Hi there! Some fortnights you spend emptying the tank, and some you spend filling it back up. This one managed both - in that order actually - which I’m beginning to realise is more or less the pattern of my whole life if I stand far enough back to look.
The first week drained me. I built timed papers for my National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher classes and then marked the students who attempted them prior to their real exams. I properly built them, in the evenings, going beyond what was strictly needed because that’s the only way I know how to do it. There was the May 28th event to keep planning too, and an online S1 parents’ evening which was perfectly fine if slightly repetitive. I’ll confess I contributed to a kitchen design conversation at home in the large gaps between time slots. Whether I was multitasking or not paying full attention to either thing, I’ll leave for you to decide.
Underneath all of it was a less comfortable feeling. The asks at work keep growing, especially as term winds down. And the sense of being valued for this work hasn’t grown to match, the opposite in fact. I had an honest conversation with my line manager about it. I came away with a clearer sense of my own limits and a shared understanding of the pressure we are all under than I’d had in a while.
Then, towards the end of the draining week, the opposite arrived. I was invited to speak on a panel at Ibstock Place School’s Game On conference, six hundred miles south. They very kindly covered my travel and put me up. I talked about what’s actually worked in building an esports hub and what hasn’t, and swapped stories with people doing the same thing in their own schools. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit how much this mattered, but I felt like I was part of a community in that room and it was great to realise I had something worth adding to our collective knowledge. It’s a strange thing to need a school in another country to remind you that you might be good at the thing you’ve been doing for twenty-two years, but there we are. I’ll take the reminder, gratefully, and try to remember it’s mine to hold without anyone else having to fly me anywhere. But honestly, thank you Ibstock.
The second week was for filling the tank back up, and as I’m all about breaking cycles this year, I went about it more deliberately than I usually would.
I’ve started tracking my sleep. Since the operation last year I’ve been feeling more like myself but I’m still drained in a way I can’t quite shake, and I want to understand why. Maybe it’s age. Or maybe I simply need more sleep than I used to in order to recover. It could be that I have conditioned myself to overwork and then never properly let myself come back down. The pension conversations of recent weeks have pulled my eyes up to the horizon and somewhere out there is a retirement I’d very much like to be healthy enough to enjoy.
It’s a sharpening thought and turns looking after yourself into a clear goal with a fast approaching deadline.
The sleep tracking turned up one immediately useful thing: I sleep far better on the nights I take a golden hour between getting home and starting the evening. Not work. A walk, or sitting in the garden, or a conversation with my partner about anything at all except school. If I do that, the night that follows is measurably and consistently better. Apologies if that sounds almost too simple to be worth writing down, which is probably the reason why I’d never done it until now. I also nod to any Italians reading this who are well aware of these necessary breaks between work and home and are shaking their head at the author who didn’t learn this lesson ten years ago when he actually lived in Italy!
My partner and I walked out to Dunnottar Castle early on the Saturday, and I told her properly about the days I’d been away. We celebrated the end of my daughter’s final university assessments with a family trip to see The Sheep Detectives and a very good meal at Zizzi’s, and a wander round the shops before she caught her bus back to Ayr. My son and I watched the finale of The Boys together. Well, we watched it at the same time in different locations to beat the spoilers, which left his day clear to revise for his last Higher.
I loved the little bit of serendipity this week. I browsed myself to a poem by Lucas Jones titled You Wake Up In The Afterlife. It’s about a man who gets to the end and realises he never really lived: he was too busy, or too distracted, or too consumed by the unimportant things which made him blind to the things that matter. It’s a bleak little gut-punch to be honest, and I’ve linked it below.
I keep it here not because it describes me, but because it describes the version of me I’m fighting not to become. The person who works straight through the golden hours and the wonderful walks and the family chats over pizza, and only notices what they were for once they’re gone.
I think the trick - and it's the bit I keep relearning - is making sure the recovery time actually happens. I said previously that it's good to pay attention. I'm heeding my own advice and beginning to see the benefits.
Take care and have a great week xx
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