Teaching Math and English in Hong Kong. It was my first ‘real job’ out of college, and I burned out in a few years.
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Can Single Parents Teach Abroad?
For a year, I taught (mostly) pleasant students, and dealt with amicable parents.
My next teaching job started a few months later, and it wasn’t the best.
I won’t complain about the conditions but I’ll just say I didn’t last long.
I taught for one month in Colombia before I decided that it wasn’t the right place for me.
My next teaching job came a few months after that as a Writing Consultant for a community college.
My position made me the first point-of-contact for international students, and I taught them how to read and write at the university level.
Overall, my teaching career was nothing to complain about.
It had its good parts and its bad parts like any job, but I don’t regret teaching for a few years, even though I burned out.
Teaching is a great way to get started traveling and living a life as a digital nomad.
It didn’t matter how pleasant or intellectual the students were, I just couldn’t teach anymore.
It wasn’t that I didn’t find satisfaction in seeing people grow in their education and working with students who were excited to learn, I did very much.
I just hated doing it on-the-clock, because the clock ate up the time I should be spending with my daughter.
For the record, even the income from my community college teaching job left me working a second job: umpiring high school sports.
And that would keep me through the evening and early into the night.
My number one goal is to spend as much time with my daughter as I can before she grows up and moves out from under my wing.
So, I can’t work for a clock; I work for my time.
A Man Not Made for the ‘Job’
There’s only been one job that I truly enjoyed doing on-the-clock, and that was working as a counselor at a summer camp in upstate New York.
Unfortunately, that job doesn’t exist year round and I’m too old too experienced for it these days.
Other than that, I’ve always felt like the clock and necktie lifestyle just doesn’t work for me.
Sure, we all gotta do it.
Unless we design our own lifestyle.
I went from tired teacher to trudging writer.
Writing for a Living; A Single Parent Lifestyle that Works for Me
I like what I do now, it’s taken me two years of freelance writing to get to a point where I still worry about my writing prospects, but I also have the experience of succeeding through that worry.
2 years ago, I set a 10-year goal for myself to make writing a sustainable, full-time career.
I started by ghostwriting heaps of content, around 150 articles, before I got my first byline.
Now, I’ve had a book published, poetry featured in several major magazines, gotten around 50 paid bylines, and have been quoted in Reader’s Digest and South China Morning Post .
I’m feeling more confident today than I was two years ago, and that’s a good feeling.
Not because it’s confidence, but because it’s confidence built off of a long-term dedication to hard work and slogging through the mud.
It’s taken me a long time to finally feel that reward system fire.
It took a commitment.
That’s what I did two years ago, and I’ve been grinding for 24 months.
With my 50th byline, I feel like I’ve taken my first step out of the mud and onto hard land, and now, drenched in the muck of progress, I need to shake it off and start climbing the mountain.
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