I just wanted to write about some heavy things on my heart that I have been struggling with a lot.
Each job you take will have its own problems. You will never find the perfect job, though it may be close. Maybe you aren’t passionate for your job, but it pays the bills. Maybe your commute is too long, your co-workers aren’t your favorite people, the salary is a little low, or you’re super bored throughout the day. No job is perfect.
In America, we basically take ownership of our job as if it were the only interesting thing about us. People ask you to explain who you are, and you probably say your job and what you do within the first minute of that explanation. However, if you are proud of, or passionate about your job – this is something you want to say because it is something you love.
My photography job is one I am dearly proud of and passionate for. However, the downfalls of that job is overworking or not knowing how to say no, and taxes with a lack of benefits. People do sometimes walk over you, talk down to you, but you get used to brushing it off and responding with sarcastic statements. Within the last 5 months I have made the transition of 30-40 weddings a year, to 10 next year, while full time teaching at a university.
The good thing about this transition is I can still take on weddings and do the job I so very much love, but at a pace that won’t eat me alive with post production. I love calling myself a photographer, a wedding photographer. I love being the one to capture these sweet ‘last’ moments of families being together in one place, hugs between grandparents, first steps of children at big events. I love the candid and raw documentary, but also having a space to create fine art work. Wedding photography has always allowed me to be more than one thing. I don’t have to do just fine art work, I can do documentary, motion work, slow shutter speeds and everything all in one. People love labels, and they always want to label artists, too – but that confinement is exhausting – which is why I started to really do more lifestyle work and expanded my work into landscape work [which I sell by the way]. So I can still do all of this, but capping at an amount that helps me get paid in the summer, and not overwork myself in winter.
Teaching is its own category of stress. The pros are: I am very good at it, I explain things in a way that make sense and wish would have been described to me, watching students grow and have their ‘i get it’ moments is so dang rewarding in itself, and a life-to-work balance that is totally manageable. It’s so funny because last semester I took 5 classes between 3 different universities. It was SO much but I figured a way through it. I am right now, teaching a 4 course load, and it’s so manageable, and I did it while photographing 7-8 weddings during the semester. My peers who are doing a 4 course load seem to really be struggling with the balance – but for someone who always overworks, this is actually a lot less for me and a heck of a lot less than last semester.
It’s been so amazing to wake up – do my personal tasks, whether that is edit or work out, go into my office early and grade or lesson plan and then teach for the day. I have made boundaries on when and where I can grade, and that has never been feasible for me since before I was adjunct and didn’t have a space to do work besides my own home. So now I have a space for working on school work, and a space for living and editing. A big bonus that you don’t realize how beneficial it is until you have it [those of you who have shifted in the covid age from office to home probably understand this]. For 15 years I have been doing work in my own home, and though it is ‘nice’ sometimes boundaries really get smashed.
With teaching there are also some downfalls, but not in the way many people would think. I love lesson planning, creating projects, activities, and correcting each semester with things I can do better for the following semester. I have grown so much in being blunt and straight forward, as that was something I really had to learn. It was and sometimes can be, very hard to give critical critique on students work when they are just beginning. You don’t want to tell them their work is really bad, but you also have to do it in a way that promotes inspiration and encouragement of growth, because not telling them would do nothing for their growth at all. However, most of them are just beginning so you can’t expect them to be incredible artists, especially when their major is math or science. So there is a bit of give and take, and a lot of the grading comes down to effort and time spent on it – though I hate grading the most.
More than any semester, this semester, I had the worst time with students actually coming to class, turning in projects, or being reliable. I think a big factor in all of this, is these are many COVID high schoolers that have entered college. You really learn how to manage time well from 10th-12th grade. Specifically if you are in extra-curricular programs and are taking a full load of classes. A lot of these students don’t have that skill. So it seems the next following semesters my first day is actually going to have to be discussing how to manage time.
Many students this semester would miss 6 classes in a row, and then ask me how they could pass the course – but GVSU has a good and strict attendance policy and so do I, especially when the course is so heavily dependent on making mistakes, making art, and learning in class. Even if I was lenient on the absences, most of them just didn’t turn in work. Some of them even showed me work they were making on their camera, but I never saw it during assignments. Getting students to really care before it’s too late has been a hard one I am still figuring out. Shoot, even getting them to be independent and learn how to research what is due on Blackboard [which I organize TO DO and HOMEWORK by date so it is very easy to find], was a pain in the ass. So there is a loss of independence there, and that is a conversation I had with many students who admitted a lot of it was due to them not used to being on their own.
So that’s a weird factor to switch from ‘college level’ mentality to… whatever we are facing with now. It feels high school – I don’t love it. More so, I hate giving them lasting consequences that is only wasting their money – but in the end I have had to learn that their lack of effort really isn’t my responsibility, and they really need to buckle down and understand college isn’t holding hands with their professor every day to get through assignments, though I don’t mind extending a hand as much as I can.
The next thing that has been the hardest, is the discussion of mental health. It seems our society went from ‘mental health doesn’t exist’ to ‘mental health is bad’ and then ran to ‘mental health is so important you need to stay in bed if you aren’t feeling up to the task.’ As a fellow mentally ill person, I’m saying, there has to be a line. However, I also don’t agree with the structures that colleges have been created with the thought that: everyone has health care and can get a doctor’s note, there are no excuses for missing ‘test dates,’ and late work is non-negotiable if someone only missed one day of class.
With that being said, I also have seen an increase in every semester of students with anxiety or depression missing big days of class because they didn’t feel mentally in the headspace to create work or come to class. I didn’t used to be so personal with my students but I have had to shift gears on this. I was getting so many students telling me they couldn’t handle their courses work loads and just didn’t do anything because life was too much to handle at the time and they had some sort of mental health episode. They would talk to me like I didn’t get it – so I had to let them know … I get it. I never have told students that I deal with chronic depression, manic episodes, and panic attacks. I never told them before that I was heavily medicated and usually not having a good time, but this semester I had to. I let them know that in one week I was diagnosed with arthritis, lost my estranged grandpa [that had me feeling some type of way] and had a manic episode hit me all at the same time. 3 other things happened that week – I blocked them out – but I also was balancing teaching and my other full time photography job. Its like once I released this information all of their eyes widened. “It’s okay to have anxiety, need medication, understand your limits but you can not, can not, let it hinder your life.” What do I mean by this? It’s okay to limit your activity, take longer to graduate, go out less, but its really important to work through your mental limitations, health episodes, illness, and still live your life. If you bow down to your illness in every category of your life, you wont go any of the places you want to [metaphorically or physically]. My therapist has been working with me on this for OCD. If you feed the monster, it only grows.
When I explained this to one of my teaching peers, and all of the problems I was having with students not attending class or turning in work, they told me ‘they should have had their mental health figured out before college,’ and my god I don’t agree with that. That is definitely an old mentality, but to be fair, college is the perfect time for a mental health break. I, for sure, had my first panic attack in college but at the time had no clue what it was. I pushed through working 2 part-time manager jobs, while balancing photography work and another 10-hour-a-week job – while taking 16-18 credits a semester. I have no idea how I did it. But what a beautiful equation that was for a terrible overworked-mental health fall. I broke up with my boyfriend of 5 years, had a terrible relationship in between, and then thought it was me being unhappy with him, but re-evaluating I think there was a lot more going on in my mind and I just needed help… and we also needed to get better at our communication.
The younger teachers and professors get it. We are trying to seek the balance between accommodation and consequence. I am trying to gather more boundaries that limit my empathy but also extend it in certain scenarios. It’s been a big challenge, and the reason I always think about my wedding photo job is because this isn’t an issue during these big days. I know what I need, I’ll get my job done how I want and regardless of what happens unexpectedly, and I can depend on myself. Teaching just has so much more responsibility in terms of other’s futures and lives.. .yet this job pays less than my commercial work which is really what’s wrong with this country in a nutshell.
wishing you all the best luck and peace moving forward to this next year <3