Is everyone else fine?!
So it's been a while. I missed y'all. And I'm sure you missed my ridiculous rants about whatever is at the top of my mind currently. Maybe you haven't. To that I say: feel free to delete, I won't be offended.
For those of you I haven't met yet, I'm your friendly neighborhood school psychologist, and I periodically write random blog posts on topics adjacent to mental health. I care about you all as people, not just as educators or parents, and sometimes I think it's helpful to get an email in your inbox that's about YOU, not the incredible job you all do on a daily basis.
In some ways the world is so much better than it was the last time I was writing one of these emails, while sitting on my couch, wearing the same pair of sweatpants I'd been wearing for the last 4 (maaaaybe 47) days. And in some ways, it is exactly the same amount of hard, with 300% less grace and understanding that everything is still, in fact, on fire. The aggressive insistence that things are allegedly "so much better" while the reality is that things are "a little bit better, but mostly a different flavor of terrible" is kind of starting to wear on me. I'm tired y'all. And I have run out of so many things (the motivation to "people", clean masks, Netflix shows to watch, words or even the willingness to describe my general state of being at any point in time).
I was listening to the We Can Do Hard Things podcast (which is my favorite podcast and if you want more of the same flavor of #realtalk as my emails, but SO MUCH BETTER, you might want to give it a listen). And Glennon mentioned this crazy obvious thing that I had never thought about, and am going to share with you all now.
When kids fall or hurt themselves, what is the very first thing we say to them? "You're fine." When they cry or have a hard day or are upset, we tell them they are fine. Whenever kids experience a hard thing, we immediately rush to tell them they are fine.
What does that teach them? That when you are hurt, the thing you are supposed to tell others is that you're "fine." You are supposed to ignore the very real feeling and experience you are having, because an adult you trust has labeled that experience "fine." "Fine" becomes ironically synonymous with "not fine." So is it any wonder that, as adults, we go around insisting we are fine all the time, when we are not, in fact, at all fine.
WE ARE NOT FINE.
No one is fine. Not one single one of us is fine. And you know what? No one SHOULD be. And no one HAS to be.
I don't have any actual offering for you or suggestion about what to to with this information. But I think the acknowledgement that we have all just been white knuckling our way through a societal natural disaster is kind of important. And I think maybe we might all feel a little bit better if we stopped trying to convince ourselves that ANY of this is "fine."
What a pep talk, right? Seriously though, go forth, and be not fine. I'm with you 🙂
