Craziness

Yesterday something strange happened. I had a panic attack. Not like a little one, a full-blown panic attack. I've had maybe two or three of those in my life, and this one came out of nowhere. I was in Japanese class, and my heart started fluttering, which it does fairly often, but it's never more than an annoyance, and it goes away. But yesterday during class it wasn't going away, and I started having trouble breathing. I got dizzy and I had to excuse myself. I went into the stairwell and put my head down, and I had to cover my ears because all the noise of the different conversations in the classroom was making me crazy. After a few minutes I tried to go back to class, but I was still dizzy and my head was pounding and being in the classroom was so noisy and overwhelming that I had to go back to the stairwell. I was shaking, and for absolutely no reason I started crying. There was nothing to trigger it, I wasn't upset about anything. It was like I had suddenly lost control of my body and my emotions, which was frightening. I've never shaken so uncontrollably in my life. I think it kind of became a cycle, and I finally had to haul myself out of it and go back to class, even though my head was spinning, and force myself to try to calm down and sit through the rest of class. 

I was thinking about it today, what might have brought it on, when there was nothing overt to really cause a panic attack, especially one of that magnitude (the only other time I can remember feeling like that was during finals Freshman year, and even then it wasn't this bad). Yesterday I came back to school after the JET Midyear Conference in Kobe and had a new sense of purpose. I'm really trying to improve my work life, and overhaul the bad habits I've fallen into, because I definitely fell into a comfort zone last semester, and I'm not putting enough effort into my job. So yesterday went well in that respect. But I think the emotional strain of forcing myself out of my comfortable routine, and the intense fear of failing to better my work situation (which I'm unhappy with right now) may have all come to a head yesterday. 

Actually, I want to clarify that. I am re-contracting for next year, no question. I like my life here, even when there are challenges. The biggest enemy I'm fighting right now is not culture shock or the Japanese winter (although the no central heating is a bitch). My biggest enemy right now, or I guess, rather, the biggest challenge, is my expectations of myself and what I can realistically achieve. I was so frustrated last term when I came up against the reality of my job as compared to the expectations I had, and as a result of my disappointed idealism, I fell into an apathetic rut. Now I'm trying to correct that. By far the hardest thing about being here is this job. But that doesn't make me want to leave. It makes me want to stay and keep working at it until I can do it well. I've never been faced with something like this: a job at which I feel like I'm failing. As a students, I always knew how I was doing, and because I knew how to be a student and worked hard, I was always doing well. But here, I have no idea how to be a teacher, much less one of a language I have no qualifications to teach in a country where I don't understand the language, the school system or the culture. It is incredibly frustrating, not to mention thankless, teaching junior high. With elementary schoolers, you know you've done well if the kids are having fun playing a game you made. Then it feels worthwhile. But junior high schoolers wouldn't be caught dead showing they were having fun. So you spend hours planning an activity, and making props and questions and lesson plans, and then, if (it's a big if) you actually manage to get them to do the activity, which is a feat in and of itself (you don't know how many times we've had to scrap an activity in the middle of class and give the kids word searches just to get them under control), you have no idea how effective it was, because they all look like they'd rather be having root canal surgery.

There's this, plus I've been stressing about the fact that I haven't been studying Japanese AT ALL. I had all these plans, and I do have time, if I use it effectively, but I haven't been, and I actually feel like my ability to speak Japanese has decreased in the last few months. Again, disappointed expectations of myself.

So when I said nothing brought on the panic attack, I take it back. Seemingly nothing brought it on, but in hindsight I guess the stress had been building up for a while before the cacophony and frustration of Japanese class pulled the trigger. But it caught me off guard because I wasn't expecting it. Though it may not have been completely emotional. I'm still dizzy today and I think I might be getting sick. Really hoping it's not the flu, it's going around, a lot of the students are sick.