A Meditative Moment

It’s been… quite a year.

My husband thinks I’m experiencing some degree of secondary trauma, which seems plausible to me.

Aside from the pandemic, and the constant low-grade anxiety that produces, in July I accompanied my friend through her family getting violently evicted from their home of 30 years. I have been accompanying a student who is experiencing pretty acute mental health crises on a regular basis, who came out to me as trans this fall, in a school and family context that is pretty hostile to LGBTQ identities. All year long I have been emotionally supporting another friend through a trans-continental move and divorce. And then there’s the shared collective trauma in my passport country due to an autocratic and abusive head of state, the whole election season was incredibly traumatic – and we’re still not out of the woods there yet.

Yeah, it’s a lot to carry.

My one new year’s resolution this year is less Twitter, more meditation. I’m running on empty and staring down the barrel of the second semester, wondering how I’ll survive mentally and emotionally. I mean, I’m functioning, and doing pretty well all things considered, but as soon as school got out for the holidays I pretty much collapsed. This week I started working on stuff for January and after a couple of hours I just have to take a nap. So, energy is kind of bottomed out.

I spend and spend and spend myself, so I have to find more ways and means to recharge.

How are you doing?

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.

Balance

I realize that I come here to vent, and this blog becomes a repository of a lot of negativity. That means I feel freer to put aside those difficult and heavy emotions, to walk more lightly through the day, but as a record it tends to slant downward.

Today is a beautiful day. The sun is out and it feels so good on my skin. The mountains are glorious shades of blue and green, sparkling after the heavy rains of the past week.

The bike ride to school was smooth, smooth, smooth.

piled higher and deeper

I’m feeling more anxious than usual today, even though yesterday I felt quite mellow and content during our weekly Zoom chat with my in-laws. Over the weekend I processed a lot of thoughts and feelings about a couple of my students who are sending off SOS signals of different kinds, and had come to some new insights about how to help them more effectively and so was moving towards Monday with a sense of having a good plan.

But then this morning I lost my raincoat. Or, better said, last week Wednesday (I think) I lost track of my raincoat. I spent several days thinking I had left it at school but today was the first time I really needed it, and when I got to school this morning, didn’t find it where I thought it was. I have searched all over and it’s nowhere to be found. It was new, too, and a bit expensive, so I’m very unhappy with myself.

It could be at home, although I didn’t find it there either, or someone could have taken it home from school in these past days. But that thought makes me really sad because access to the building is so restricted that it would have had to have been one of the students or staff and either of those options makes me really sad.

Two teachers are out sick today, and four students, as far as I know none of them have Covid, but it means that we are stretched past the breaking point for staffing today. It’s getting so hard to deliver quality education right now and that’s bumming me out as well.

So I’m fretting about my “troubled” students, fixating on the missing raincoat, and scrambling to figure out where I can possibly pitch in to help cover for the absent teachers. The thing is, I can’t. I’m already doing all I can.

Surviving

So far, we’re surviving. I don’t know when my generalized anxiety about the world has ever felt so warranted.

One bright light in my life has been my Harry Potter and the Sacred Text virtual “local” group, the European Floo Network, that meets weekly on Zoom to take a deep dive into the HP books and use them to make meaning in our lives. Some members have had to distance themselves from anything JKR related, but most of us have found a way to engage with the texts despite the author. This past month we did a gift exchange, mailing each other packages “Secret Santa” style. I knit a light blue hat with an owl cable-stitch pattern for our moderator who, as organizer for the exchange, opted out of participating. It was very sweet how happy she was to get it, and an almost surreal moment to see this fabric that had emerged from my hands appear on the screen as she put it on.

Overall I’m just very very tired. And it’s only the fourth week of school.

Turtle Mode

I slept 10 hours last night and woke up in a fog. There is rain in the forecast for Wednesday. My plan all summer has been to send the kids in a taxi to school on rainy days, because according to my calculations we’ll still recoup the cost of the bikes even if we only use them 60 days this school year.

My husband, it turns out, has other ideas. We coordinate with two other families for getting to school. One family walks, the other bikes. Because of work schedules, Gimli and I have picked up most of the accompaniment duties. I take Oz and go with the bikers, he takes Illyria and goes with the walkers in the a.m. One of the other moms picks up the walkers in the afternoon. They do take a bus part of the way back; it’s not too full mid-afternoon coming into the center of town, so I’ve been ok with it.

Gimli says it’s flaunting our somewhat higher income if we send our kids to school in a taxi when the other families walk and bike even in the rain. So we had a big fight about it this morning and I retired to my bed in tears.

Really, though, for me, it’s about fear. My boy has been biking with me and two other kids, but I don’t want him biking in the rain. I am overwhelmed with terror just to think about it.

On Friday, our schedules are weird and it was awkward to coordinate between bikers and walkers, and so one kid who normally bikes with me ended up coming home with the walkers. I was re-organizing all the schedules in the middle of the school day and it slipped my mind that a) the walkers take the bus part of the way home, and b) the mom of the bikers is adamantly opposed to using the bus due to the risk of Covid. I’m sorry if this is confusing. All these logistics are confusing to me too. Anyway, the mom was livid when she found out her kid had been on the bus.

We worked it out but I still feel wretched. Same kid fell off the bike one day last week and face-planted on the asphalt. No serious injury but it ratcheted up my anxiety and I also felt wretched about that too. The responsibility for other people’s kids is wearing on me a lot.

When I think of my kids taking the taxi, I just feel this sense of relief. It feels like they’re safe there. For that mile and a half to school, for the duration of those 15 minutes in a cushioned seat, peering out like turtles from a shell, they are safe.

I know that’s not entirely true. I know accidents happen and nothing is ever truly safe. But I don’t worry about them, for those 15 minutes. I don’t worry.

What day is it?

Oh dear; I wrote on the 11th that “School starts in person tomorrow,” but what I meant was Monday the 14th. Not Saturday the 12th.

On Wednesday (yesterday?) I wrote in an email that “we are in our first week of in-person school,” then I thought no, it must be longer than that. Deleted “first” and wrote in “second.” Then thought again no, yesterday was Tuesday and that was our second day biking. So no, first week. Third day. It felt like a month.

All the news is overwhelming. And it’s here, too, in this tiny little country, which is considered such a backwater by Europe that it’s where Voldemort fled to hide after failing to kill Harry. Two nights ago the smell of wood smoke filled the air, and we went out on our balcony after dark to see the fires burning on the mountains above the city. We came back inside to hear a booming sound, then read in the news the next day that a car bomb had detonated a block from where my son’s best friend lives.

I grew up in a country plagued by car bombs, although that was political; this is mafia business. I want to move to New Zealand.

Til We Have Faces

School starts in person tomorrow, face to face, for our school and all Albanian public schools. Some private school have been operating already, and the Ministry of Education has given all of us strict guidelines for distancing, masking, and screening which we have been rehearsing and building into school structures and policies diligently for the past two weeks.

I see the admin at our school, and help them as much as I can; I am glad not to be in that position myself but I know what it feels like. This current situation reminds me acutely of our time in Colombia: the constant daily cycles of risk assessment and mitigation, looking after a diverse and dispersed international team, the constantly changing parameters and contingencies shifting all the time. As an international community, the crises multiply and become layered as we all watch our passport countries from afar and the sense of helplessness increases.

We feel responsible for things that are beyond our control.

Signs, measuring tape, e-mails, touchless thermometers, a proliferation of hand sanitizer. Battling traffic that is already crazy on the way to school. At the end of class yesterday, checking for understanding, but they only had questions:

“Is it true that we aren’t going to be allowed to eat at school?”

“Not indoors. Only outside.”

“What if someone faints from wearing a mask?”

“Then the teacher will administer first aid, and take you to the front porch, which counts as outdoors, to lie down.”

It’s my job now to have the answers to these questions. We just have no way to know what is actually going to happen this year. We never have, we just thought we did.

***

ETA – I thought I was fine, excited and happy even, but now that it’s about to be real I am scared spitless. Irrationally, unmistakably terrified.

School is underway

We have begun school online this year, with a plan to switch to face-to-face on September 14 – the same day that Albanian schools will launch. All summer, I watched workmen refreshing the paint on the school building next to our house (a “Nëntvjeçare,” or 9-year school which is the basic guaranteed education level in Albania). It’s an old building, known as “The Red School,” because of the color – not necessarily any Communist affiliation although that would have been a given at the time when the school was built. Anyway, I figured when I saw them sprucing it up that the plan would be to return to school face to face in the fall.

I just deleted a long explanation about ministry of education requirements in Albania because I was even boring myself! The long and short of it is that this is where I am right now – in an empty second-floor classroom, facing an open window and maskless. The day is warm, but not as scorching as it has been this past month. I can see a glimpse of the mountains out the window. The chairs and desks behind me are spaced a careful 1.5 m apart, but there isn’t quite enough space for the teacher to stand at the front a full 2m from the nearest student, so we are going to have to do something about that before the 14th. This morning I taught two 90-minute classes online. A few of my colleagues are in the other part of the building, but most are teaching from home. Still there is coffee in the pot and the requisite temp check and screening every morning when we come in.

So I’m hoping to find the odd hour here or there to work on my passion projects, the memoir (now conceptualized as auto-ethnography) and a fantasy story for young readers.

Meanwhile, we are severely short-handed as an admin staff member had to leave the country for a non-COVID medical emergency and we’re scrambling to redistribute his workload among those of us here. It looks like I’ll be picking up Student Council advising and a few more study halls and lunch duty supervision days… but what the heck. At least today I have time to write.