It's been so long since I've sat down to write something, anything...anything at all, that I don't know how well this reflection will turn out. My life has undergone so many ups and downs and twirling loops that perhaps – just perhaps – my thoughts and creative streak have been scared into a temporary paralysis.
I was a teacher of English for well over twenty years. For the first fifteen years, I couldn't have been happier doing what I loved, while travelling the world. Well, I can't actually say I've been all over the world but I've travelled quite a bit and am grateful for the opportunity for both getting to know different cultures slightly more in depth than if I'd been a mere tourist and for all the lovely people I met along the way.
What's important, at least for this text, is that I felt professionally fulfilled and happy as a teacher and loved every single aspect of my job, from preparing my classes to each and every one of my students and their idiosyncrasies.
During those 15 years my students were all professional adults and I could usually read in their eyes their appreciation for my effort and that they thought that most of what I taught was useful for their daily lives. Oh, happy days!
Little by little, however, my schedule began to be filled with more and more general English classes and fewer business English ones. Gradually, teenager and young learner groups started taking over my timetable...Perhaps, if I had started out my teaching experience with those target groups it wouldn't have been such a challenging change.
Almost nine years! That's how long I tried to mould myself to the new reality, until I decided to chuck in the towel. Mind you, this doesn't mean I was unsuccessful or anything. I'm actually quite proud to say that overall my students were quite confident speakers and usually did very well in their Cambridge exams. I'm the one who struggled with fulfilment. And trust me when I say I moved heaven and earth to try and find fulfilment: I sat in on all the teacher training sessions I could fit into my already tight schedule, to find new methods and approaches, I listened to other colleagues who had more experience teaching teens and younger learners, I read books and articles, ...yet I failed to find my drive. And when that's the case and there's no other kind of motivation (e.g. financial compensation), then one must decide to do something else with one's life. That's what I did.
To my mind, as a Portuguese/English bilingual who also speaks and writes Spanish and French fairly well, I'd be showered with job opportunities if only I held some kind of business certificate. So that's what I did. I enrolled in an intensive 14-month business management course and did surprisingly well for someone from a completely different field of study. For some reason, accounting and logistics were quite easily assimilated and understood by my humanities-driven brain. Go figure!
Unfortunately, as a middle-aged woman with no experience in the field I found it difficult to even get short-listed for an initial job interview and as weeks turned into months and months turned into years I decided to fall back on another skill of mine – baking and cake decorating – and enrolled in another Professional Bakery and Pastry Course. That took me another year.
Once the apprenticeship was over, I printed out my CV and went door-to-door asking to speak to the bakery manager and/or pastry chefs and within a fortnight I was working as an assistant pasty-chef. Usually in this line of work people start at a very young age and work their way up to the post they desire in a couple of decades, and here I am with half a century on my back wanting more than what I'm getting. I don't have the same time as normal people do to go through the normal stages of cleaning trays and greasing tins, and taking almost 15 years to being able to actually do what real bakers do, which is to bake and decorate. I'm so eager to please and have been putting in the time and effort to try and succeed but it hasn't been easy.
Unfortunately, my current bosses haven't been helping me develop my skills in the cake decorating area. So, here are some of the cakes I've made in my own time. What do you think? Please follow me and my pastry adventure on Instagram @pauladoamaral123
I'm so impatient and want more, so much more out of life. It's so very hard to constantly try and reinvent oneself to try and find fulfilment and a bit of happiness. Do you have any piece of advice for me? What about you? Have you been able to dodge all the curve balls life sends your way? How have you reinvented yourself?
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