Hello all, back again with my monthly diary post and I must say there's lots to include in this post. So as you may have noticed, I've been a little MIA from my blog for a couple of months now. As you may have read earlier, in the beginning of October I was made redundant from my job. All the members of staff were also made redundant and in all honestly, I didn't take it well. I had finished university and started working there as a stop gap job, trying to decide what to do next. For example, I'd been thinking about continuing my education via a masters but obviously, masters take time and money and so not something to be decided in a hurry.
After a few months of thinking about it, I decided against doing a masters but decided to stay where I was anyway until I found out my next move. Back in March, I'd been hearing lots of good things about Learning Support Assistants (LSA) in schools and thought it sounded like I job I could really love. After doing some research, to my dismay I discovered that in order to retrain, I would have to undergo an expensive course and unpaid work experience which meant no money coming in. For this reason, I couldn't take the leap and so I stayed where I was.
If things would have carried on the same, I probably would have got on fine but always wondered, what if. Then, on the third of August, we were told that the shop was closing down and that we would be out of work as of the seventh of October. This hit me harder than most as I still hadn't figured out what I wanted to do and whilst they did offer jobs elsewhere in the company, I knew it wasn't what I wanted.
Around this time, I started suffering with bouts of anxiety and panic attacks and honestly it was possibly the worst month I've experienced. For a time it looked as though I may work as a dental nurse as Id been offered a position at my local dentist. However, the more and more I looked into it, the more I felt that it wasn't the right move for me. So, with no security of a job further down the line, I turned down the dental nursing job. It was a scary move knowing I could be out of work for a long time but following my gut felt like the right thing to do.
Following the shops closure, I had one week before my Lanzarote holiday and honestly it was the one thing getting me through. And thankfully, it was exactly the restful week I'd hoped for (so thank you to my lovely boyfriend for being there for me.) Now that I was out of work, it seemed to me there was no good reason to put off becoming an LSA and so I organised a weeks work experience in a school to check that it was still what I wanted, before paying for an expensive course.
It was in this school that I discovered that the one thing I should have been doing had been right in front of me all along. The school itself is an outstanding example of how education should be and they could not have made me feel more welcome. But, it gets better. On my second day into school, I was approached by one of the senior staff and asked if I would be interested in working there as an LSA starting in January. As you can imagine, I nearly scared her to death with how quickly I answered yes.
And so, following one of the worst months of my life, I have come out the other side with a job in place after Christmas and two months off to get my head in the right place. There is a famous saying of "when one door closes, another opens" and it could not be more true in this case. I cannot believe my luck and I am so grateful to the school for seeing something in me. I will add that I wont be discussing the school or anything to do with it in my later posts as I feel it would be inappropriate, but I hope you understand. If you feel you're in a bad place, just remember you never know what is around the corner but, as always, thank you for reading and lots of love,
Laura.
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