Quick! Go! Hurry! Teach!

On Friday night, I had a call from my new boss… there was a possibility I’d be needed to teach Saturday, but we wouldn’t know for sure until Saturday morning. I got things ready, just in case, and sure enough, I was called in to cover at the very last minute! I taught my first solo class with no warning, no prep, and it went fine.

I have to say, I was grateful for medication that interferes with the adrenaline response, though! To be fair, I have done a lot of teaching, and the materials for this course are really clear and helpful: the instructor has plenty to do, but it’s not an overwhelming burden and you don’t have to have all your own PowerPoint presentations or anything like that. The students were all very gracious about the delay and the disorganization while I figured out where everything was, they learned the skills quickly and asked really good questions about the material, and we got it all sorted out.

It was cool to be the hero again. That was the best part of my old job: I was able to come up with a process that would solve someone’s problem and they’d say “oh, wow, yeah, that’s perfect! I wish I’d known about this six months ago! You have saved me so much work!” … or I’d find a way to get their data from point A to point B so they didn’t have to rekey it all, or answer a question off the top of my head so that someone didn’t have to go dig through the documentation to find the answer. It was awesome, being able to save the day, being the One With the Answers, the One Who Knew Stuff.

Lately, I’ve been the One Who Needs Help. The One Who Forgets Stuff. The One Who Can’t Keep Up. I’ve been The One Everybody Has to Take Care Of, not the Self-sufficient Manager Of Things I used to be.

So being the One With the Answers, the One Who Saved the Day … even just briefly … that was pretty awesome.

It comes at a price, of course, and I knew that going in – I spent Monday in my jammies, drinking tea and reading on the couch. I did a bit of knitting but I was too tired even to do much of that, so really, I rested. Today I am trying to get a bit of the neglected housework out of the way before the Reluctant Farmer gets home, but it’ll be no more than a lick-and-a-promise as I just haven’t got it in me to go beyond that. Even sending Matilda around to keep the floors tidy feels like work right now, which sounds odd even to me, but it is what it is.

The drugs are still working: I had a harder time going to sleep the last few nights, probably as a result of the stress of teaching. I do still feel that mellowed-out sensation during the day, as well as what seems like honest-to-goodness tiredness. It’s really interesting to feel lethargic, instead of that weird combo of wired and exhausted that I’m accustomed to. The weariness seems to me like it might be a little bit artificially induced (I suspect some of it is medication side effects) but then again, I really ought to be tired after all I’ve done in the past little while so it makes sense that I should feel tired. I jus have no idea what that’s supposed to be like because I’ve spent the last fifteen years or so turning a deaf ear to my body whenever it said “please can we rest now?” Maybe this is what it is like for normal healthy people. I really have no idea, it’s been too long since I fit in that category and I don’t remember.