It’s been a rough week.
I keep telling myself that things will settle down.
Yet those things never seem to get the message.
I’m usually the strong one. But right now, I’m feeling pretty weak. And all pretense of strong disappeared Friday night. Earlier that day, we had a lockdown drill at school. Our school doesn’t believe in doing the hyper-realistic drills that bring in fake shooters and try to replicate the chaos of the real situation.
But that doesn’t mean that drills are easy. Far from it. Usually, I’m able to build some distance between the discussions I have to have with the students and my own emotional reactions to the reality we live in. I guess my current state of overwhelm meant that those walls were pretty flimsy.
Because later that night, at home with my husband, I suddenly broken down when the show we were watching had a scene with excessive gunfire. Normally, fictional violence doesn’t phase me. But I guess I’m not normal right now, because I ended up crying and shaking under the covers.
As is often the case with emotional eruptions, it was about much more than just the one thing that eventually triggered it. My husband and I spent Friday night talking through some options. And I’ve spent some time this weekend researching possibilities, communicating my needs and finding some hard numbers.
I still don’t have an answer to my current overwhelm, but I feel so much better now that I have data and an outline of options. I no longer feel as trapped and just having some possible plans explored gives me some breathing room.
It can be scary sometimes to face the hard facts. But there is freedom in information. Just knowing that you have options makes the current one feel less like a trap and more like a choice.
I am very interested to hear more about your options and how you are continuing to deal with this kind of situation. I am often taken aback by emotions that arise from similar situations, and often they occur at the worst of times and so unexpected!
Be kind to yourself. The Washington Post had a really interesting article about the impact the lockdowns and drills are having on students. Adults are similarly impacted. Hugs.
Thank you. This was definitely a wake-up call of how depleted I am at the moment. Time to shift some priorities:)
It can’t be easy. I’m glad I live in Australia. We don’t have any of that crap to deal with.
Sending you love and space to identify your emotions more precisely and as needed. That’s often the first positive step towards eventually figuring out what we need to do about a situation.
I’m not trying to fix you nor suggest what has helped me in the past might be anything remotely close to what you need.
I would like to share personally that it has helped me at times when I’m not feeling strong, to reduce my consumption of either news or even fiction (books, audio books, tv and movies) that feature too much violence.
Often this doesn’t even phase me. I love the Christmas classic movies Die Hard and Die Hard 2 for example!
But there are times when too much violence saps my strength. I’m getting better at identifying when I need to go on a fictional ‘violence diet’ or a fictional ‘violence cleanse’.
There are many reasons why this can help, lots of sources and recommendations out there. I’m not sharing this to preach to anyone, just sharing that it has helped me at times.
As a parent and as a former partner of a school teacher, I’ve experienced the fear from a parents perspective of lock down drills and lock downs for actual events (kids bringing weapons to schools, crimes committed in the vicinity of schools with criminals on the loose on school grounds), fortunately nothing worse, but the fear and the situations constantly teach me that America needs to change and find a new way forward.
Thank you❤️