As we all get ready to say good-bye to the chaos that was 2020, I can’t help but sit back and reflect on everything that happened this year. What a rollercoaster it has been!
I went into the year with such high hopes. I finished 2019 with a solo trip to my favorite city to reflect and recharge. I was finally at a place mentally where I wasn’t mourning the end of my marriage. I was ready to move forward into a new year with a positive mindset. I woke up on the 1st and picked my focus word of the year (yes, I know. Basic white girl at it’s finest!). I picked REST. I wanted to purposefully slow down a little in 2020. I wrote out my intentions, my plans, my hopes for the year. I even wrote a letter to God with all the things I was putting in His hands because strengthening my faith was something I wanted to prioritize. I just felt, deep down, like this would be a growing year. A positive year.
By the end of January, my resolve on that positivity was starting to slip. Before the first month of the year ended, I had 10 stitches in my face and another 5 in my mouth. I was drinking soup out of a straw for a couple weeks until I could move my mouth in a normal way again after being stupid enough to bend down and give a friend’s dog a kiss. I’m a crazy dog mom and I tell everyone not to put their face in my dog’s face, yet I did exactly that. And yup, he wasn’t having it. Even in that moment, bleeding from my face, I was cracking jokes and trying to find the silver lining. I was trying so hard to hold on to the positive mindset I was determined to keep going into the next month. I refused to let a little scar ruin the whole year.
Should have known then that things may not go as positively as I had hoped.
We all know what happened next. February the news was full of pandemic stories from around the world. I was watching my friends in Italy start to quarantine and see how life was going for people in places where the disease was taking over. While I normally avoid the news because it can be overwhelming, I couldn’t help but check often and track the germs. I wanted to see if this was something that was impacting just “them over there” or if it would be something to start worrying about here. Were we going to be like Italy? Was everything going to close here and we would be stuck in our homes? Was it something that would blow over in a month or two? It was scary. Even scarier than teaching middle school!
When the first cities started to close here in March, I didn’t know what to do. I work in a school where rumors are passed from classroom to classroom so quickly it will make your head spin. We watched what other cities and states were doing when it came to schools. We were told to prepare mentally to be told the same thing that New York City was being told. We were told to anticipate being out of school for a week, maybe two. We were told to just watch our emails and wait for a message from the city about what would be happening. It was like tracking a hurricane and wondering where and when it would make landfall. But somehow, I could deal with a hurricane much easier than I could deal with this sense of dread that the whole world was about to change for an unknown period of time.
I know I’m not the only teacher who felt like they were floundering when the two-week temporary closure turned into the rest of the school year being digital. We were all thrown into the unknown of having to convert everything we did in person to a digital format that few of us were comfortable with. Students that used to be great in the classroom were struggling because they now had to be the one watching younger siblings or taking care of house chores or were just isolated from everything that was safe for them.
But even in the chaos, there were great things happening. For the first time in a long time people were seeing how hard teachers truly worked and that schools provided more than just a Common Core education for students. In my area, the school districts came together to make sure that every student that needed a meal could get one. It didn’t matter if you were a student at the school that did food pick-ups; if you had a need, they wanted to meet it. And I had a few students that were struggling emotionally with the school closing. They were used to being around other people and being able to interact with peers that now weren’t coming onto the Zoom classes or even living in the area anymore due to family issues. So with permission from their parents, once a week I would put my pup in the car and do drive-by visits. I would be able to lay eyes on my kiddos to make sure they were ok. We would chat and catch up while they fed treats to the dog through the open car window. We would swap books with each other (wiped down with Clorox wipes of course) and I could let them know that they were not being forgotten just because we weren’t in school anymore.
Of course, taking care of others wasn’t exactly letting me practice that rest I was supposed to be doing. I may have picked that as my word and circumstances outside of my control were certainly trying to make me slow down, but I was struggling. I didn’t know how to slow down. I didn’t know how to just be with my own thoughts. I was alone. All day, every day. Sure, I have a great dog. But I could go days without interacting with another human being outside of texting friends. I had far too much time to be in my own head and sometimes that was a scary place to be. I was dwelling on the loss of my marriage (and realizing maybe the divorce was good because I don’t think we would have made it out of quarantine alive with each other). I was dwelling on being single when I saw my friends having their partners to lean on during everything going on. I was worrying about my students, my family, my neighbors, my finances, my job. I was doing a lot of worrying. Enough so that I finally reached out to a mental health professional to start up talk therapy again. I knew that I was not going to be able to pull myself out of the deep hole I was falling in without some help. She told me that if I wasn’t feeling crazy through all of this she would be far more worried about me than if I was feeling overwhelmed and confused in the chaos going on.
She wasn’t the only one who helped pull me out of the hole I was in. I had friends start to reach out when the quarantine stretched from weeks to months. I have one good friend that still comes to my house every other week to lay eyes on me the same way I do for my students. Even on the crappy days, knowing that someone will be there soon is helpful. We could sit on the couch (a safe 6 feet apart because I have furniture made for giants) and watch TV in sweatpants, not talking at all, and it would be ok. Once the weather warmed up, this friend met me outside in the fresh air too! We live in a tourist town that was empty all summer, so the beaches were actually socially distanced for once! We could set up our chairs without worrying that people could we crowding in on us any second and I didn’t have to worry about strangers and germs for an hour or two while we just soaked up some sun and relaxed. Turns out there is something to that whole “you’ll feel better if you just get some fresh air and sunshine” thing that people say.
As the year comes to a close, I am trying to look back without being bitter about the cancelled trips, the family I missed, the students that I struggle to get through to on yet another Zoom class. I am trying to be thankful for my health, the roof over my head, and a job that is still helping me pay my bills. But it is hard. It is hard to find the good after such a rough year. It is hard to be thankful for a job when people are saying such awful things about teachers and the education system. It’s hard to be thankful for a home when I don’t share it with anyone. It’s hard to be thankful for my health when I know others are struggling to breathe right now. Reflecting on this year still hurts my heart and makes me sad. I look back at how optimistic I was in January and wonder if I’ll be able to find that positive headspace again before the clock strikes midnight on New Years Eve this year. I think we are all hoping that the evil spell that seems to have settled over the year will be broken then. My friends pick on me because of my love of the magic of Christmas, but I think even they may be holding out hope that a little bit of that North Pole magic will help turn things around for 2021. It could happen, right?