It has been three and a half years since I began full time teaching. I find that it is still exhausting. I am truly past a lot of the issues I had as a rookie teacher and I am mostly past the issues I developed because of how I was treated as a rookie teacher. It is like I passed the test of learning how to be a teacher, but I am left thinking, "so this is it." I am twenty-five and I am starting to think that no amount of experience will make this job less draining. I have a good thirty-five more working years and within my career there is no where to grow--yes, I will get better at the job I am doing, but the job won't grow with me.

There is a big part of me thinking that if I ever want to change fields I should do it now while I am young. Even now, that thought is daunting because I have six years of education past high school and four years full time experience. If I go a different way, I would have to start from scratch.

But I keep thinking of a story the other teachers on my team told me. There was this girl who used to work in the teaching position I have a few years back and she was really really good. We still use a lot of her ideas and practices and the teachers who worked with her talk all the time about how much they learned from her. Her husband was assigned a job over seas and she is now working for the embassy in a foreign country--I don't recall the country. She says that she is now the happiest she has been in her adult life because she can leave work at work. She has a low stress job, and her quality of life feels better. Would I have a similar experience if I pulled a big switch-a-roo? I don't think I will ever regret the time that I have spent teaching, but I don't know if I can keep doing it indefinitely.