Posts Tagged → Mental health

Hop aboard the struggle bus our rates are reasonable and our seats are clean hey what do you mean you don’t have exact change f*ck

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe that I’d be better at handling loss than I am. Maybe to believe the mid-west adage that there’s nothing more curative than WORK WORK WORK to take your mind off things.

Whatever the case, I have been struggling. I feel like I’m doing a terrible job at school and that just messes with my head. I can’t stand being somebody who isn’t doing their best, and there is no doubt that my classes are being affected by what I’m going through.

I’ve missed more days of work these last few months than I have at any job ever, which means I’ve had substitute teachers, which means that all of my classes are behind in their coursework. It’s nothing insurmountable, and I don’t mean to say a single bad word against substitute teachers — they are vital and God bless every one of them — but the fact is that not as much work gets done when the class has a sub.

Lots of students, even the most studious students, tend to slack off. I don’t get upset at students for it — what am I going to do? Get mad at someone for not wanting to read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?”

Plus, I often feel like a significant portion of my brain has melted. I am just … dumber than I used to be. My memory is bad. I have trouble focusing. Little things that I’d normally remember slip through the cracks. (Cue a panicked student yelling, “Did you grade my paper yet!?”)

Between this paragraph and the last paragraph I typed, I just spent about 10 minutes trying to get the cat to sit on the heated pad we got her. Unsuccessfully.

Sigh.

The solution here is obvious: Time.

Of course that’s the answer. I have to be gracious with myself and give myself time. All I do by beating myself up like this is giving myself a proverbial black eye. All I have to do is wait. Breathe. Exist. “This, too, shall pass.”

I hate it, though. Until it does pass, I hate every last minute of it.

The New Normal and words that I probably won’t say at my father’s funeral

My dad died early in the morning on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026.

What had started out as a trip to the E.R. for abdominal pain spiraled into more and more problems until, eventually, the cancer was just too much for his system.

It feels too personal to go into details, but my memory hasn’t been … working the way it should for the past few days. All of us were by Dad’s side right up until the end and everything has turned into this blur of nurses and doctors and hospice reps and phone calls and late-night drives and texts and chicken fingers from the hospital cafeteria and, at some point, my brain said, “You know what? I need a break. We’re going to shut down some non-essential functions.”

And so, my writing about all this is a way of helping my poor brain keep track of events.

(I can’t believe I’m still doing doodles for a post like this)

My brother has told me a couple times in the last few days that he doesn’t think it’s really “hit” him yet.

I’ve responded both times by asking, “How do you think it’ll ‘hit’ you? Like, what do you anticipate will happen when it does?” Because that’s what a therapist would ask — it’s a leading question to help you understand that you’re not tied to any tracks; there’s no steam train about to run you down. You’re having a trauma response that makes you feel like there’s an immanent threat, but really there isn’t.

(Today’s armchair psychologist’s report is brought to you by: Years and Years of Teaching Seminars!)

My brother says he doesn’t know what it’ll feel like when it hits. I think the whole “hitting” thing is a myth.

Or, I should say, I’m not as worried about getting hit as I am worried about “The New Normal.”

What I think happens when you go through a traumatic event like this is your brain slowly starts incorporating new, bad habits that result from the trauma and/or getting rid of good habits you may have once had. If you’re not careful, those temporary habits become actual full-time habits when maybe you don’t want them to and all those good habits you once had are gone forever.

Like, right now, there’s no way I’d be able to go out and do fun stuff. I absolutely don’t feel like it. If a friend called and asked, “Hey, do you want to play board games or go to a concert or see a movie?” I’d probably respond (internally) with, “No way! I’m too sad to do that. I want to stay home and watch A Relaxing Walk Across Skyrim and take a nap for the fourth time today.”

That’s a big, obvious example and I’m sure you think, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense, I can see that.” But how many tiny and seemingly-innocuous habits are there that I’m losing or gaining?

For example, at one point in the last week (although the specific day escapes me), I realized that I hadn’t brushed my teeth in two days. I had similar realizations at other times along the lines of, I haven’t had any food since breakfast yesterday. And When was the last time I showered? Christ. I don’t remember.

And mental habits! I don’t even know how many times I’ve told myself, “I am not going to think about that right now. I’m just not even going to consider that particular problem right f*cking now.” It could be a bill or an email I have to send or the question of what to with my father’s collection of erotic sculptures from across 6 continents. I will just shove it aside like a passenger on a Japanese train, without so much as a care, and continue on about the business of being miserable.

That’s what I think happens to you when someone you love dies; They leave a hole, and a big part of that hole are the habits — physical and mental — that keep you happy and healthy. Your sadness becomes a part of “The New Normal” and you’re left just being … worse.

Sigh. This is not at all what I intended to blog about when I started.

Whatever. I’m still here. Still typing.

The thing to remember is that all you can really do is anything at all

I’ve had these moments for the past several days where my body will suddenly stop whatever it’s doing, as if put on pause, and an incredible and inescapable sense of ennui will wash over me like a layer of quick-dry cement. I’ll be just walking down the hallway with a cup of tea on my way to 2nd block when, WHAM, it hits. In this moment of intense hopelessness, my thoughts will turn incredibly dark and I’ll feel this sense of, “What’s the use of any of this? Why am I — why are WE doing any of this nonsense?”

It lasts for a fraction of a second; anybody watching would probably think I’d just had to do a sneaky, stutter-step fart or something, and then I’m back to normal, just walking along like everything is fine.

I don’t know why, but I feel a little guilty about it. Is that dumb? I think it is. It’s a stupid thing to feel guilty about and I’m aware of that, but I imagine what Dad is going through and can’t help but think he’s the one who is in the thick of it. I should focus on how to be helpful rather than dwelling on how bad I feel.

I talked to my brother about it quite a bit yesterday and I said something to the effect of, “I’m really starting to think that the only thing I can do — the only thing any of us can do — is to find happiness in little moments. Stop thinking about the past, stop thinking about the future, take a cue from all of those eastern philosophers and just live in the now.”

Trite? Maybe. Cliche? One-hundred percent. But it’s one way that I’m able to find some sort of comfort. Plus, in a new-agey, hippy sort of way, I really do think that Taoism has the right idea with entering a “flow state.” Spending too much time dwelling on the future is missing the point entirely.

Anywho, I was telling my brother this in the context of sharing this perhaps-too-on-the-nose clip from the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood:

(The part I’m talking about is at the end. “..to die is to be human, and anything human is mentionable. Anything mentionable is manageable. Anything mentionable is manageable.”)

I’ve also (surprise!) been thinking a lot about how uncomfortable most of us feel talking about death. I’ve been able to talk frankly about it with a few people in my life — Sarah, my brothers, a few friends — and it really does seem helpful.

Just keep moving, keep busy, keep talking. One foot in front of the other.

Thanks I hope so too

My dad is sick and I am a mess.

He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a few weeks ago after a hurried trip to the ER when he started having difficulty swallowing. Scans revealed a tumor in his esophagus that prevented food from going down; more scans revealed that the cancer had spread. The prognosis is bad. Stage 4, likely inoperable.

I hate hate hate talking about it. Thinking about it is hard enough — I try to dumb myself down with substances in my off time specifically so I don’t have to dwell on it. Is this healthy? Not one bit. But I’m doing what I can to get through the day. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself.

I’m at a point where I’ve started letting people at work know about what’s going on. Students are asking me about it; I missed school yesterday so I could go sit with dad while he waits to get a feeding tube put in, and today, first thing, I was met by a bunch of, “Where were you yesterday, teach?” (Students don’t really call me “teach,” but I’m hesitant to put my real name on here. I’d hate for my solitary reader to know who I am.)

This is what I assume you look like.

I don’t lie to students about stuff like this. It might be easier if I did, but this sort of thing is a part of life and there’s no use hiding from it. Plus, it isn’t as if people won’t notice something bad is happening. I probably look awful. Still, I won’t go advertising it because, again, I hate hate hate discussing it. When I have to talk about it, I try to sound as positive as I can to keep classes from turning into some kind of morose pity party.

So I smile and say, “Oh, my dad’s in the hospital and I wanted to drive down to be with him.” The conversation continues for a bit and, invariably, students say to me something like, “I hope your dad gets better soon!”

As much as I want to be truthful, I can’t exactly tell them that this isn’t the sort of cancer that gets cured. I pretend to be positive and, while it’s not technically the truth, I just tell students, “Thanks. I hope so, too!” in the most upbeat tone I can muster. It’s better than saying, “I don’t feel hope anymore,” which (unfortunately) is where my head is currently at.

Putting on this act is exhausting and It. Never. Stops. It’s so tiring that there are days when I don’t know if I can actually handle it. My body, like a house consumed by flames, will crumble in on itself in a pile of ash and smoke. “That was a nice old building,” couples will say as the amble by.

How do people do this? I have come remarkably close to losing it this week, and it’s only exacerbated by knowing that worse things are yet to come. Every time my phone rings or I get a text notification I immediately think, “This is it.” A memory will randomly make me feel like crying. I have to excuse myself from class every now and then just to get a moment alone to breathe.

Like a nandle in the nind

I downloaded a little book called The Trauma of Burnout by Dr. Claire Plumbly the other day, hoping (as I always do) to find more information about why I’m having trouble sleeping. And, hopefully, to find ways to improve the situation.

Am I actually burnt out? I don’t know. Being burnt out is more of a spectrum than it is a binary condition (“syndrome,” technically), so I suppose most people who’ve been teaching for a while are. Both mentally and physically, teaching is a tough gig. If you want to see how tough it is, take a little trip over to r/teaching on Reddit and see the horror stories that get posted there on a daily basis.

Plumbly’s book reads like she’s been following me around taking notes about how my day is going, which should make me upset but actually makes me a little relieved. It’s just nice to have a clearer idea of why I feel so crummy and to have some practical steps I can take to fix the issues.

For example, this morning, one of the first things I did after waking up was splash a bunch of cold water on my face, which apparently has some physiological benefits. Did it feel great? No. But my morning did go a little smoother than usual, so that’s a win.

I’ve never been huge on self-help books, but at this point I’ll take advice from anywhere I can get it.

Home again home again jiggity jig

I was able to keep some food down yesterday (toast, some soup), but I’m still nowhere near back to “normal,” so I’ve decided to take another sick day. I still feel a bit feverish and just so…exhausted that I don’t think I’d be much use in front of a classroom.

I’m a little guilty about it. I always have felt guilty when I’m sick — any time I take day (or two) off of work, my mid-western brain starts beating itself up. “You’re just being lazy,” is a phrase that was always thrown around the house when I grew up, and now it lives rent-free in my head.

People always say your health comes first, but my mind is at odds with that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a person wanting to work a lot — if anything, I think I’d rather err on the side of being too hard-working — but that means I’ll feel bad about it whenever I can’t work.

And that’s a stupid way to feel. Like a boxer climbing into the ring alone, punching himself in the face, and then complaining to the referee that the rules of the match aren’t fair.

Sarah and I put a humidifier in our bedroom this winter and, holy cow, all the plants over by the window are absolutely thriving. Apparently they like a little moisture in the air.

Sarah’s taken charge of managing all the plants in the house, and she’s been doing an amazing job with them. Her policy so far has been “The more the merrier!” and it is really working. Nearly every available window has at least one plant nearby. Most windows have more. The biggest problem we’ve had is that a lot of them seem to be outgrowing the pots they’re in, which isn’t really much of an issue when you think about it.

I’ve only noticed these hearty greens because I’ve spent a lot of time in bed over the last 24 hours. Take pleasure in the small things, I suppose.

I didn’t read much yesterday, but I finished A Court of Thorns and Roses this morning and…I’m not quite sure how to feel about it. The book is fine. But that’s about it; there’s nothing really amazing going on.

The characters are a little bland, the prose is a little pedestrian, and there isn’t much happening plot-wise that really turns my crank. I think Sarah J. Maaaaas is steering everything toward a love triangle in the next book, which isn’t exactly ground-breaking.

It’s like a scoop of vanilla ice cream as far as fantasy books go. It’s not even French vanilla; just the plain stuff you get in a gallon-sized tub at the local IGA.

I’m going to give the next book a try — A Court of Mist and Fury — but I’ll have to see if things pick up a bit before committing to the whole series.

I should also keep in mind that I’m sick and I’m probably not going to *love* whatever I read right now.

Oh well.

Troublesome times & behavioral defiance

At the end of last semester — just before winter break — a troublesome student of mine handed in his final assignment and told me, “I’d better pass this class. Otherwise, I’m coming for you.”

I didn’t feel particularly threatened by it. This student talks a lot, but they’ve never been violent, so I didn’t think there was any substance to what they’d said. However, you don’t get to threaten people.

So, I took the student into the hallway and explained it to them. “You can’t talk to teachers — or anybody, I guess — like you just did. Making threats like that is very serious.” I sent the student to his admin and wrote them up.

All of this happened literally 15 minutes before school got out for winter break.

I took some time before leaving for the day to speak to administration about it; I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for threats, so I wanted to cover my bases and make sure I’d informed everyone who needed to be informed. Admin told me not to worry — that particular student was being moved out of my class. So, I thought, problem solved. Hopefully the student will be put someplace where they can find success.

Except, of course, that wasn’t the end of it. That student simply got moved from one class of mine to another class of mine. So, I’m still teaching them, but at a different time of day.

(Thanks for the help, admin! Shuffling students around like troublesome Catholic priests is sure to solve this issue.)

Yesterday, this student got in some more trouble. They were late for class without a pass, lied about where they’d been, lied about talking to an admin when told to get a tardy slip, lied about having their phone, lied about using their phone while they were supposed to be reading, and refused to stop using their phone multiple times. All of this was within the first 10 minutes of class.

I called for security to get an escort to take this student to the administration office. The student said, “I don’t need an escort. I can walk to the admin office by myself.”

I said, “I’d like to believe you, but you’ve lied pretty consistently today and you have been caught walking the halls several times this week. We’ll just wait for an escort to make sure you get where you need to be.”

Only no escort showed up. We waited for over an hour, but … nothing. The student just sat at his desk. I carried on with the lesson and emailed admin to ask what to do in this situation but heard nothing in response before the end of class.

It is incredibly disheartening. I’m not mad at the student, just as I’m not mad at admin for keeping this student in my class, just as I’m not mad about no security escort showing up.

The cold, hard truth of it is that security was probably busy with other problems and didn’t have time to send an escort. Admin probably kept the student in my class because there was no other choice with scheduling — every student takes English and there are only so many English classes. And this student has problems of their own — I’m sure their propensity for lying is learned behavior that has helped the student in the past. They need more help; they need a classroom with fewer students and a different structure.

This is the kind of student who, if I asked them, “Please write your name on this piece of paper,” would fail the task. Not because they can’t write or anything; it’s more likely something along the lines of behavioral defiance. The student opposes anyone in authority “just because.”

I wish I could say I didn’t have other students with the same issue, but it’s actually pretty common.

Who would’ve thought a country like ours would produce so many people with behavioral disorders?

Dumb & dumber & grades

I swear I’m getting dumber and dumber as the days go on. It’s like my brain is turning into a dried up husk.

It’s not that I’m forgetting how to speak or do math (although I feel like I’m a lot slower at both of those things than I was, oh, five years ago) but that I’m feeling a lot more scatter-brained. I am all over the place.

You know that feeling you get when you walk into a room and forget why you’re there? That’s called an event boundary, and it basically happens because your mind starts a new “instance” of itself when you are in a new context. When you’re in the kitchen, kitchen-you can be perfectly aware that kitchen-you needs kitchen-your airpods, but when kitchen-you goes into the bedroom to get them, a whole new you pops up! It’s Bedroom-you, who doesn’t run the same set of processes. Bedroom-you isn’t thinking about how kitchen-you’d like to listen to a podcast while kitchen-you’re cooking; bedroom-you wonders if bedroom-your sweatpants are in the dryer or in the hamper. 

Hence, it feels like you “forgot” why you went into the bedroom just because your mind switched modes. Go back to the kitchen and, odds are, you’ll remember what you were after.

It’s like a crappy magic trick! You’re the one with the saw and you’re the one getting cut in half!

I left my kindle at work so I can’t draw pictures

See? I can remember that stuff perfectly well, but I’ll still fall victim to this psychological treachery.

The worst part of it is the way my attention span has been impacted. It’s not that I’ll be sitting and reading a book and then go, “I’m bored. I should do something else.” But I will sit down to read and find myself suddenly standing up to go do something else when I don’t even realize I’m doing it. Only when I’m elbow deep in dirty dishes will I go, “Oh, yeah, I was reading.”

This is just evidence

Anywho. I’m guessing that the problem is related to my sleep, which makes sense, since I just got done blogging about how bad my sleep patterns are.

It’s tough to decide what to do about this. Except, of course, have a cup of tea.

Of my inevitable mental decline

In other news, after a second round of grades put in the gradebook, hey, look at that, the average grades in most classes are normalizing. There aren’t nearly as many failing grades as the administration was worried about. Why? Because a student’s overall performance is no longer tied to one or two data entries.

It’s almost as if freaking out about off-track data during the first few weeks of school was a total waste of time. 

Who knew?

News flashes & routine procedures

I’ve been trying to set a bit more of a morning routine since school started back up in January. It’s always been tough for me because I’m not the most consistent sleeper in the world. On some mornings (like today), I’m able to hop right up at 5:00 AM and start doing things. On other mornings, I’m completely dragging ass and hit the snooze until 5:45. The problem is that I wake up randomly in the night and often struggle to get back to sleep, so there’s no telling if/when I’ll be well-rested.

I’m not sure what to do about that. I’ve tried to improve my sleep hygiene, but I don’t think I did that correctly (I’m still not sure what “sleep hygiene” means, exactly). I’ve tried medicine, but I’m not a huge fan of feeling super groggy. I’ve tried drinking more water, exercising, meditation, and most recently a humidifier. I’m still wildly inconsistent with my sleep.

The other problem with my morning routine is the news. I enjoy turning on the news first thing in the morning so I can see what’s going on in the country and world — my parents used to do this and I’ve always thought it was a “normal” part of getting up, but all of the news sources I can fund just … suck. It’s all either 30-minutes of “What is Donald Trump talking about today?” and/or segments on the most divisive subjects using the worst “reporting” they can muster. ABC. CBS. NBC. BBC. Their reporting is all garbage.

Not only is it bad to start your day with such rampant negativity — these bozos can’t help but spin every little thing to preserve the status quo that earns them their bread, which means treating disturbing, murderous content like it’s “just another day!” — but it’s wildly inaccurate and full of nonsense that isn’t news.

(Hill I’ll die on: Reporting on polling data doesn’t qualify as “news.” It’s a major corporation telling us how to think.)

I know I often seem flippant about current events, what with my funny little pics like this one:

But everything happening in Minnesota is so horrible I’m not sure what else to do about it. There’s video — multiple videos — of a guy being held down and executed. The Trump administration openly lies about it while the news shows the videos, and all the news will say is, “Well, shucks, fellas, it looks like we’re getting conflicting reports of what happened!” when what they should say is, “Administration officials are lying to your face.”

The whole thing does make me want to share this George Orwell line from 1984:

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

I’ve tried watching some Al Jazeera news in the morning to get more of a world perspective, but that station’s reporting is like a who’s who of starving nations, which is important but not the sort of thing I want to ponder over my morning tea. So, maybe my problem is more that the world is awful and I don’t want to hear about it at 5:00 AM.

It’s still cold and a lot of the country is buried under ice. (That sentence is true both literally and figuratively.)

Tick tock on a clock dj blow up my speakers

I downloaded TikTok a while ago (I’m awfully late to the party; sue me) mostly because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I’ve found it hard to interact with students on a personal level if I don’t spend some time checking out what they’re into. You’ve got to watch the shows, listen to the music, play the dumb phone games (and, yes, download what is possibly the most insidious app ever devised).

I’m not saying you’ve got to become all about those things — five minutes with Block Blast, I think, is more than enough — but you should spend enough time with them that, when you see little Timmy trying to sneakily make a little square jump over some spikes under his desk, you can know which particular culprit has stolen Timmy’s attention.

Of all the apps that students regularly use, TikTok is far and away the worst. Good lord it is addicting. The more I use it, the more I come to think that it is both reckless and stupid to allow teenagers unrestricted access to apps like TikTok. We’re creating an army of little dopamine mind-slaves. Australia has the right idea in banning that shit.

(Sure, that “mind-slave” bit is an exaggeration — I’m a writer, I exaggerate perpetually — but you’d be hard-pressed to find a single long-term benefit provided by TikTok.)

Sure, but what news is being delivered at laser-fast, fiberoptic speeds? What, exactly, is the content being bounced around satellites and into my little glass rectangle? That’s the problem I have with this whole thing. I ask myself the same question I ask when I watch cable news: “Who decided that I should see this?”

For cable news, the answer is easy: It’s decided by corporations who will show you whatever “news” they think will most benefit their bottom line. (As evidenced by cable news shows actually turning into the home shopping network.)

For TikTok (and YouTube and Instagram…), we’ve instead got something people are oddly okay with calling “The Algorithm.” (What the fuck kind of sideways-ass timeline are we in where our “information feeds” are controlled by “The Algorithm” and we’re all like, “Yeah, that’s fine, Imma go to Starbucks.”)

The scary part (well…one of the scary parts) is that nobody, not even the creators, can fully tell you how the goddamned algorithm works. It’s complicated as all hell and tracks so much of your information it is absolutely astounding.

So, basically, we don’t know how or why we’re being fed the stuff we see on these apps. We don’t know if we’re all seeing the same stuff, or if we’re all in little bubbles being spoon-fed what The Algorithm wants us to see. (In some cases we’re being shown different angles of the same event — actually spinning reality in real time, creating different “versions of the truth.”)

I mean. This all sounds a bit like I need to tighten my tin foil hat, but… How many more times this morning do I need to see a guy in Minnesota being murdered? How many more times do I need to zoom in on that shooting with super slo-mo?

And how many times does every teenager in the country need to rewatch it? No, really, what’s a healthy number? What do you think? They say you have to experience something 33 times for it to enter long term memory, which seems a little high to me, so maybe we can start there and work toward a reasonable number? /s

Shit’s bananas.