I'm not the kind of person who often seeks out advice from teachers, professors, or bosses, but I remember going to see my faculty advisor in my last semester of college. He was holding his office hours out at the edge of the plateau because he had signed up to count migrating hawks. I almost never went to see professors in their offices, but I went to see him out there.

I was thinking about going into the Peace Corps, and I knew he had done it. I'd studied just enough to know that sometimes programs with good intentions had negative impacts on the lives of people they were trying to help.

My professor said, "I don't know if you'll find this comforting or terrifying, but you can't really change much of anything."

Well, it's important to keep your life in balance. For instance, I'm a teacher, and you've just described my job. We have to recognize that we have very little control over our students' lives.

We have to recognize that being a good teacher means holding onto our sanity, and that means we have to have something going on in our lives besides work. That may be part of why so many teachers do continuing education, whether or not they earn more money for the extra degrees. Exercise is pretty crucial to that endeavor as well, and if it's out in nature some kind of way, even better!

I've never sought medication for depression, but I have plenty of friends who have.

If you haven't read up on Dabrowski's notion of Emotional Overexcitabilities (though gifted folks usually have a set of OEs, not just one), you should do that. _Living with Intensity_ is a good book if you want to get really into it, but there are quite a bit of articles on the web.

"Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice." -Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Last edited by Beckee; 03/05/12 11:05 PM.