Uncertainty invites us to deschool

Back in January, I went for an interview for a communications role with a local charity. I didn’t get the job but I did get some valuable insights. 

I knew that home educating my kids wasn’t allowing me enough time to work, primarily from a financial point of view (and if I’m really honest, from a personal one). Yet it felt too risky to give it all up and dramatically change our lifestyle if I didn’t know what was going to be happening workwise. 

I wanted to know that sending our kids to school and tying our lives to the system was going to pay off - to be worth it. 

I was also running a project for home educated young people two days a week, a self-directed, consent-based learning community. So I went into the interview hoping I could negotiate around that. In some ways, giving that up was the harder thing for me to reckon with because I knew that other families were relying on it.

Meeting the team and talking through the job, my mind was a wild tangle of things. And no surprise. It was my first interview in fifteen years where I wasn’t the interviewer!

I hadn’t come to the role ready to go. I was still dipping a toe in, hesitantly wondering whether this could work, whether change would be worth it. I was asking the universe for a sign, some assurance of certainty before doing anything major. 

But there was nothing else for it but to jump in. I couldn’t find a job and then put the kids in school and close the project. The latter two had to happen first so I could have the space to find the next thing.

Fortunately, soon after the interview, I started a subsidised course of counselling, which helped me start unwinding. We worked on identifying what I was so afraid of, what was overwhelming me to the point of not being able to take steps forward. 

A lot of it had to do with uncertainty.