After it happened I wrote an email to some of my friends and family and I found it therapeutic, so now about 6 months later I thought it would be good to try and put my thoughts and feelings down in words again. I may not post this but I hope writing it will help.
So brief history of what I was doing in China. I am a qualified maths teacher but I had been playing poker for a living for a few years, but was getting fed up of it, it became too much of a grind and i missed teaching. A friend of mine happen to see a listing online for a maths teacher in China and passed it on to me.
It turns out a lot of people that go to teach in China do not have teaching degrees so they offered me a good wage and good benefits and next thing I knew(like 2 weeks after applying) I was on a plane to China. While my experiences and impressions of China are probably worth there own post, I reckon others have similar experiences and are better writers so I will leave that to them.
I was working in a high school in Changzhou a small (3mil+ people) city near shanghai, and while the school was run a bit too much like a business for my taste, I was happy enough for the first two years. There were many negatives about working in China, the pollution being the biggest, but my teaching was going great, I had a small enough workload and a large enough paycheck (a nice combo) and I had a good group of friends.
Then at the end of the 2nd year things went a bit haywire it was looking like the company running the school were going to shut down. They told us sorry but the school is shutting down next year and then days later it wasn't, in the face of this all my colleagues decided they couldn't risk returning. I was the only foreign teacher to return, I was able to risk it, if the school shut down early in the next year I would either get another job or take a year off (I am frugal/cheap so I had a good bit saved up). As Well as that the high school program we were running was a 3 year one, with the last 2 years made up of the students doing their A levels, so I had a group of students midway through their A levels and without many other schools in the area offering the program. So I felt I owed it to them to help their last year be as smooth as it could be.
I arrived back in China with assurances that everything was as it was last year, but I was expecting the worse. And sure enough my old company were gone, and they seemed to of offloaded the students and me onto a chinese run school that was starting a international program. Not so bad I thought, not ideal but not so bad. It took a week but I finally managed to talk to someone in the new school, I would be teaching my old classes (had to threaten to resign to secure that) and half of the hours of 3 new classes, I had plenty of time to teach all the hours of the new classes but they wanted it done half in English and half in Chinese, so whatever it's their school. So here I am back in China working 20% less hours with the same wage, and I will be able to teach a group of students from start to finish of their high school experience, a first for me.
I was at odds with the new school from the start, and looking back on it I may of spent too much winning some early battles before ending up losing the war, and that's what it felt like most of the time a war. It was some small things, some big things, some personal things, some professional things, most of which I don't think it would be appropriate to go into. What it boiled down to was I didn't feel the new students that I was teaching were getting an acceptable educational experience, and I was loudly expressing myself to management. From their point of view I was a overpaid underworked pain in the arse.
It came to a head a month before Chinese new year I was told in an indirect way that I would not be needed for the 2nd half of the year. Now the point of this post is not to let everyone know I was hard done by by an evil Chinese company, in fairness to them they didn't want me from the start and I was difficult to work with. But as I said that's not the point, what I wanted to talk about is how I handled it mentally. I never have any problems with mental health and I admit I often had trouble understanding when other people did, I considered myself very strong mentally and looking back on what happened, a month or 2 after the fact, I was shocked at how it had affected me, at the time I didn't even realise anything was wrong.
So I had a month left but I found this out in mid december, so I decided that as I had missed the last two christmases I would rather leave then and there. I went out and had a few drinks with a few friends to talk it over, ok I had a few too many drinks. I was decided, I had just got paid and was only owed a few days wages, I was leaving asap. I woke up the next morning, a bit hung over, and went into work and told them my decision, indirectly (couldn't find any bosses, not strange for this new school). They didn't seem that bothered. So far so good, I was ready for this to fall apart all year, but there was a grow feeling of unease in the pit of my stomach.
I went up to my original school to tell my students of 2.5 years I'd be leaving. Things had been going so well with that group that year, it had been a difficult start when they realised that they had all new teachers except me and I think they appreciated that I had returned, that or as it was there last year the maths had got so difficult they were just more attentive in class. Either way, not helped by the hangover I was dreading telling them I'd be gone within the next day or 2.
I got about one sentence in when I could see one of the student welling up, then another, I managed to tell them the whats and whys (I put a more professional spin on it than here), but if I told you my eyes were dry at the end I'd be a liar, if I told you my eyes were dry recounting this I'd be a bigger one. I had a teaching assistant (a maths teacher in her own right) for the last 2.5 years and impressed on them that she would be able to get them to their exams, they only had 2 months of material left to cover and 5 months to do it.
If that was the end of it I'd probably of been fine, broke up about it, but fine. But my boss asked me could I work the rest of the week while they sort out a replacement for my new school's classes. As the flight I got was a week away and this way I would get nearly 2 weeks wages out of it, I agreed. Big mistake.
That week I taught 4 emotional classes to the students I had just said goodbye to, I said goodbye to the circle of friends I had made, I moved out of my apartment that had been my home for 2.5 year, I had to arrange to move money home (no easy thing in China, thank you bitcoin), I had to sell my bike and a thousand other little things. It was too much for me, I found myself crying when alone, I started to get paranoid that I wouldn't be able to get out of China, that they would confiscate my bank account or accuse me of some crime and arrest me. My boss, like many bosses in china, had contacts with local government. Looking back, saying goodbye to my students still affects me, but I can see the rest of it for the paranoid delusions they were. My neighbor, fellow expat and more importantly friend helped me so much, but mostly I wasn't willing to listen to things like it will be alright, and no one can help you when you are alone at night unable to sleep with the worry. But thanks for being there Alex.
When I was finally ready to leave ChangZhou I went to the train station worried/expecting them to not give me a ticket when I showed my id, and the same the next day when I got to the airport. Only when the girl at the counter gave me my ticket did I really believe I was going home (Dublin, Ireland). I started welling up, while that was not unusual that week, this time it was due to happiness or at least relief. I tried to hold it together because I didn't want the girl to think I was a security risk. I walked to the nearest wall and I literally fell against sobbing with relief.
That's when I began my recovery, and it was by doing what I am doing now. I wrote a letter to some of my friends and family to explain why I'm coming home, and while I didn't go into as much detail as to how it was affecting me mentally, the fact that I wrote a letter with any emotion in it at all tipped them off. I received a reply that helped me so much, a friend of mine wrote a long letter about how things had got to her from time to time over the years. While it wasn't about the things I was going through it helped so much to know that I wasn't alone in feeling these ways.
The other thing that was really affecting me was the fact that I have more of a life in Changzhou that Dublin, I'm 34, most of my friends are married or working abroad. Since coming back I wanted to try and make new friends, and while I have done that online through my youtube channel that I started, in real life not so much. It is hampered by the fact that I decided to stay out of work until at least September, I keep meaning to join some sort of club but as an adult that is surprisingly hard. Being checking out the app meetup and got my eye on a ping pong club, got into playing that in China.
When I starting writing this I thought I could keep it short but I sort of just rambled on, and I was surprised at how much some of it affected me, I had to take a break in the middle. I don't know if it was a nervous breakdown I had and I don't know if I am fully over it, but I know it has helped writing it down and sharing it with others.
Thanks for listening
P.S I wrote this yesterday and decided to read it again today before I post it, and I just want to say I am not as crazy as I sound. And I realise what happened to me wasn't nearly as hard as what a lot of people go through (it certainly wasn't the worse thing that ever happened to me) but for whatever reason it got to me the most.