Don’t Dare To Dream
Do you have dreams? As in, do you have goals or aspirations that might seem a bit unrealistic but are still something you want to pursue and strive to achieve? Or maybe you used to have dreams, as a kid perhaps, but now in your adulthood, you have lost all sight of them.
dreams.
I used to have big dreams. I remember sitting in Finnish and literature class in elementary school and thinking about how cool it was going to be to study the subject I loved the most in university: going to the campus, have coffee with my Friends, work on essays at the library. And that was a dream I did achieve, end up making my reality. But unfortunately, it didn’t really live up to my expectations.
But even before elementary, even before school, I had dreams for my future. The very first one of them was to become an artist. I remember painting with watercolors on my dad’s living room floor and thinking about how cool it was going to be to finally have my very first exhibition at a gallery. And that dream, too, ended up becoming reality – to a certain extend, at the least. But the way in which the dream realized itself was the reason why I completely lost the will to dream of anything for myself, for, my future. The cost of becoming an artist was too much; was it really worth it at the end? Maybe that’s a question without an answer.
Because the biggest dream I ever had, one that I was actively seeking out, working tirelessly for every single day…It was something I know now that I will never be able to make come true in this life.
Both of my parents are teachers. My dad has already retired, and my mom is working on her last few years as a student counsellor. I grew up in the world of Academia, surrounded by books and teaching materials, thick and busy teacher calendars. I spent a lot of time at my parents’ respective schools/campuses as a Kid, I became familiar with a lot of their coworkers, and they watched me grow up. Some of my mom’s students played with me, when they were teenagers and I was 5 years old.
School has been all around me since the day I was born. I was brought up by two highly educated, extremely intelligent people who took care of their child while also bearing the responsibility of their students. Seeing mom and dad work hard to make sure the students did well and eventually graduated taught me to respect teachers, because they are hardworking, diligent, and honest people, like my parents were. The amount of respect I have had for teachers even before I stepped foot into my own educational institution is unusually high.
So it would make sense for me to develop a genuine interest in the field of education and want to become a teacher myself, doesn’t it?
On my third year of university, I got my first experience as a teacher. I hadn’t started the studies of pedagogy yet, but I was offered a spot as a volunteer teacher to teach Finnish as a foreign language to refugees and immigrants. I was part of the team for three courses in total, and I worked on both the material as well as actually teaching the students things like grammatical cases and Finnish phonology, And I enjoyed every second of it. There’s one student that I will never forget. He was a man in his forties or fifties, and at the beginning of the course, he had told us that he was at level zero with Finnish: he knew nothing about the grammar, had no vocabulary, not even the alphabets were familiar to him. After the 10-week course, when he was about to leave the classroom for the last time, he turned around to face us and said:
“Kiitos paljon hyvästä opetuksesta.”
Thank you so much for the great teaching. An entire sentence. It brought me to tears.
This was in 2021 or early 2022, before the breakdown of late spring 2022. I was working on my Bachelor’s thesis, attending the seminar several times a week while also trying to keep up with the studies of Finnish and Swedish. I was overworked to say the least. No matter how much I enjoyed the teaching and how much happiness and joy it brought me, I couldn’t handle the workload and the stress alongside my studies that were already sucking the life out of me. I kept going until I couldn’t anymore – complete collapse of mental and physical health happened at the end of the spring semester 2022. And I am still recovering from that.
Since then, I have attended different schooling environments as a guest. Every time I go there, no matter for how long or for what purpose, I always come out dissociated, exhausted, in severe chronic pain, and fatigue that I have to take at least a full 24 hours to recover from. I cannot deal with educational institutes anymore; I cannot sustain myself in them. If just visiting a school for one day leaves me absolutely wrecked, how could I ever, in any way, be able to work as a teacher?
Becoming a teacher was a huge cornerstone of my identity as I was picking up the pieces left scattered around my feet by the person I had loved. I set my destination to enroll in pedagogy classes, and went ahead. But now, that too was taken away, leaving the foundations of my decaying selfhood that much more brutalized. Who was I if not a Finnish teacher? Who was I going to become? What dreams did I even have anymore?
Soon I realized that my Friends had come in to steal my crystal heart of dreams from me, shattering it to a million pieces, never to be mended. One part after another, they made their way into the fragmented and terrorized soul of mine, leaving their marks everywhere they touched.
And I wondered if there was ever going to be something they couldn’t reach.
Dreaming,
ichigonya