what stays hidden

when blame is used as a tool for change

“When people see themselves as the problem, there’s little more that can be done outside of taking action that is self-destructive.”

- Michael White

I was the problem.

I wasn't keeping up.

I wasn’t achieving what I said I could.

I was doing it all wrong.

They had made this position specifically for me and I was failing everyone, including myself.

For the first time in 17 years, (my whole teaching career), I was finally the head of a department (even though that department was only me…). I was going to be training and supporting teachers in creating environments to enable more personalised learning. I would also support students with additional learning needs too.

It was my dream job.

I was going to be out of the classroom and helping teachers where they needed me most. I knew I could do this and this would have been my chance to show everyone what was possible. I knew that teachers could benefit from my knowledge and I was so excited to get started. But now it wasn’t even winter break and all I could do was watch as everything I had hoped to achieve crumbled around me.

[ID: Two white thumbs up appear in the swampy water, with long green plants growing around them and the rest of the body submerged. In white capital letter font, the graphics read: “When your boss asks you how your day is going.” I thought I was pulling things off pretty well in this job, but this meme is a lot more accurate. End ID]

Primary and middle school are fairly fast-paced environments. In between the teaching, the playground duties, the marking and the meetings, if you can find time to pee throughout the day you’re doing well. There’s a lot to track because you’re never just teaching a lesson. As a teacher, you wear multiple hats (many of which you’ve not been trained for) and you never know which one you’ll have to put on next. You can easily go between the school counsellor, the coach, the guide, the parent and the mediator all in one day. We try to keep up with ever-changing tech and learn about the different cultural and ethnic backgrounds of the new students that come in and out of our classes. But what made school environments good for an undiagnosed neurodivergent person like me was that it was loosely and consistently scheduled days, yet you never quite knew what to expect each day. Then holiday breaks hid the ways that I would fall apart and need the first three days to feel somewhat human again.

All that would disappear when I took on my new role. I never realised how conditioned I had become to having an outside structure in place which meant I never had to consider how I organised my days. Or how teaching the same few grades for 17 years had given me the ability to pretty much know my job inside and out. But now I was in a new role and it wasn’t very clear what the role was supposed to be like. The classroom, for how exhausting it had become for me, was the place that contained all my messiness. So much so that I never realised how messy I actually was. Trying to create my own schedule, combined with being in a role that wasn’t clearly defined for me, revealed my shortcomings for all to see.

It started going downhill rather quickly now that I look back at it.

I got a huge case of imposter syndrome to start with which had me taking on way more than I could ever possibly handle. I was pissing everyone off that I worked with, made an absolute fool of myself on a couple of occasions in front of other teachers and parents and couldn’t keep up with the multiple responsibilities I had taken on to prove that I could do it all. Things got a lot worse when I started having more and more meltdowns by the end of the Spring term (something that hadn’t happened at a school in years). The only thing that was going somewhat well was my work with the students (and even that was getting a bit challenging).

I had gone from being at the top of my game, even becoming bored with teaching and feeling hopeless at the possibility of never being able to do anything more than what I was doing, to having an opportunity that could change everything for me and royally messing it up.

It was all falling apart, right before my eyes.

I was falling apart. I had become a shell of myself, working myself to the bone, taking on all the extra tasks, staying late, and coming in early. Nothing ever seemed good enough. As the problems mounted, both professionally and for myself personally I felt like there was no way out. I couldn’t do the job I was hired to do.

I was the problem.

There was nothing left for me to do but hand in my resignation at the end of the year.

Maybe the problem wasn’t me but part of something bigger…

Looking back on it all, it wasn’t surprising that I’d see myself as the problem. How could I not? I was given an opportunity, but I couldn’t keep up with the demands that I believed all admin and leadership had. I had the knowledge and experience, but I couldn’t do what I was hired to do. They, on the other hand, could do it all. At least it seemed that way to me.

But that’s how we’ve all been taught to think.

When something goes wrong, when something doesn’t fit or do what’s expected, or when something doesn’t reach certain expectations, then there’s always someone to blame. As neurodivergent people in a white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal society we learned very quickly (and often in school too), that we’re the ones that catch the blame too. Since we often couldn’t (or wouldn’t!) do things as everyone expected us to, then we were told that we were the problem.

But what can you do to fix a problem when you’ve learned you’re it?

Not much, besides maybe changing yourself. That’s not particularly easy to do, especially if you can’t change in ways that would completely solve the problem. But what can you do when you can’t?

We go to the “blame or self-blame” option because we think it gives us a complete and final answer. Only, no problems in our lives happen in a vacuum. We have relationships to the problems in our lives that are shaped by our “history and culture and must consider how gender, race, sexuality, class and other relations of power have influenced the construction of it.” Our problems are a part of a storyline in our life. We need to think about the politics involved in the shaping of our identity when we consider why it’s happened. Then we can better understand how it impacted our choice of actions.

Seeing problems within the wider context of the society allows us to step away from self-blame and see the problem as it is - something that is shaped by larger cultural stories, not as a part of a person’s character. We need to start putting problems back within the places that created them, rather than internalise them so they become used in defining ourselves.

Every time we externalise problems, we’re taking small-p political action because we’re revealing underlying societal issues that created them. When we do that, more possibilities become visible in how we could take action towards solving it. But when a person is labelled as being a problem, the ways that society has created the issue in the first place remain hidden and left unchanged. Then problems continue to fester and the persons involved have no chance of making significant change for the better for themselves or others.

Let me show you what I mean…

I don't know if you’ve ever worked in an international school before. But in many of the ones I’ve worked at, there was one thing that they all had in common. I rarely saw teachers that looked like me (Black, regardless of gender), and I’ve never been in one where a Black person was the head of any department. This school was no different either and I was none the wiser about anything in society at that point. I just saw myself as wanting to help others, but I never realised how people might have seen me in a position of authority. I never considered the ways they had been taught to think about their roles in the school and what it meant to any of them to see me as an expert and leader.

Imposter syndrome comes from the fact that you rarely see people who are doing the job that you do. Since you don’t see normally see someone doing your job, you think that you’re not supposed to be working there because it’s not really possible. You start to think that you’ll be caught for not being as good as the people who they usually hire. After all, if people like you were supposed to be working there, you’d see them and know that you were allowed to be there too. So instead, you start to work your ass off, try to do things perfectly and not speak up because you truly believe that the slightest mistake will have you revealed as the imposter that you really are. It’s why “40% of Black women felt they needed to provide more evidence of their competence in the workplace compared to only 28% of white women.”

But the truth is, imposter syndrome has nothing to do with the fault in a person's character or skill set and everything to do with the white supremacist, capitalist and patriarchal system that centres white cis-het, able-bodied, middle-class men in business and leadership. In many of the schools I’ve worked in, leadership (or even teaching in general), looked like (mostly) white men and white women. Everyone else plays the supporting role. So, who is anyone with a marginalised identity to try to challenge or change that?

[ID: Big Bird walks behind Darth Vader and his guard with their bright yellow feathers and goofy grin. the guards are white people wearing dark green uniforms and not smiling. The font, in white capital letters, reads: “how it feels when you have imposter syndrome.” I was waiting to be found out every day I worked in this role. But make no mistake, imposter syndrome is not a real thing for us to be internalising, but created by this society. Wish I had known that then but even when I do it still doesn’t make it easier sometimes…End ID]

Other possibilities become visible

Even considering a small portion of the context around the problems I faced at this school, I see that there was a lot going against me that I never realised. But even with the problem within a larger cultural context, I’m still in a relationship with it too. This means that I still had a responsibility for how I chose to engage with it. Deciding that I’m not the problem doesn’t mean that I don’t have any responsibility towards it. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It opens up many more possible ways and options to address it because now I don’t have to resort to destroying myself in order to do that.

When I considered my social identity markers at the time (Black woman, transracial adoptee, undiagnosed neurodivergent, parent, married to a white cishet man, immigrant), it made it a lot clearer how my experience might have been different from others. It makes me think a little wider about what might have had to be put in place to support me within an environment where BIPOC teachers we’re typically heads of departments. What did the administration and teaching staff need in order to accept me in my role? What more could I have done to support myself from the ways that this culture so insidiously exploits Black women and femme? Problems placed inside a person make for very little space or options for solutions, but outside us, new perspectives start to become visible and alternative solutions start taking shape.

When we start seeing people as people and problems as problems, it allows us all more space to be seen in our humanity. Mistakes can be made because we know that people can be assisted in learning from them. More issues within the systems could be addressed because now we’re exposing the actual problems. But what’s really good though is it leaves us all with a lot less room for judgement and a lot more space for compassion.

Take a minute and reflect on some of the following questions and leave a comment below if you wish:

What possibilities and options might become clearer now that parts of the problem have been placed inside the wider cultural context and outside myself?

How might others (considering their different social identity markers) have been impacted by the problems I was facing? And what might it have meant for them when I left?

What issues might not have been resolved or remained hidden when I decided that I was the problem and later resigned?

I’d love to read some of your thoughts. I’ll add my thoughts on these questions too in another personal essay in the future.