When You’re Tempted to Leave Unschooling and Try Something Else

Every evening of our recent holiday, Imogen and I swished through the warm waves as we walked along the beach, waiting for the sun to set.

One evening, I noticed a group of birds on the sand. At first glance it looked like a gathering of seagulls, but there were two imposters in the lineup.

The word imposter makes me think of all the times I’ve felt like an unschooling imposter. For many years I’ve blogged, podcasted, written books and made videos about this way of life, sharing my thoughts, my ideas and my family’s stories. And it might sound like I know everything and our life is perfect. But we’ve had our share of difficult days, days when I’ve questioned what we’re doing, days when I haven’t felt qualified to share unschooling with anyone. I’ve just wanted to run away from my life and my public presence on the Internet. Yes, I’ve felt like an imposter hiding in a line of real unschoolers, hoping no one will notice I don’t belong.

It took me a while to realise that everyone has bad days, even unschoolers. The problem is not many people talk about them. It’s much easier to share the good times. And having difficult days doesn’t mean we’re on the wrong track. It’s not unschooling that is making life hard. We shouldn’t look around at what other people are doing and then try something else. Oh no, we need to stick together as a family, love and forgive and help each other through the problems, and keep trusting.

I wrote the following words in my story An Unschooling Imposter:

It’s all very well loving each other when our days are perfect. That’s easy. But when things aren’t so good, can we continue loving each other? For example, can we choose not to take offence when someone treats us unfairly but instead try to understand and be forgiving? Can we pull each other up again when we fall? Can we help each other become the people we are meant to be? If we can, then, even if everything is not looking and feeling as we’d like, we’ll be unschooling perfectly.

Life will never be perfect. It will always have its hard times whether we unschool or not. But it’s unschooling that will help us deal with them. We could say:

Unschooling is the perfect way of life, especially when life seems far from perfect.

Our holiday was perfect. All the problems of an imperfect life felt a million miles away as I spent a few days relaxing on the beach with my daughter.

An Unschooling Imposter can be found in my book Radical Unschool Love. The new edition of my second unschooling book will be available on Amazon very soon. I ordered the proof copy a couple of days ago. If it looks okay when it arrives, I’ll be able to immediately hit the ‘publish’ button!

So, have you ever been tempted to jump off the unschooling ship on a bad day? Have you ever felt like an imposter? And do you have a place to retreat to when the problems of the world seem overwhelming?