Living Well

A Win, a Lose and a Dawning Realization

Posted on September 27, 2020 by stilllearning2b

I’m not sure what happened to September. Or August. Or July, for that matter.

Between the Groundhog Day-esque nature of COVID-era living and the magnitude of the work required to teach both remotely and in-person, the days have both been endless and indistinguishable: walk, work, cry, workout, work, sleep, repeat. During the tearful moments, I would tell myself, “You just need to make it to fall break.”

And I made it.

The Win

Thanks to being raised by a counselor-mom, I’m pretty good about boundaries in my personal life. But I struggle (i.e. completely suck) at them when it comes to work. And this year, with so much of my job intruding into my evenings and weekends with the never-ending needs of the kids, I’ve been even worse about drawing hard lines. But as my mental health plummeted and my anxiety sky-rocketed, I knew how important it was for me to truly step away.

I spent the first Saturday of the break grading the tests that came in overnight, posting answer keys to the assessment, creating and posting retests and answering questions. Then, I logged off and closed every single work-related window on my computer. Within an hour, I realized I forgot to disable notifications on my phone when, in rapid succession, I get the following messages:

“Mrs. Arends – I need to talk to you.”

“I want to… How do I do this?”

“Can you please answer me?”

“Hello???”

I turned off notifications and went for a trail run where I talked myself out of responding to the message thread (and secretly wondering how long it would be by the time I decided to respond).

The next day, my husband, the pups and I packed up and went to stay at a cabin in North Georgia for a few days. Despite the rain and the pain (more on that soon), it was glorious. My big morning commute was to the hot tub, where I enjoyed the sounds of the rain on the metal roof and indulgently read one of several books that I brought. After a real hike on the first day, we were relegated to exploring the local roads on subsequent days because of the downpours. We both remembered staying in that area before, so we enjoyed searching for the cabin we stayed in previously (we never found it, but that didn’t lessen the enjoyment of the hunt). The dogs were awesome and got to enjoy lots of time off-leash just being dogs, exploring and sniffing.

And even though we had great WI-FI, even though my husband had to spend the majority of one day working and even though I was feeling anxious about work, I never checked my work messages until we returned back home yesterday:)

The Lose

From January to July, I was doing so well with my career-change goals. I decided what I wanted to do, I committed significant time each week to study, I worked to silence the “You can’t do this” voice and I even navigated changes to my plan based on the fallout from COVID.

And then July happened.

It’s now been almost 10 weeks since I’ve done any coding or studied any math for my new career. There are a variety of factors, some more prevalent than others on any given day: available time, available brain-power and motivation. Even though this has been an agreed-upon plan, whenever my husband mentions something about this being my last year in the classroom, I get angry. Angry, because I again feel stuck.

I know that my mindset right now is the biggest thing keeping me stuck. It’s a story I’m telling myself and I even wonder if my current lack of motivation is my passive-aggressive subconscious way of recruiting evidence to support my narrative.

I’m scared to log in to the websites I was using to teach myself (I can’t even remember the name of the program I was last using right now; how on earth can I expect to remember how to write a for-loop???). I’m worried that if I don’t balance the demands of the school year with time off-computer that I won’t make it until May. But most of all, I’m afraid to try at this new thing and fail.

But I fired fear as my life coach when my first husband walked out of the door.

Growth is messy. Learning is non-linear. Change is scary.

And none of that means impossible.

The Dawning Realization

For the last three years, my lady-parts have hated me. There are a variety of reasons (I feel like with every ultrasound I have, another malady has been invited to the party). Basically, I’m just waiting for menopause to turn the lights off and send all of those uninvited guests away.

Most months, it’s hardly noticeable apart from a miserable 24 hours or so.

But some months, it flares, swelling my midsection until it’s hard to breath and turning my pelvis into some twisted art exhibit where screws repeatedly tighten metal cables strung across in random patterns.

And with this being my fall break, guess what kind of month it is:(

But I’m not going to whine about the pain.

I’m going to talk about how amazing my husband is and by extension, what I realized about my ex.

As a child-free married couple who has been very busy these past several weeks, we both went into this week with certain expectations about couple-time. When the flare-up began to build on the day we left, I grew increasingly frustrated and in denial (“I’m fine,” I kept insisting, as if I could speak it into existence). But my husband never got upset or disappointed (and he only had to scan my face to call BS on my “fine”). His only reaction has been concern for me. He clearly put my physical comfort above his desires.

It made me reflect back on a time in my early 20s when I had shingles in a very unfortunate location. My then-husband was attentive and nurturing, taking me to doctor’s appointments and fetching the ice and medication when I needed them. Yet, even though on the surface he was loving, he still clearly put his desires above my physical comfort. Which, in retrospect, was how he was in all areas – a great exterior hiding a rather dark and secret interior. Blech.

With all of the uncertainty in the world right now, I am beyond grateful that my first husband chose to leave. He is definitely not the one I want by my side when things are hard. In contrast, I now feel like my husband and I are a team. Even when one of us is struggling, we are strong together.

Focus On Where You Want to Be, Not Where You Fear Ending Up

Posted on September 20, 2020 by stilllearning2b

I just couldn’t seem to get it right.

My body was in the correct position. My muscles were contracted. But every time I tried to find my balance, I would wobble and fall back onto my feet.

“Maybe you just can’t do crow pose,” I told myself.

“Bullshit,” I replied.

For months, I kept trying. During one practice session, I grabbed a pillow off my couch, placed it on the floor in front of me and promptly nailed the pose. never even coming close to face-planting in the pillow.

Curious, I removed the pillow and tried again.

No bueno.

It was then I realized the role that pillow was playing. Because the pillow was uncomfortably close to my face, I craned my neck slightly and shifted my gaze forward. Without the pillow, I was looking down at the ground, which was exactly the place I feared ending up.

Focus on where you want to be, not where you fear ending up.

It seems so simple, doesn’t it? Yet, it’s far from easy.

We all have a tendency to put our focus – our energy – on those things that we fear.

And much like a new driver who instinctively steers into an adjacent lane when looking in the sideview mirror, we tend to move in the direction of our focus.

Where are you looking?

Normal Isn’t On the Menu

Posted on July 22, 2020March 6, 2024 by stilllearning2b

Normal Isn’t On the Menu

It’s a hard time to be a parent right now.

I can feel the trepidation and frustration in their frantic posts. They’re worried for their kids, emotionally and academically. It’s been a rough few months, having to balance work and childcare, trying to be a parent while also playing the heavy when it comes to schoolwork. They desperately want their kids back in school so that they can reconnect with their friends, not fall too far behind academically and have structure again. Yet they’re also scared. Unsure about the safety plans put forth and the ability of children to follow guidelines. They crave the normal fears and excitement that surround a new school year.

It’s a hard time to be a teacher right now.

We’ve struggled teaching into the void with emergency distance learning and we’ve been worried about the well-being of our students. We desperately want to get back into the classroom where we can verify that each child is okay and we can facilitate the energy and excitement and community that form around learning together. Yet we’re also unsure, trying to problem-solve how to build a sense of collaboration when students are distanced and masked while simultaneously working on developing virtual lessons. Underlying that is fear. Fear that we’re going to see our students get sick and our colleagues fall ill. We wish we we’re busy decorating our new rooms instead of trying to make them safer.

It’s a hard time to be a human right now.

Back in the spring, we all had a sense of, “Okay. If we do this for a couple months, we can then get back to normal.” And now we’re here. Months have passed and there is still no end in sight. We know we can’t lock down forever, but we’re struggling to figure out how to live in this new world. We’re all grieving the way things were just a few short months ago. We all want normal.

But normal isn’t on the menu.

I see so many people (myself included) fighting against that fact. Arguing that normal must be available, maybe it’s just hidden in the back stockroom. That if we just ask nicely enough – or scream loudly enough – that normal will be served.

As far as defining moments go, this has been an odd one. Often, these life-changing events are quite sudden, clearly delineating a before and after – the accident that takes a life, the DDay where you learn of an affair, the diagnosis that steals your health. With those, it’s clear that there is no returning back to way things were. They require a recalibration of normal.

But this one snuck up on us, allowing for plenty of denial along the way. If we can believe that this is overblown, we can get back to normal. Or, if we cherrypick our data, we can convince ourselves that normal is just around the corner. We place our faith in an election, a vaccine or a treatment. But those are not quick fixes, flipping the switch back to normal.

Because right now and for the foreseeable future, normal isn’t on the menu.

It’s time to explore what IS on the menu.

We all tend to veer towards what we know. It’s comfortable and we like to be comfortable. Part of what makes this so hard is that we feel like we have no control. We want to choose different, not have it forced down our gullet.

Yet we’re here. Hungry to live again. And until we accept that normal isn’t available, we won’t be able to partake of what still is on the table.

And just maybe, we’ll find that some of the new options are preferable to the old and that we choose to leave some of normal behind.

Living With Uncertainty

Posted on May 14, 2020May 14, 2020 by stilllearning2b

Like many (most? all?) of you, I’m struggling right now.

As a teacher, I’m used to a certain rhythm of the school year. And by now, I should be excited for summer, exhausted by the demands of the end of the school year and putting energy into finalizing plans for the next school year.

Instead, I’m sad about not being able to say goodbye in person, more blah than exhausted and the next school year is simply one big question mark.

I find myself increasingly distressed by the unknown of what’s coming. I keep reflecting back on the comfort (unappreciated at the time) of past years, when plans were in place and I could find peace in the surety of what was around the next corner.

But then I catch myself. Because those plans of past years were only certainties because I’m viewing them from the perspective of the future, where the scheduled events were carried out with only relatively small adjustments.

The truth is that uncertainty is always present, we simply hide it away beneath a veneer of imagined control, applied so that we don’t have to face the discomfort of admitting that we don’t have the ultimate say in what happens.

This year is no more or less uncertain than any other time. The outcomes are always in limbo and only seem inevitable once they occur.

Of course, the unknowns are more pronounced right now, like magma bubbling to the surface after a seismic event. It’s difficult to imagine what next week will look like, much less next month or next year. We are all being forced to drop our plans. In reaction, we’re grasping to control what we can – setting rules and boundaries for our families, calling out those who aren’t socially distancing the way we are and arguing against the ways our governments are handling the outbreak and the economic fallout.

It certainly FEELS different.

Because we become so accustomed to life unfolding in relatively predictable ways. And it’s only when it breaks open that we realize how that predictably is a story we tell ourselves so that we can sleep at night.

I keep thinking back to my summer 11 years ago. In a span of hours, I went from believing that I would never be apart from my then-husband to learning that everything we had together was a lie. Upon the discovery, I felt like I was in free fall, unable to trust anything. But in reality, the revelation of the duplicitous life wasn’t anything new, it simply uncovered what had always been there. I fought against that unknown for a time, craving the feeling of solid ground beneath my feet again. Yet it is was only when I stopped struggling to control every outcome that I was able to relax.

The lesson in all of this isn’t going to be found in finding a new way to try to control life. It’s in learning how to find acceptance that there is little outside ourselves that we can control and finding peace regardless.

Most days, I’m still struggling against this. But I’m finding moments when I can simply be in – and appreciate- today without undo concern for tomorrow.

Hope you all are well and are able to find your moments of peace.

This is hard. And also, in the words of Glennon Doyle, “We can do hard things.”

Lisa