the wall

We don’t need no education.

We don’t need no thought control.

No dark sarcasm in the classroom.

Teachers, leave those kids alone.

Hey! Teacher! 

Leave those kids alone!

All in all you’re just another brick in the wall

All in all you’re just another brick in the wall

Ok, who can actually hear that song echoing in the recesses of their tortured 80’s goth wannabe brain? I can. I could write the lyrics from memory and I only missed one word. Picture, if you will, a teenage girl slouching on the sofa  Christmas morning nineteen eighty-something, wearing a Pink Floyd The Wall album cover t-shirt. She is very, very cutting edge and you can hardly stand it. The coolness factor is off the charts. It was a very temporary stage, you will be relieved to hear. I did cultivate the greasy, lank hair as well. I got over it, as you can see from the wedding pictures in 1987. Whew.

Let’s face it. That Wall in the ’80s was a form of rebellion, kind of sexy, right? We will rage against the machine! We will not become bricks in anybody’s wall! Not only that, we will join forces with other rebels and work tirelessly to break down and smash that wall! Ack!

That kind of wall was kind of a wealthy rock band’s strategy to appeal to rebellious teenagers so that those teenagers would buy

their record and make that band millions of dollars. It reached its target audience for the most part, and I jumped on that bandwagon for as long as I liked the t-shirt. So maybe 6 months.

After I grew up and became a teacher, then a special education teacher, then a special education teacher during Covid, I found myself hitting a very different kind of wall one day last week.  It was a day when I thought I had Covid when I had to take a sick day when I was happy to have a  fever because it legitimized my absence and made it okay to stay home.  All of a sudden, things I have been doing since September became completely impossible to imagine doing for one more hot second. I simply could not do it at all. It was all too ridiculous for me to accept that I had to do it. And I probably gave myself a fever, even though I turned out to be negative for Covid. So sick is as sick does, right?

It was bound to happen. I am a generally positive person. I try really, really hard to be positive about things. Personal things, work things, money things, kid things, things in the world. All the things. And now, for two and a half years, covid things. Masks and distancing and hand washing and contact tracing and quarantine and and and. The relentless pressure as a teacher to stay upbeat for students is real. Like pressing down on your chest-type pressure. Chins up, folks. Be sure that you model that growth mindset for students in your classroom. It’s part of the job. I knew this when I signed up to become a teacher. But that was before.

I feel like I am screaming into the void sometimes, and it gets tangled up in my thoughts and ideas about other things. I want the place I work to recognize and acknowledge that we are not okay.

We are not fine.  When we walk down the halls and hear “how are you?” we automatically say fine, fine, fine. And then all we hear from the other teachers is fine, fine, fine. We are most certainly, definitely, and absolutely not fine.

 I heard such a great phrase on a podcast the other day:

We are literally fine-ing ourselves to death.

 (We Can Do Hard Things, Glennon Doyle) 

Is that not the truth? People will be walking down the hallways of their place of work, they will stumble to the nearest wall or chair and, legs shaking, sit their crazy body down. When you ask them what’s wrong, what is it, what can you do for them, they will say with halting breath and sweat beading on their upper lip

“I’m fine. Thanks.”

And the truth is that they are literally dying inside and it made its way to the surface for a few minutes, so other people could see it. It’s quite embarrassing, actually, and they sure would appreciate it if you averted your eyes and turned your gaze in some other direction while they pulled themselves together. Would you? Thanks so much.

I very much want to walk the line between toxic positivity and complete despair. I want to model good mental health for my students, but I also want to teach them how to speak honestly about how they are actually feeling at any given moment so that they can care for themselves and keep from hitting the walls in their world. Or, if they do hit them, they will know that they are simply the latest in wall-hitters and it happens to everybody. They might sit a spell, rest their back against the wall they just hit, sip on a juice box and take some deep breaths. That would be a GREAT response to a wall.

We are all so tired right now. And the flavors of tiredness are called teaching, first responders, parents, frontline workers, grocery store people, nurses sticking long q-tips in people’s noses all day long. We are completely done with this nonsense. Unfortunately, it is not done with us. We do not get to retire from this career called coping with covid. It’s like a houseguest that does not get the hint that, dear God, we are dying to go to bed and they will not stop telling their vacation stories and scrolling through photos on their phone. Please, for the love of all that is holy, stop already. Yes, that neon pink cocktail looks AMAZING.

That day I spent sick in bed was weirdly healing for me. I just went back to sleep for a while. Then I woke up and ate some soup while I read my book. Then I went back to bed and read there for a while. When my husband got home, we had toasted cheese sandwiches for dinner. We watched the news. I quietly regained the will to live. And without warning, I realized that I could find the strength to try again. The wall was behind me, crumbled into many bricks. There might be another one ahead of me somewhere, I don’t know. In the meantime, I am going to load up on juice boxes and keep my eyes peeled.