Im a 29 yr old teacher and im f**king outta here
For the past few months every time I’ve told someone that I’m moving to Australia the reaction has been pretty much the same across the board; a look of surprise. Which in terms of the expected life trajectory of a 29 year old Secondary School teacher from Ireland is a pretty fair reaction. Truth be told id still have that reaction if somebody told me and it’s almost two months since I left.
Whether or not we’d like to admit it society imposes an unspoken sequence of life events that we are all aware of and maybe 90% of people follow and adhere to;
Get the best Leaving Cert possible
Go to college/university regardless of your desire to do so
If you don’t get your desired 3rd level option and decide not to go find a desirable pensionable job ASAP!
By 24 begin saving a deposit for a mortgage
House
Start a Family
Engaged
Married
This isn’t a rigid list and I’m not for a second saying there is anything wrong with this order of doing things there’s absolutely not, my closest friends have gotten engaged, planning their weddings, had kids and have built and bought the most beautiful homes and despite the moments of jealousy I have I know its not what I want right now. There’s still one big giant itch that needs to be scratched.
I have always wanted to travel, no specifics no desired end destination, travel has just been the goal. I lost sight of that majorly when I graduated from the PME in 2017 and got my first full time position in a School with a 22hr contract with the possibility of permanency arising from it. For those that don’t know in order to get Permanent status (known as your CID*) as a Secondary school teacher in Ireland you need to complete 2 full school years with contracted hours that belong to you and you only i.e. maternity contracts don’t count. Having completed the two years those same hours you have worked must be available again for a 3rd year in order for the CID to be awarded. That 3rd year can sometimes cause the biggest sweat for people as the perfect storm can arise and a teacher that has requested transfer from another school (redeployment) may be taking those hours. It happens. So for 24 year old Kyle getting my CID was goal number one. In the course of that first year out I began to do that thing we all do before a huge lotto jackpot draw; how the money was going to be spent was planned to a T. I had my future planned out, the length of time it would take to save a deposit for mortgage, how long it would be before I could apply for it, what car I’d get on finance, kids, marriage, the works. Plot twist, I wasn’t rehired the following year which meant no CID, back to the drawing board and my newly formed life plan was out the window. I wont go diving into the reasons I wasn’t rehired in this post as it’s something I want to write more in-depth about soon. Long story short I became so consumed with getting a CID and far too complacent as the year went on believing this was a sure thing that it perhaps tainted my teaching or the level of teaching I could have achieved. More to the point of this blog post, I had lost sight of the one thing I’ve always told myself that I would do and that is go travelling.
*Contract of Indefinite Duration
Fast forward to January 2019 and I’m midway through my 1st year in Clonakilty Community College and the conversation of travel is revisited. It was decided Australia 2020 it was and the new countdown began. It was hard to describe and I didn’t know why but I wasn’t fully invested in going away for a minimum of a year at the age of 26. I wanted to travel, live somewhere else for a while experience more of the world one voice in my head told me that it was a non-negotiable, but I was never fully all in. What was unfair to Lyn (my better half) was i was in denial about this while she could see it plain as day. I saved hard, began the process of getting my visa even applied and interviewed for a job I knew id love and still I just was not 100% in it. 2020 put the brakes on
everybody’s adventure plans so it provided me with a scapegoat to never address why I was never fully invested. The excuse provided was stereotypically Irish “sure no one’s able to do it, so i cant either” (insert shrug emoji). So what was holding me back? What was the reason behind not fully throwing myself at something that I’ve wanted to do since I was in Primary School, fortunate enough to have been brought to the most ludicrous of places by my parents as a holiday. Well that’s only come to light recently;
FEAR.
The best way to describe it is through the emotion i suppose and that was fear. A fear that stemmed from the feeling that I was doing it all wrong, that I was too old to even be contemplating moving to the other side of the world. That in doing so would push back the number years required to get my CID in a school, meaning approval for a mortgage in the stunning landscape that is the Irish Housing market being next to impossible. “Yeah you’ll enjoy the travel but ultimately you’ll be failure because you’ll be so far behind everyone else” was the weirdly embedded notion I had. The fact of the matter was nobody was imposing this idea of having to adhere to the ‘societal norm’ but me. What I wonder now is it the same for others? I think I can confidently assume so and if wrong ill stand corrected.
What I can say now for sure, having gone through that process and while editing this post, that hopefully you are still reading, from the balcony of a Villa in Bali is this;
I was allowing factors that do not have the same relevance as they may have had 10-20 years ago stop me from being me. In the last year and even more so since leaving Ireland I feel like a better version of myself because I have finally embraced what I have always wanted to do, despite how scary and how difficult, and it has given me the fervour to pursue more of what I feel will provide the true sense of accomplishment in life that remaining in Ireland just would not have given me. I will be that guy with the cliché statement, theres just a different kind of happy you feel when you really go for what you want.
If you’ve read this and felt at some point it’s applicable to you, then please let this be your message or sign or whatever, to just take that leap and go pursue whatever it is you want to do. YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT! That’s the beauty of it all home will always be there, there will always be a job. What wont be there is time over.
So to sign off as this is my first ever blog post (some of that ‘more’ I mentioned earlier) I want to introduce myself but with a little advice from the great and wise Austin Kleon to “strike all the adjectives from your bio” and remove the heirs and graces and just state the facts. I am Educator and an Artist, and I hope you stick around to see what comes next.
