I’m a mess this week

I have been a mess this week. On Monday, I accidentally deleted an assignment in Google Classroom *while* my students were working on it. On Tuesday, I left my house keys in the outside street-level gate when I got home after dark, after a staff meeting. Luckily our landlord’s son found the keys before some random person was able to take advantage of the opportunity to steal all our bikes, which are parked (but not locked) just inside the gate. Theft is rare in this city, but it has gotten sadly worse as Syrian refugees are being trafficked through Albania and abandoned here by terrible people promising them entrance to the EU (Albania is not an EU country).

But I didn’t realize I’d left the keys there until the next morning, and after a frantic search and then dashing off to school without them, I called the landlady and her son took the phone and told me he had them.

So I got them back, but Gimli was mad at me and so I felt wretched. It’s like another episode in a series of me losing things – remember the raincoat incident? All I could think about all day was what a loser I am.

When I got home yesterday afternoon I did the grocery shopping, washed the fruit, started dinner, then gave in and crashed for a 2-hour nap while Gimli finished cooking. I have been so completely and unutterably tired.

I think I’m more tired than when I was in grad school having babies. I didn’t think that was possible.

I know that fatigue is at the root of all this forgetting and losing things and making mistakes. I’m terrified of what mistake I might make next.

I realized last night that a good percentage of my fatigue could be from the dampening effect that the masks have on being able to get non-verbal student feedback during class. Seeing only their eyes dampens my ability to “read the room” and I don’t think I have been conscious of that. I think my brain is working harder to interpret facial expressions based on eyes only, and I feel a much higher degree of uncertainty about what students may be thinking/feeling when I can’t see the whole face. So I think I’m going to move class outside as often as I can, weather and tech needs permitting – especially the smaller classes where I only have 3 or 5 students. I imagine everyone is experiencing this brain-drain to some degree, I guess I just never thought much before about how much I use that facial-expression feedback during class sessions to calibrate what I’m doing.

I have a lot of students who are on the edge as well. The Covid stress is like an additional layer on top of all the other things they are dealing with – anxiety, panic attacks, perfectionism, recovering from past abuse, coming to terms with sexuality that doesn’t fit the conservative Christian mold of our school – it’s A LOT.  One week I had 3 students in crisis of various kinds. On a typical day, 8-10 students are out for quarantine if they were exposed, or isolation if they actually tested positive. Our high school student body is around 40. So basically 20-25% of the students are missing class or virtual, every day. And I’ve made some big mistakes in the past 2 weeks, misreading a student who was struggling with intense anxiety, seeing them as insolent instead of sending out an SOS.

I guess I need to extend the same grace that I do to them, to myself. It’s ok not to be ok. Look for the helpers. Learn from my mistakes.

Darkest hour and all that

It could be that election anxiety + Covid anxiety is going to help me reach my fitness goals. I’ve worked out twice this week already, needing somewhere to put all that jittery energy and calm my body with the flood of endorphins and all that – but didn’t overdo it. Yes I’m still giving in to the occasional stress eating but biking to and from school gives me such a great feeling that I haven’t spiralled down that route too much.

During breaks in the school day I find myself watching the numbers ticking in super slow motion on the electoral map and watching the bar graphs rise on the World meter Covid map for Albania and it’s such a weird mental place to be. Hope and fear and doom and anxiety.

I am thankful that I have a lot of work to do for school, so much grading and planning and the high-energy rush of teaching. I’m thankful for a healthy community at the staff level, it makes it so worth it to be working here. I’m thankful for the persimmons dropping from the tree in the schoolyard, perfect coral-orange globes of sweet fruit nestled in my hand. I’m grateful for these things that fill my days and keep me from the twittering anxiety of the doom scroll.

Peace, love, hope.