Blogger’s Note: I’ve spent the past 1.5 months processing, and that’s made it difficult to do much of anything except clean my house, pet the cats, despair while reading the news, and think about what comes next in my life.
When I lost my job without any warning because I expressed Covid concerns, I was broken. For me, that employment wasn’t just a job, but a religious mission I sacrificed for even as it grew harder and harder to work there. With everything going on in the world, processing their betrayal has been more difficult than perhaps it would have been if everything else had been going smoothly. While I am better off now, and I firmly believe God will use this for good, the betrayal has been rough. Still, Husband and I have been looking to distance ourselves from our former church denomination for a while now (and long before I lost my job), so this termination actually makes that easier since the school is affiliated with that religious body (though not the specific church we used to attend). There will be other opportunities to do other things, I know. Maybe I will write again? Maybe I can be a children’s librarian (pipe dream–do you need a library sciences degree for that?)!? The possibilities are endless, and exciting if unsure. My occupational journey has only just begun. Usually, I can keep that in mind. Things could be SO much worse. I’m really very undeserving blessed, and I don’t take that for granted.
But the last three days have been very hard. I’ve been angry and depressed, remembering what they did to me. I wrote this letter, and now I feel better. Truly, a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I don’t need to post it, and perhaps I shouldn’t, but this is a life and anime blog, and this is my life, so…
Again, things in the world are tough, so don’t feel like you need to absorb my angst, too. If you click away and keep scrolling, I support that 100%, but if you’re in the brain space to read the letter that my old bosses never will, see below.
I hope to get back to anime content soon, when I’m feeling more up to it. I’m still watching Fruits Basket, though!
Take care of yourselves, readers.
You will never read this letter, [school name]. You will go about your days and weeks thinking about tuition rates, your dangerously dwindling enrollment, and your desperate bids to keep your establishment afloat. You will not think of me. You will not miss me. You will not mourn over the meaning of my loss to your school, if indeed you recognize it all all.
But I…
I will mourn you.
Every single day, I wrestle with my baser nature, and I do this because of you. Your betrayal burns beneath my ribs, a coal glowing brighter and brighter until it crests my throat in cries of white hot agony. I have felt more rage and despair over what you’ve done than I have since I was a child without the ability to regulate my emotions. Indeed, I have wept, sobbed, shouted, raged, broiled, and then cried again. I’ve done this so many times.
In honesty, I have wished for your ruin. Rather than woken gently to the truth, my eyelids were ripped apart and the light of a harsh reality shined directly into my face. That reality is something I denied to myself over and over again, but sometimes the truth hurts. You could not be trusted. An establishment supposedly dedicated to the Lord, and you could not be trusted to do as He would do.
I gave too much of myself to you and to your mission even before the pandemic. You used me and threw me away without warning, without notice. I am left to pick up the pieces in a situation even the Regional Office of Education calls “unethical,” if not “illegal” when I reported it to them.
You will not recognize your wrong, nor how deeply your actions have hurt me. You will deny my words, call them dramatic or unwarranted or plain inaccurate, but the truth hurts. I didn’t want this reality any more than you did, but here we are.
I gave everything I could to you. God will use your betrayal to my benefit in the long-run, but the pain lingers, and through that pain I will reward your perfidity with one final gift: I will mourn you. I will mourn my position as a teacher, as a once-colleague, and for the institution I thought you were.
I will mourn because of your descent into degradation as I’ve seen it unfold over the past year, your hypocrisy, and your unwillingness to do what is right rather than what is easy.
I refrain from legal vengeance–one to which I am quite entitled, regardless of your own belief and private school status–only because the rigamarole would prove less than worth the cost of time and emotions incurred. And despite my anger, I refuse to debase myself by saying half the horrible things I feel you deserve to hear.
I won’t thank you for the lessons, but if nothing else, I leave three-years-richer for having taught those beautiful, loving children, and three-years-wiser in knowing that my own will never attend a private institution for their own sake.
I attended private school, I taught private school, and in the coming and going I have learned enough to spare my own children that heartbreak. I thank God for the lessons and experiences HE gave me through using you, and I look with great joy to new opportunities He puts before me.
In the mean time, I will mourn you. Your future, like mine, is in God’s hands. I’m not strong enough yet to forgive you, so I will pray God does it in my stead, even as I guiltily confess that the searing coal in my chest has siphoned its heat from the warmth of my once-regard. I feel nothing for you now but disdain. I look forward to the day that thoughts of your administration no longer taint the gentle sorrow and maternal joy I feel at reflecting upon my time in early childhood education.
Shoujo Thoughts: ☆ ～('▽^人) Otaku Ramblings 