In the middle of a school day, science teacher Brittany Beck passes out in her classroom, leading her to reflect on what got her here.
Brittany Beck is a science teacher at the High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Brittany is also her school’s Coordinator of Student Activities and lives for event logistics, fundraising and trip organizing, and the facilitating of many student groups including Women in Science Club and Student Government. You can follow Brittany on twitter at @brittanbeck. Brittany has been an MfA Master teacher since 2015.
This story originally aired on March 8, 2019 in an episode titled “Circles.”
Story Transcript
A little over five years ago, it was the middle of the school day and I was driving to the emergency room with my principal. Neither of us quite knew what was happening with me. What I did know is I wouldn’t have been there if I wouldn’t have passed out in school. I wouldn’t have passed out if I had slept at all the last two nights. And I wouldn’t have been awake the last two nights in a row if I wasn’t, like many of us in this room, a self-martyred teacher.
Filling up medical history forms is tricky for me, though. My maternal grandma had 23 biological kids, 16 of whom survived to my childhood. I have, no exaggeration, hundreds of cousins. When you have that many family members, you're bound to have a number of diseases on that form checked off.
I was around while my aunts discussed their breast cancer, my uncles discussed their heart issues and my cousins and I discussed the various childhood body issues that popped up as we grew up.
As a ninth grade health teacher now, though, there are certainly many things I never discussed with my rural Catholic Missouri family. Drugs and alcohol, no. Sex, heck no. Social, emotional or mental health, let us pray.
As a youngster, I have lived in a world, and there were certainly enough of us to create a world, where I thought everyone had the same socialized roles and was related to me. Technically, as a biologist, I know that’s kind of true.
I can track my love for Biology and Health back to my parents, both of whom are expert scientists. With them I spent hours exploring our giant backyard, time with my dad in his chemical plant mixing chemicals, and checking in fictional and real patients at my mom’s hospital. Science, like my family, seem to be everywhere.
My parents decided that all my time doing science could be done a year early in kindergarten in a more formal learning setting. I still remember the day that I went into early kindergarten testing with my mom. We walked into the testing site and a likely very nice teacher introduced herself to me and to my mom, which clearly meant she was not a Beck or a Blomquist I recall feeling fear and confusion that there was a world outside mine that I didn’t know existed.
I peeled myself away from my mom and I went and I sat in the front table and I just remember my heart was racing. I was feeling paralyzed and I just kept repeatedly wiping my palms into my usually empowering Disney princess shirt. Belle for her books and Ariel for her hair were my idols.
I still remember most of the questions she asked me about the alphabet and about basic shapes and, yeah, I could read that that word was ‘apple’ and could even point to the green apple that she had hidden among the other fruit on the board.
The problem was I would not and, now believe, could not speak. She tried and tried and finally gave up. I remember when she said it was time for the test to be over, it felt like a giant weight lifted off my tiny shoulders and I could run back to the safety of hiding behind my mom’s legs. I'd like to go on the record now, though, and say that that was my first public stand against standardized testing.
After I protested that test, my mom told me that I would be going to an awful place, preschool. She told me that if I learned how to talk to people then I wouldn’t have to go to school anymore. Logically, I spent the entire first day coloring alone at the table waiting for her to come back.
After a couple of weeks of preschool, all the other kids got to file into the brightly lit cafeteria while the teacher who wore these giant, thick earrings so much so that I still, in my head, call her Ms. Onion Rings. Ms. Onion Rings pulled me into the shadows of the hallway and she sat me down at a chair did the teacher squat to get at eye level and asked me, a four-year-old, why I wasn’t talking with anyone and why I didn’t seem to want to make any friends.
Of course I cried. Ms. Onion Rings then let me go back into the cafeteria where I stared down at my lunch of bright yellow corn and mashed potatoes and those Dino chicken nuggets that I usually love to mush together and eat but that day just tasted like salty tears.
For the other shy, classified kids in the room, I’m sure you can recall a similar experience. It was the first time I was shamed for not knowing and not really even wanting to know the steps to social interaction.
The next time early kindergarten testing came around, I forced those answers out of my mouth and I hoped that a real school would be better.
In elementary school, my parents tried another force-me social experiment, dance classes. I kicked and screamed through my first couple months of those classes but, admittedly, started to love it. If the challenge was to move my body to make my heart race and to sweat, I didn’t have to be concerned about the body-paralyzing, heart-racing, sweaty-palm experiences that were still happening to me. Plus, I didn’t have to talk to anybody while I was dancing.
Later on, I joined chorus. Singing still isn’t talking. The play, their lines, not mine, and really found my stride in something big at my high school, show choir.
While preparing for a performance in the ninth grade, my choir director, the late and great Dave Ward said something along the lines of, “Even if you don’t feel like it out there today, fake like you do. Fake like you're happy.”
Between that pep talk and the sci-fi fantasy books that I've been reading relentlessly, something clicked. I could become the extroverted, non-paralyzed character that I so desired by completely and totally faking it. I faked it so much that my default personality became an outgoing character that always seemingly said everything with confidence. I was, with intention playing the role of a sheep in a wolf’s clothing.
The thing is, when you're acting, you become the person that people want you to be instead of the person that you actually are. I can remember countless times as a young adult feeling the strain of being someone else that I wasn’t and becoming paralyzed as a result of it.
In church, in a roomful of people that I'd known for a decade, my heart would start racing and I wouldn’t be able to sing anymore. In a meeting for an internship that I loved, I wasn’t even able to introduce myself because I felt like if I spoke that I would tip sideways like a paralyzed board.
I learned to not order fragile glasses at coffee shops because I would sit there with the for-here cup and I would feel like everyone was looking at me. So when I went to bring the cup to my face, I would shake so much I wouldn’t even be able to take a drink.
In college, in the student union building, I was sitting with a sorority sister that, for some reason, I really wanted to impress. And one of my super-nerdy science friends came up to talk to me about the organic chem labs that I'd been teaching at the time. The peppy sorority role inside me wanted to make a flippant joke about the rumor going around campus about the frat boys that synthesized moonshine in the organic chem labs and then taking the shot in the bathroom.
The intense, hyper-nerd in me wanted to brag about how confident I was that I could synthesize acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin for the non-chem teachers in the room, that was so strong that it would instantly cure those frat boys’ hangovers. The problem was, at the time, the roles for me were so contrasting that I just mumbled and feigned sleepiness until one or both of the parties left.
As a biologist, I’m aware that we go through very distinct phases and stages of development throughout our life. I feel like I go through very distinct and contrasting phases and stages within each second of interacting with someone.
Five years ago, I was assigned a co-teacher that, for various reasons, both my fault and hers, I could not get along with. Having her in the room with me every day was a hostile audience member that I just couldn’t perform for.
In early October, I knew an observation was coming and I'd been up for two nights in a row over thinking all of our conversations and interactions and the plan that we had for that week. The next day in school, I was sitting talking with the kids and suddenly the world went black. I woke up and I remember feeling really tired and very confused but, honestly, my first thought was, “I’m only a second-year teacher in this building. What’s the proper protocol for when you pass out in class?” I still don’t know.
I told everyone in class that I was okay and I made it to the bell and then I stumbled down the stairs, three flights of stairs to my principal’s office. She looked at me and decided to take me to the hospital.
In the hospital, they ran lots of tests, but the real test came when the psychiatrist came in. She asked me if I'd been stressed recently, and I just laughed. She told me she thought I'd been having panic attacks, she told me to call my mom. She sent me home with a psychiatrist appointment, a prescription for Xanax and a couple of pamphlets about something that, until that point in my life, I had never heard of - anxiety disorder.
I went home, took the next day, thank fully a Friday, off of work and tried to calm my fried brain. I also tried desperately to not Google everything that I possibly could about anxiety disorder.
My mom took an emergency flight out and we tried to treat the next couple of days like a surprise tourist trip instead of a trip that you take to make sure that your daughter is okay. Over those couple of days, a couple of things that I'd never heard from my mom emerged, like “Well, your dad and your grandma were always super nervous like this too.” And, “You Beck kids always strove to do your best and beat yourself up if you didn’t.”
In fact, when I told her I was going to be giving this talk and the topic was my anxiety disorder, even this week her reaction was, “Are you sure that you want to talk to people about that?”
But the thing is, I’m sure that fighting against the stigma of mental health is part of the non-faked part of me. It’s why, when I went back to school, finally, I made the next unit of my academic writing class all about mental health and then worked with a team of teachers at my school to develop a year-long health course. I know I would be a different person today if I'd learned about and de-stigmatized mental health disorders and I don't want my students to have the same ignorance that I did.
Now I try to make time in my life to find alone time to recharge and to try to find avenues to perform, to sing, to dance and to breathe. I've made good friends both inside and outside of school and occasionally have the privilege of forgetting that I struggle with anxiety disorder at all.
That said, in my day-to-day life I’m not really sure what role I’m playing anymore, and I’m finally starting to think that that’s okay. Thank you.