If you're in a place, #22: Let Yourself Be

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April 01, 2020

#22: Let Yourself Be

If you’re in a place, let yourself be.

It’s officially Day 20. We stopped teaching very suddenly and closed the school on March 12th. I thought I would spend this time reflecting. I thought I would spend this time writing. I thought I would spend this time catching up on reading. Listening to podcasts. Getting back into yoga. Building up my running stamina. Watching shows I’ve let queue up on Netflix for weeks. And, to be fair, I’ve done a lot of these things to different degrees. However, none of it has felt like enough.

And I keep getting stuck on that word.

Enough.

It feels like such a Before COVID word. Enough.

I’ve been wondering if our society will take anything major away from all of this. Will there be a Before COVID Era and After COVID Era?

It was crazy. In BCE, people didn’t believe that health care was an absolute right. They paid for that shit out of their own pockets or only got it if they had a certain kind of societally acceptable “career.” And in BCE, service workers were paid like $10 an hour and, in some states, even less because restaurants took advantage of our country’s tipping etiquette as a way to pay their workers less. And in BCE, bars weren’t allowed to sell cocktails to-go. And people didn’t regularly tip 25%. In BCE, we had a FIVE DAY WORK WEEK. Five days! And people went into offices even for jobs they could clearly do completely from home? Can you believe it? And in BCE, there was no comprehensive financial safety net for people who lose their jobs. In BCE, you could evict people. In BCE, people didn’t wear masks when they were sick. BCE. Can you even imagine those times?

Wouldn't it be nice for all of these things to seem like some wild, incomprehensible past?

I’ve been working on forgiving myself more. I made this joke on Twitter the other day. Someone tweeted, “What’s your “I am super into it but I also completely agree with everyone who makes fun of it and/or hates it” thing?”

I replied, “Myself.”

I mean. I guess I wouldn’t call this a joke. It’s just true. I am internally fighting constantly between being unhealthily arrogant and paralyzingly insecure. So what happens when you’re stuck in a nine hundred square foot condo with the person you love the most AND the person you hate the most? And what happens when those two people are the exact same person? And what happens when both of those people are you?

You have to come to terms with, well, a lot.

Something I’ve realized about teaching over the last nine years is that I love the work because it forces me to be a better version of myself. The best version, in fact. Each day, I have to wake up, and be NOT a piece of shit. Somehow. That doesn’t mean I have to be perfect. In fact, I take pride in being imperfect in front of my kids. But it’s a measured version of imperfection. A self-conscious version of imperfection. In my classroom, I am communicative. I have foresight. I am empathetic. I consider the perspectives of all of my students. I think about what they’re bringing into the classroom and how that may be informing how they’re treating me. I take deep breaths when I find myself irritable, annoyed, hurt, sensitive. I try to do what’s best for them because I know we’re connected and what is best for them will ultimate be what is best for me. I ask myself Why? And often.

I actually love this version of myself. This is when I’m most confident. This is when I’m least in need of validation. I know I’m good in that room.

This is hard mirror work. I have to be on constantly. And over the last four weeks, for the first time in years, I’ve been allowed to just shut down. To not be on.

When I don’t have to be on, I’m more selfish. I’m irritable. I’m sensitive. I need constant validation from the people I care about most. Too much validation I need so much fucking attention. I sleep for 10-12 hours at a time. Kind of. It’s shitty sleep. Like it’s two hours of sleep, then one hour of lying awake or scrolling through Twitter, then another two hours then a half hour awake, and some pattern like that until 11AM. I don’t get much done. I eat like shit. I don’t feel good about myself. I have terrible dreams. I don’t like myself. I don’t feel intelligent.

I’m struggling with all of this. I want to lean in to this lighter productivity. I don’t want my worth to be attached to a specific job or task or career. I don’t want to depend on others so much to feel good about myself. I want to be more gentle with myself. More okay with not being okay sometimes.

Every day, for the last 20 days, I’ve come to sit at this computer. Each day, I hope to write something. Even if it’s not specific work on my book like I keep hoping, I just wanted to write something. Something true. And I’ve struggled. Nothing feels relevant. Nothing feels true. And I think that’s because there is no truth right now. We haven’t worked it out. We haven’t hashed it out yet. Truth is up for grabs.

We are still in this. And it’s hard to just be in something collectively traumatic for such an extended period of time. There’s this desire to process, work through, now. Today. Yesterday, preferably. But we’re not there yet. I’m not there yet.

Of course I’m not writing. I’m too busy surviving.

Here are some things I’ve enjoyed over the last couple of weeks: