’d often cancel lessons, not because I was physically unwell but because I just didn’t feel capable of teaching. Truth was I didn’t feel very good at teaching, at grasping the grammar or figuring out how to plan and execute a lesson. 

I moved onto teaching creative writing, and then doing various trainings in parent education, and creative writing for therapy. Somehow it made more sense to me, to work with emotions. To be on a path to healing and help others do the same. 

Ever since COVID I haven’t ran many writing or parenting classes, and have mainly focused on writing articles to earn a living, as at least in my case it paid more than book royalties. Even so the publications I tend to write for are more on the lower end of the pay scale and in the last few months, I began to realise that it was never going to add up to a viable living. It was like trying to go up a downward escalator, trying to finish that article, grab that payment, but the work was always so much more than the rewards, and I would always fall back down again. 

I’d had it in my mind to put up a poster locally to advertise as an English teacher but I kept putting it off. Maybe I had doubts about it, remembering times I’d been a bad teacher, a boring teacher. However, eventually I did put up that poster, as I had an inkling that things would be different now. 

After teaching my first lesson, I felt so happy, it was like I had my mind. I could think. I could talk to my student and see what they needed to learn and how I could help them get there. I scribbled down a bunch of notes and my student told me I had a ‘buona sistema,’ and it was like confirmation, that yes, I could really do this. And I even enjoyed it. 

With hindsight, I know that when I was lost and traumatised, all that meditation etc. wasn’t helping me. It was opening me up to spiritual attack, giving me the feeling that I was healing and improving, but also flinging me back into a state of fuzzy trauma, that I could not escape from. I was so busy working on myself that I couldn’t take the time to plan a lesson properly, or figure out what a student needed. But in reality, I didn’t even know how to do this. 

But I got my brain back. I stopped the practises that left me in a constant cycle of healing. And by turning attention away from myself, it stopped mattering to me so much, what career I do, how I earn a living. 

The other day I was reading in Matthew, ‘whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.’ I’d like to write a book again, maybe now I have less time writing for money, I can focus on my own projects. I’m also wary, though, of that tendency of wanting to exalt myself. Ultimately it feels very freeing to know that if God wants me to write a book, I’ll work on it, but if not, it doesn’t matter. I’m happy to wait for my rewards in heaven.

While the world is teaching us more and more that self-focus is the answer for wellbeing, Jesus shows us that it’s not about us. It’s only with Jesus that I finally feel like I can put myself aside, and it’s so freeing. 

This world is passing away. There is much suffering and pain, amidst fleeting joy. Ultimately, it’s not about, here and now but preparation for the next life, and doing what we can to make sure as many other souls come along with us. That is the only work that truly matters.