Where I've been and where am I going?

Right now isn't a good time in my life.  For the last 18 months I've been working part time and on short term contracts.  Sometimes that doesn't bother me.  No job stress is quite enjoyable even after all this time even if no money stress isn't great.  So far we've been getting by but it is a continual worry.  Before being made redundant I thought I was on the verge of becoming a headteacher which is something I've been aspriring to for a large chunk of my adult life.  But I can't pretend that my career was an uninterrupted ascent.  In fact the more I think about my life the more confused I become about what I want from it and how I got here.

Like most small boys I was going to be a footballer to start with.  At some time around the age of 9 or 10 I read a book with a central character who was a journalist.  I can't remember the first thing about the book but for a while I was going to be a journalist.  Somwehere along the line I decided I wanted to be a solicitor.  I can't remember why now.  At about 16 or 17 I spent a short time doing some work experience in a solicitors office and ended up reading Law and Politics.  I was going to be a crusading solicitor working for deserving cases on legal aid.  As it turned out I got a 2:2 and found that I didn't enjoy my legal studies as much as I had thought I would. 

After a year waiting tables I trained as a teacher.  I had done voluntary work in schools since the age of 15 and had also worked on playschemes while at university.  The PGCE was hard work but I enjoyed it and so my career as a primary school teacher began.  To be honest I found it hard to keep up with paperwork throughout my career.  The introduction of the National Literacy Strategy in 1997 and the National Numeracy Strategy a year later just made the paperwork even worse.  When Uncruliar Junior No 1 was born in 1998 I wanted to get out of teaching.  In fact I was so demoralised that I decided I wanted him to be home educated just to make sure that he didn't have to suffer a teacher as jaded as I was.  Despite all that I can remember many enjoyable moments from those years and I know that some of former pupils have fond memories of me as a teacher.  But I often felt that I was failing as a teacher.

In 2000 I had the opportunity to take up a secondment for nine months.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and could have turned my back on the classroom for good then.  The salary that was on offer follwing the secondment though was nowehere near what I could earn as a teacher and so I ended up returning to classroom teaching.  There followed three good years that ended up in my appointment as deputy headteacher in another school.  On the whole I thought I did quite well, especially when I had to act up as Headteacher, but there were still times when I felt overwhelmed.  My last year was a nightmare as a new headteacher came in who clearly didn't want me around and I went into a really negative spiral.

I've had some good moments over the last 18 months, both at work and at home - especially running a marathon for the first time.  But on the whole I feel quite negative.  Whenever things don't go as I'm hoping, and that seems a frequent ocurence, I feel a complete failure.  There are things that I think I want to do but I'm not making them happen.  There are things which I've got to do and it always seems like really hard work.  As for work I feel that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get even an interview and sometimes that is for jobs at a lower level than I've previously been applying.  Perhaps I should be looking for a career change but I've got no idea what I want to do.

I guess the first thing I need to do is to start setting myself small targets and achieving them.  Like I did with the marathon training.  And start focussing on positive thinking.