Entering the maze.

Why do people decide to write blogs?  That’s the first thing that went through my head when I considered starting a blog about my life today. Well, it’s a bit of a vanity-project I suppose - intrinsically it’s an exercise in self-publicity – the idea that you would just put your thoughts, your photos, your life out there on the internet for anyone anywhere to read, unasked and unbidden, does seem a bit narcissistic when you think about it. ‘Is there any point to a blog?’ I’ve been asking myself, and ‘What purpose does it serve?’ I’ve decided that (for me at least), it fulfils a basic need to communicate, to express oneself, to make a mark on the world.

Essentially blogging began back in the 90s as an online diary or journal.  Pre-internet, diaries were private, their contents known only to their authors. The difference betwen blogging and traditional diary-writing is that with a blog, anyone can read what you are writing.  Perhaps that’s just an indication of the way that we live our lives in public now - we all have an internet profile, a digital history that can be traced and monitored.  The internet gives us all the right - or at least the opportunity - to be a social commentator.  We can share our thoughts about anything from the latest celebrity shenanigans or what our political leaders are doing to highly specialised thoughts on whatever unique interests we may have; we all have a voice now, a voice that will be heard if enough people read our comments, our tweets, our posts.

So what’s the point in this particular blog? That’s me up there, looking a bit confused. My whole body position and facial expression really say it all - I don't know what I'm going to be doing next or where my life is going or even when my next pay-packet will turn up.  You see I've decided to change my career at the age of 50; for the past seventeen years or so I've been working in education, first as a teaching assistant and then as a secondary-school English teacher, here in Sussex (that’s in the south east of England/UK if you’re not a native of these parts).

And that’s one of the reasons why I thought I’d write a blog. I’d been looking online to see if there were any other blogs about life after teaching or about changing your career in later life, and surprisingly there were very few.

Teachers are a funny lot; they moan and moan about the pressures of the job (me too!) but they’re reluctant to be too critical about it - most of them have a ‘love-hate’ relationship with what they do; most of them love the enthusiasm and endlessly-entertaining reactions you get from children, most of them love to impart their knowledge and inspire young people with a love of their subject, but at the same time I would say that nearly all teachers hate the restrictions that are put on their creativity through the annual filtration of top-down initiatives, they hate the overwhelming pedantry of specific policies, and they hate the constant lack of support and the constant criticism that is levied at them from senior leadership, inspectors, politicians and the popular press.  Personally, I started to feel that I wanted to give up being a teacher about a year ago now, but I didn't do anything definite about it until February as I wanted to see my GCSE class through to their exams which meant I didn't hand my notice in until  Easter.  I’d become exhausted from the workload and the fulcrum for my work-life balance was shoved right over to the ‘work’ side, leaving me very little time to spend with my family or to fully relax and unwind at weekends and during holidays.  You never escape from teaching, even at weekends and during holidays - you are always thinking about the things you have to complete or plan, the marking you need to do, and all of the details about the students in each class that need to be attended to in terms of their learning and their needs.

I therefore thought that by writing a blog I could help or inspire others who might be thinking about changing their career path later in life and I also thought it might be useful to chart my experience as a woman at the age of 50.  It’s not easy being an older woman who doesn’t have much experience in a business environment. I would like to think that in today’s anti-discriminatory workplace, being ‘old’ and being female should not present any barriers to employment, however I know that with my limited experience in anything other than a highly-specific profession those two facts may contribute to the difficulties I face in changing career.  So: 50, female, and fairly inexperienced and (did I mention?) an ethnic minority; could those things be a problem?  Possibly. Will they? Let’s hope not.
Well, I have been talking an awful long while and in my experience I know that most people turn off from blogs after a couple of paragraphs, but before I go I just want to quickly tell you what else I’m hoping to do with this blog.

There’ve been two other recent changes in my life that have also made me think about writing a blog in order to help others who might be experiencing similar things - I’ve been diagnosed with alopecia (frontal fibrosing) and, at the age of 50 and years of eating meat and dairy, I’ve become a vegan.
I hope not to be too serious though - it’s not all doom and gloom! I’d like to write about some of my other interests: reading, exploring the countryside, science-fiction, and family life with four grown-up sons.

And the maze? Oh how much I wanted to entitle this post ‘On entering the labyrinth’ - how much more poetic it would have been - but that metaphor just wouldn’t have expressed how I feel at the moment - a labyrinth has a clear path that takes you on a pre-determined route but I am definitely entering a maze.  In a maze each choice you make might lead to a dead-end, there are so many different routes that can take you to your final destination, and sometimes you don’t reach it at all.

This maze is at Chatsworth in Derbyshire - I went there in the summer with my husband when we were staying in the Peak district.  And the photo of me right at the top was also taken in the summer - I was standing in the door of one of my favourite writer’s childhood home - Thomas Hardy’s cottage at Lower Bockhampton in Dorset. What a magical day that was - far more moving than the splendour of Chatsworth. But the maze was fun!

Well, if I haven’t put you off with all of this serious chat then hopefully you will stay tuned for my next post.  Please sign up for emails by adding your email address in the 'subscribe' box up at the top and I would LOVE LOVE LOVE for you to leave a comment - tell me to stop whingeing if you want but just say something!
All the best, Judy.