Communicating Boundaries as a Female Five in Career Transition
So, I'm a 5w4 sp-dom. I'm also a *cue Ferengi sneering voice* female.
Due to the emergence of my bipolar disorder in my early twenties on top of being visually impaired enough not to drive, I've continued to (need to) live at home with my parents into my late 30s. In the period immediately after my mania I was too out of it to be bothered by that (or much of anything); now this situation is intolerable. They were anxious helicopter parents when I was growng up, and now it's not (much) different.
Seven years ago, I finally got enough of myself together to start teaching ESL online. These online platforms are marketplaces for teachers: you set your availability and your lesson price, and students choose to buy lessons from you. I set about 60 hours a week of availability.
In seven years of teaching ESL I have never gotten more than about 60 hours a month at absolute most. Which also meant I didn't feel justified in raising my prices (roughly $18/hr at most). And so I got stuck. Low-grade depression returned; lots of YouTube.
I've always wanted to write fiction, and through all of this I was subscribed to the newsletter of an author and writing coach. In one post, she introduced the Enneagram as a tool for character development. So, I discovered I'm a Five. I joined a personal development program designed *for* Fives by a Five.
Through that program I got out of my head and stopped needing to distract myself from reality; I started a strength training habit. Something like a libido developed, and I recognized that I'm at the least sapphic, if not a lesbian. I started to think about what freelance online work I could do that would actually be full time and generate a self-sufficient income. I got training to be a copy editor.
Now I have my first author clients, and I just want to stop teaching.
So where's the question or problem? Well, hello passion for secrecy and lack of healthy assertiveness slash confusion about professionalism and people pleasing.
Some of my ESL students have not accepted the idea that I'm going to stop teaching. One of them, an older woman, said that oh, but it's ok because Teacher will continue to teach her and other students privately. I felt such helpless despair when I heard that.
I get the impression that the ones who can't accept this think that teaching is my calling/passion. I think it would be rude to tell them it isn't, or at least, I don't trust myself to be neither a doormat nor rude about it. I also think that since I stayed so long, it's not unreasonable for them to have gotten this impression.
I do not want to continue to teach, and it isn't my devotion; I want a complete end to teaching and to move on.
But I also want continue to be professional. It is also not these people's fault that my psychological drama and dysfunction got us stuck up this tree, so to speak. They continue to need and want to study English. They just don't want anything to change.
How do I communicate professionally to them that this is truly the end of my time as their teacher, and please respect that? I don't want to have to go into all the personal life stuff in order to make this clear.