I came close this week to never wanting to step foot in a classroom again after my NQT year.

I dreamed of other jobs, other countries, other lives. 

The reality is this. I don't have a life. 

I'm in school at 7am, and most nights I don't leave til 7pm. I work through my break-time doing intervention and rarely have longer than fifteen minutes of lunchtime because I'm always doing something or other. I sit down for approximately twenty minutes, once I've returned home, to eat my dinner. After those precious few minutes when I can savour the taste of food which is meant to keep me energised, and which does anything but, I settle down to do my marking which can take anything up to three hours, then make resources, plan lessons and answer emails till anything up to 1am. That's an eighteen hour day. Every day.

Weekends don't exist. 

I plan, make resources, complete data, sort interventions, and mark some more. I work solidly for about sixteen hours over the weekend. I don't have nights out, I don't go out for dinner. I don't even get to watch television. The time I get to spend with people, I worry. Endlessly. About lessons, about data, about individual children, about observations. About everything. I feel guilty for having time to myself. How ridiculous is that?

Don't even mention sleep. 

I'm exhausted. I am beyond exhausted. I feel as though I'm on the edge of some sort of meltdown. 

People tell me it get's better. It hasn't. It won't. "Yes it will!" People say. Naive individuals. My class next year will have completely different needs, levels, abilities and interests. They will be completely different children, I can't just pick up the planning I've done for my current class and assume it's going to fit. It wont. 

An article from The Guardian, explained it beautifully, 

'But despite this, I rarely had an evening to myself, let alone a holiday without work. I know some people think that teaching is a job that will fill every moment if you allow it to, but I wasn't doing anything more that was necessary to prepare properly and I streamlined things as much as possible. An unsustainable work-life balance is a normalised and accepted as part of the job, but it shouldn't be.'

I really hope that my love for my class and job outweighs the hatred of the pressure, the expectations and the doubt that's lying in my head, creeping ever closer. Telling me I'm not good enough.

Just let me sleep.