I AM ME!!!

I got out…hmmm…not just yet…personal, financial, legal rocks keep me there still. There are many, many, many tangled parts of my life. But I’ve been able to breathe, I have had time to sleep, to eat, to laugh, to cook, walk the dogs, be silly with my husband and my kids.

I am getting out… It’s as if I’ve been underwater the last four years of my life. I met him when I was teaching High School English, just for fun. I really got those classes because I loved the campus where I was teaching.

I had been the head of the multicultural program years before, and when I met an old friend from that school in the supermarket and she told me they needed teachers and I could just take one group for fun, I immediately said YES! 

I loved teaching at that school and High School is one of my favorite ages to teach. I was there for an hour from Monday to Thursday, I could teach as I saw fit, by the little brook that runs through campus, or in the gym playing games.

I had so many other things going on outside of that, that it even felt like a treat, a place where I could just be silly and enjoy teaching. 

Back to him, he was there teaching too and we started talking and we became fast friends. We would hang out in meetings and have tons of fun.  It quickly got more and more intense. He pitched me his idea for a school where anyone could learn English with us without having to pay that school’s tuition, which is quite impossible to pay. 

I was one of the best rated teachers at that school at a national level. Fast forward, in less than 6 months, we had the school running and I had left most of my other projects.  

The school was doing well and we opened a child focused school, another project, another company. By July 2019 I was working Monday through Sunday, between 10 to 16 hours a day, handling administration, finances, and all the academic operations. When Covid hit, we had 4 locations that were full, and looking to expand to a couple more within the next months and then we had to close everything and move all teaching online. I had the online program ready in a week and we were back up and running in less than 10 days. By August 2020, we had enrolled over 1000 students across Mexico and were starting to expand into Latin America. 

There were oh so many many things that were wrong, but I felt that we were a team, we were working together and even if it was “una chinga” (ASAP) it was worth it. In January 2021 he flew in a girl from Russia, he had met her through a friend, and he brought her to live with him.  Come October of that year, he took her back to Russia to see her family and he was there for a month. 

During that time the whole responsibility of the schools fell on me, and the damn broke, I broke. I found out so many things that were wrong and just out of place, I knew all these things, but I didn’t want to see them…and suddenly they were under the spotlight… I didn’t immediately think about leaving, I thought all could be fixed and set in place so we could grow more and be better. I was quite wrong.

2022 started out very well, we were still growing, expanding, I had a solid team. We were women of around the same age, and we had a vision: MAKE IT FUN, MAKE IT WORK, BE A TEAM! At that time I wasn’t fully aware of how high-demand relationships work, but I had a lot of experience with how people would be discarded or broken or they just suddenly left without me understanding what had happened. 

By April, my team had left the company. 

I had lost different teams along the way due to several situations; once I lost a coordinator and one of my best teachers and another amazing teacher and a great creator of didactic material because he had met them at a bar, when he was going out with a receptionist from the schools whom he was sleeping with, and they didn’t say hello and he KNEW that they had it in for him (he lived with all of them in the same house and had been sleeping with one of those teachers a while back; he also KNEW the other teacher was jealous because he had not wanted to sleep with her…) OMG just writing it makes my stomach revolt, not just because of how convoluted the situation is, but because of all the abuse that was happening right under my nose…in my schools.

This left me quite alone and with a shit ton of work. I asked for help. I practically begged him to help me, to take some classes, to help with the hiring process, the response I got was a phone call in which he stated: “I AM THE C E O OF THIS COMPANY YOU CANNOT BE DEPENDING ON ME TO FILL OUT YOUR INCOMPETENCE! ON MONDAY WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A MEETING AND ALL THIS SITUATION IS GOING TO CHANGE BECAUSE YOU ARE SO INCAPABLE OF FIGURING THINGS OUT! I AM TIRED OF THIS SITUATION!”

I decided then and there to never ask him for help ever again. That weekend while I was giving class in the morning, my oldest daughter called, since both my husband and I are psychoanalysts we never call unless it is an emergency. My younger kiddo was running a high fever, they had already vomited and their temperature kept rising. I placed my group as fast as I could, notified everyone and rushed home…his response to my message explaining the situation was: “You cannot stop working! THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO DO THINGS! Where is your husband, can’t he go to them? YOU NEED TO ANSWER WHEN I CALL YOU!”

That was the end for me…It was over…I had to get out.

From then on, it was deciding how and when to do it. I started talking to my husband plainly about the whole REAL situation I had been living in the schools for the past years. It was not easy for me and he had a hard time understanding, but I had screenshots, recordings of “meetings” and documents to show that I was not crazy, that the situation was and I really had no idea how I had gotten to that point. Little by little we reconnected and he said: “Whatever you decide to do or not do, I am with you and if I can help you, I will!” 

I decided to state that I had to leave due to my health. I mean, I have been dealing with a myriad of health situations all along, beginning with a cancer scare between August 2019 until May 2020. By May 2022 I had heart problems, IBS, panic attacks, memory loss, I was totally bloated and had no energy. One day in September I was handed a two hundred pesos bill and I literally had like 30 seconds where I had no idea what it was I was holding in my hand, that was really scary…I went to the doctor and got medicated to the roof, and was taking especially heavy medication for sleep and anxiety. When I asked him, my partner, if someone else could open the schools at 7:00 am because I had such a hard time waking up, I was told that my personal problems were my own and they couldn’t affect the company.

That same week I handed him my notice where I stated I was leaving by December 20th, I attached a plan so that we could train people to take part of the responsibilities I currently had. It had to be a team of 5 people. I had no real response from him except googly eyes asking me if I really wanted to leave, what was I to do with my life if I left, how was I going to live without the schools, how much better my life had been since I had met him and how I would now throw all that under the bus, how I had to be stronger and stop being the victim, how selfish I was being and so on …

On December 19th at 5:00 pm, he fired the whole team I had trained for the transition because they were bad apples and had awful intentions towards the schools and towards him.

For the past 2 and a half months I have kept helping the school staff at a distance, I have been sleeping, learning to unwind and kind of coming back to life after being in a shadow for the past 4 years…there are so many things I regret, I am angry, frustrated, sad and tired, and I AM ME!

I AM ME for the first time in a looooooooooong time…who ME is, I don’t really know completely and it fills me with anxiety and excitement… I AM ME!

~Quills & Rocks