Ten years of teaching abroad taught me the difference between hard and wrong. It took one school in Malta to make me actually use it.

By my last few months there, seeing a teacher cry at school had stopped being unusual. It happened most days, quietly, in a corner of the staffroom or the hallway between classes, and nobody stopped what they were doing to make a thing of it anymore. That was just what the building felt like by then.

I’ve been an international teacher for ten years. Ten years of moving countries, learning new systems, walking into staffrooms that already had their own history and their own inside jokes I wasn’t part of yet. Some of those schools were disorganized. All of them paid me embarrassingly little for how much of myself I poured into each kid. And still, for almost all of it, I loved the work. I felt like I was doing something that actually mattered, which I’ve since learned is a rarer feeling than it should be.

*A heart-filled teaching moment, Angola, 2017*

Then I moved to Malta, to a school with an entirely new leadership team, and every one of them turned out to be more toxic than the last. Kids’ learning stopped being the actual priority. How things looked mattered more than how things actually functioned. Relationships with parents never got the chance to form. When teachers raised concerns, they weren’t addressed, but were instead met with something closer to bullying.

The school had ten primary homeroom teachers in grades one through five. By the time I left, seven of them had already quit. The two who stayed are only still there because they’d signed two-year contracts and couldn’t get out. Eight out of ten isn’t a coincidence. Everyone inside that building knew exactly what it meant, even if nobody in leadership ever dared to say it out loud.

Here’s what that actually looked like, day to day. You wake up already anxious about a job you used to be excited to do. You get through it however you get through it, and you come home so worn down that the only thing you can manage is the couch, the TV, a glass of wine, whatever your particular flavor of numbing happens to be. You do that to survive the evening. Then you wake up and do it again.

Friday would roll around and we’d go for drinks, which sounds like fun until you realize the actual function of those drinks was trauma processing. We weren’t celebrating the week. We were debriefing it, a support group. Saturday you’d wake up with a headache and a strange kind of determination, because the weekend was the only thing you had, your one shot to remember you had a life outside that building, before Sunday night crept in and the dread started rebuilding for Monday.

Then leadership tried to reassign me to preschool, a grade I’ve never taught, have no qualification for, and have zero interest in. I was hired to teach second grade for two years. Moving me was retaliation wearing a staffing decision’s clothes, and it was also, as I told them directly, illegal. It violated my contract and my qualifications.

They fought me on it anyway.

I ended up joining the union and bringing in lawyers, which is its own particular flavor of exhausting when you’re doing it in a foreign country whose employment laws you don’t understand and can’t exactly look up on your lunch break.

At some point I looked at all of it and thought, seriously, this cannot be my life.

Was I confident quitting was the right call?

100%.

But was I sure about what came next? Not remotely.

Certainty was never actually the requirement. Knowing my reasons was, and I knew mine cold: unaddressed bullying, no room for the kids, no room for me either.

So I quit. And I’m not looking back.

That wasn’t a decision I made lightly. I was raised on a certain kind of logic. Sometimes you do things you don’t want to do because that’s what gets you to the other side of something. You build resilience by staying, not by leaving. Quitting was the word we used for people who gave up too soon, before they’d earned whatever lesson was supposedly waiting on the other side of the hard part.

I still believe a version of that. Most things worth doing require you to stay past the point where it stopped being fun. But there’s a difference between hard and wrong. Hard is a bad week. Wrong is watching a colleague cry in a staffroom and feeling nothing, because you’ve seen it too many times to react anymore.

You don’t need a classroom for any of this to make sense. Maybe your version isn’t a school in Malta, maybe it’s the job everyone keeps telling you you’d be crazy to leave because of the salary. The relationship where you’ve started mistaking exhaustion for commitment. The family obligation you took on so long ago you forgot it was ever a choice. Different shape, same math. Something is taking more from you than it’s giving back, and you’ve been calling that resilience instead of calling it what it actually is.

I found my line by nearly dying from cerebral malaria at thirty. An experience like that has a way of making “life is short” feel less like something on a mug and more like a fact you now have personal, physical evidence for. Once you’ve been that close to the end of things, spending your one life anxious and low for a paycheck starts to look like a different kind of risk.

So no, I didn’t have a plan. What I had was the clear, physical knowledge that staying was going to cost me more than leaving would.

James Clear has a line I’ve been sitting with. “If you want a plant to grow, you can fuss over it every day, watering, weeding, moving it toward the sun. Or you can place it in the right soil and let nature do most of the work. A seed planted in the right spot often thrives on its own. Life is much the same. Progress is not only about how hard you work, but also about where you decide to work. Where is your energy better spent right now: pushing harder or planting yourself in better ground?”

I’d been fussing over that plant. Watering a school that was never going to bloom for me no matter how much of myself I poured into its soil. Malta wasn’t a failure of effort on my part. It was the wrong ground.

I don’t know yet what comes next, and most days that part gets to me, but I’m not spending my Sunday nights sick over Monday anymore. I’m not the version of myself who thought two days off was a fair trade for five days of dread. I got that part of myself back, and oh how I missed her.

I was raised to never be a quitter. I still don’t think I am one. I think I finally learned where the line is, and it turns out it has nothing to do with teaching, or Malta, or any one job. It has to do with how much of yourself you’re willing to trade for a paycheck, a title, or just the fear of what comes after you walk away.

Where’s yours?

I Was Raised to Never Be a Quitter. Then I Quit.

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