Total Meltdown

Even through I don’t fully understand what happened to me and why, I am still going to write about the silent meltdown which has changed the course of my life… definitively. Maybe writing will offer me some clarity. 

Three years ago, I walked into my classroom on the university campus for the last time. My job, a job I’d been doing for 13 years, was to prepare international students, mostly Chinese, to tackle the challenges of a postgraduate course in a UK university. The main focus was on establishing and developing academic writing skills. On that day, the day the meltdown began, there was no warning. The lesson I had prepared was in line with the syllabus and it aimed to introduce students to the various reasons why referencing is required. It is an important lesson to learn for success in academic life, particularly so if students want to avoid being charged with plagiarism and subsequently expelled from their course. It was to be the last lesson I taught.

Every aspect of the pre sessional course was chosen because it was deemed essential to successful postgraduate research. It was a three-month summer course that had been designed and tested over a period of years and the material mostly worked. For this reason, I respected colleagues who worked full-time to design and test a high calibre course, and I respected my students who travelled thousands of kilometres, literally from the other side of the world, to be trained in the academic rigours that postgraduate students are expected to be familiar with for their research. Not an easy task at all, particularly if you consider that in the three months the pre sessional lasts, students on the course were expected to learn all of this in a language and a culture that was not their own. And that’s why I respected and cared for my students, and wanted them to succeed..

So, I was employed by the university to do what I considered was a worthwhile job. A job I enjoyed, teaching highly motivated students whose families had paid thousands to enable them to join the course. It was a job that made me feel worthwhile and gave me the opportunity to work alongside colleagues I liked and respected. Then it all started to go wrong. 

At first, I didn’t realise what was happening. I’d been teaching around eight or nine weeks when I noticed that instead of looking forward to my lessons I’d begun a countdown of the weeks and days left before the course ended. With this realisation came disappointment and irritability with myself because I loved my job. So why was I behaving like this? There was no reason that I could think of. Then came the lethargy. I just simply could not find the energy to get excited about what I was doing in the classroom.

The arrival of lethargy coincided with the final part of the course, which focused on academic reading. This involved training the students in the skills they would need to choose sources that would be most valuable to them in their research, to use them skilfully, and reference them correctly. Although all of this, and more is important, I found it difficult to teach because by this stage I’d run out of energy. Nevertheless, I knew that there were only 2 weeks of the course left and believed I could hold on until the end.

It was not to be. As soon as I walked into the classroom on that day, it became glaringly obvious that I had no enthusiasm for the material I was about to teach. I felt as if I were on the outside, separated from my students by a plate glass sarcophagus dividing  me from them, a barrier so complete that I could only mouth words that seemed to float in the air in front of me before they quickly faded into nothingness. Fortunately, that day I was able to fast forward the lesson to the part where group work was to be done and the students, not realising that anything was wrong, eagerly applied themselves to it.

At the start of the second part of the lesson, I was seized by the terror that this awful scenario would repeat itself. I couldn’t risk another such disaster, so I apologised, saying I had a “migraine,” went home and emailed my resignation to the course coordinator. Before I could attempt to comprehend what had happened, I received a request via Teams for a meeting with the course coordinator there and then. I explained what the problem was and stressed that I could not teach even one more lesson because I didn’t have the reserves to do it. I was empty. In my opinion the struggle to “stay on top” of my PTSD symptoms had worn me down to the point where I had nothing else to give.

I felt empty, completely wiped out. There was nothing, not even anger, disappointment or resignation left. What I did have was the conviction that there was no way around this, no room for negotiation. A more powerful force had taken control and that was final. There was nothing I could do about it, no matter how much willpower I applied. If only I had fully understood the enormity and finality of this, then I would not have accepted a temporary job as tour manager/guide three years later, in the belief that I could “get away” with a 12 day job. Again, it wasn’t to be. After the first day, I lost all the essential ingredients: energy, drive, enthusiasm, focus… Basically, I just shut down. One way of describing it is that I “froze” and once again that bullet-proof glass pane separated me from the group of wonderful women I had been tasked to work with.

My professional life was over. It had ended, not out of choice because I certainly did not choose to leave. I walked away from my employers because something more powerful than me, some greater force, had taken that decision for me. No amount of willpower or determination could give me back the control I used to have; and so I became a bystander in my own life. I could not step back into any of the professional roles I’d had during my working life. To have done otherwise risked even more humiliation: a catatonic teacher or tour guide is quickly scorned and dismissed as stupid....

Was I completely burnt out due to overwork or was something else, something sinister, possibly early onset dementia, responsible for my demise? Another explanation was that the high dose of antidepressants I had been taking for years had damaged my memory and organisational skills, rendering me incapable of performing professional work, or indeed any work at all.  Somewhere in the mix was trauma with a capital T. I knew I suffered from both delayed onset trauma and complex trauma, but I´d had successful therapy and I was confident that I was in a much better place than I’d been for many years. So much so that I never suspected I would “shut down” like this when the challenges arose and stress started. 

Perhaps it was the death of my stepmother in May 2022 that shook the ground beneath me. She was a violent woman who had made my childhood a misery. I had not seen her for decades when I was informed that she had developed Alzheimer's. After a series of brutal attacks on my father, she had been put into a special residence where trained carers monitored her behaviour. No knives or scissors were available to Kathleen there and she was medicated to ensure that her levels of aggression were manageable. Even so, she attacked my father with her fists and nails when the opportunity arose. For once, he was feeling the fear and pain that had framed every aspect of my sister’s and my childhoods. I did not feel any sympathy for him.

Kathleen’s death may have brought on the trauma response which entirely undermined my self-confidence. After all, she was my stepmother and her death may have “touched” on the trauma I suffered due to my mother’s suicide, and this catatonic response, or freeze response, was the most logical response to it. It was a means of protecting myself that didn’t work in the “real” world, where I now exist in a permanent state of unemployment, because trauma has made me unemployable