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Mental health protection is very important for stable living. When one's mental health is under attack, most things around become uninteresting. It would be as if everything is working against one. You would begin to question everything happening around you. In a worst-case scenario, a victim of mental health degradation begins to question his essence of existence.
I have had many experiences that had varying tolls on my mental health. One of the most recent happened in my immediate past workplace. It was a private secondary school where I taught further mathematics and chemistry. The school management couldn't draw a line between pushing teachers to give their all and subjecting teachers to nightmarish experiences.
From my first day in the school, the pressure was unbearable. The workload was heavy, and there was no commensurate commendation for the efforts that one put in place to get the work done. The school believes that with the relatively higher amount that the school was paying within its vicinity, they have the license to overwork the teachers. I would wake up by 5 a.m. and prepare for work. Before I could get back home, it wouldn't be anything earlier than 8 p.m. I couldn't cook my favorite meal except on weekends.
While some of the people around me envied me for teaching in a big school, I was anything but happy about the work irrespective of the salary. I would wake up in the morning and feel like not going to school. I celebrated weekends and public holidays with fanfare.
Once I entered the school premises, it was work upon work before closing by 4 p.m. After closing, I would, like other teachers, stay back to mark students' notes. Failure to do that meant that the following morning would be too hectic for me. I can't even try it. After marking for two hours, I would spend another two hours on the road back home. By the time I got home, I would be overwhelmed with tiredness.
Initially, I didn't take it as anything. I took it as normal work stress. Unfortunately, it began to take a great toll on my mental health. There is nothing as frustrating as giving your best to a task and all you get in return is an insult. I began to lose sleep because of the job. Happiness was eluding me. Whether in the bathroom, kitchen, or market, all I would be thinking of was the next working day. When it became obvious that I was losing myself, my peace, my happiness, and many other things to the job, I gave myself a timeline to leave the school. I began to work on the timeline.
With the firm belief that I would soon leave, I found a way to cope with the work for the remaining days in the school. I started hunting for jobs. I accepted an offer from another school with a significant pay cut. Though I needed to make money to sort out many issues, I didn't want to lose myself while looking for money. As fate would have it, later I got a better offer, and I left before the timeline I gave myself elapsed.
I can endure different kinds of levels of stress. However, my stress absorber works like an elastic material obeying Hook's law. Once I am being stretched towards breaking point, the effect becomes on my mental health. At this point, I don't think twice about finding my way and leaving such a zone. If it is a friend that is stressing me that much, it doesn't take me anything to cut such a friendship tie. In all I do, I don't allow my mental health to be stretched to the point of breakage.
