Death by a thousand Paper cuts

 I heard this phrase, and it hit me like a lead balloon.  I often feel like this throughout my life. I feel like I am slowly dying from a million little things.   I know how to survive the big things; I know how to clean up and pretend that everything is fine. I know what it's like, to have the rug ripped right from, under you. I know what it's like to have all the things I thought were real and true show their true colors and I become a leftover.  That breadstick that stays in the basket. To get picked at, and eventually left.  It's all the other things that seem to stab at my heart.  It is usually the smallest things, that can push me one way or the other and seems to throw my world into a tailspin. I seem to be spending a lot of time in that spiral, and I am overwhelmed.  When I am in that place, the things that are true and real play tricks and make me think it's a matter of time before my whole world crumbles; Yet again.

It's something that is more than hard to explain.  Today at work, I cannot even count on one hand, the number of times that I could have burst into tears. New programs, new rules that no one is given enough training on.  They expect us to spend a great deal of extra time after hours just to get our job done and I don't have that kind of time to give them anymore.  Each new task they want us to complete, it's as if the house is on fire.  The house is not on fire, and I cannot pretend that every task that needs to be completed needs to be treated as such. I want to scream; the house isn't on fire!!!  Education has stolen every last ounce of love that I once had for the field. It isn't what is right for the child anymore.  Children today have an exceptional number of needs that the education system isn't prepared for.  Instead of doing the right thing, they say it's the teachers, they say we are giving too many services.  They say that we are doing things all wrong and tell us to put our questions in the virtual parking lot; to be answered when they have time. I don't want to work for a place where kids don't come first. I understand rules and procedures and I know why they are important. 

It's the small daily things that feel like all these little cuts, over and over and there is no making it stop.  I think this is kind of what my teaching career has felt like.  On most days you wouldn't know just how completely burnt out that I am.  I do it for the kids, I do it because they matter and they deserve the best. But my heart has been bruised and battered and the love that I once had for something I thought I would never leave is something hard to get my head around. This is going to be a rough year, I am determined to stand up for what's right, and care the only way that my heart knows, will all that I have even on those days when getting up is dreadful. 

I heart your heart