So many parts of my identity cannot be seen that it’s easy to feel invisible. But like a pane of glass, it still hurts to walk into it.
So this morning (by which I mean last Friday, when I wrote this) I tried to shine a light on things.
Ironic aside: Shining light on an invisible thing does nothing. The failure of mixed metaphors.
Continue readingI was responding to a recent YouTube video by Wood Hawker, a favored content creator I follow who frequently reviews video games and occasionally talks about mental health. He was asking for suggestions as he begins building his new channel, and I said I enjoy his videos about mental health but at times they feel too long and heavy. And I realized that when I talk about mental health I fall into the same pitfall: I only talk about it when I hit the bottom, but I never talk about the real day-to-day life of living with mental illness.
So I thought, why not? When I hear how others struggle to win their daily battles, I feel like I’m not alone. I feel empowered. I feel more confident to take on the day.
But I haven’t done that myself, so today I want to change that.
Continue readingIf you know me personally or you’re a long-time reader (sometimes I wonder if any of you are still here…), my history of mental illness should be no surprise.
And it sucks.
Today starts our mini-unit on self-compassion in the mindfulness class I’m teaching. It’s a hard unit, even as a teacher, because so much of our culture says we need to be hard on ourselves–and probably much harder than we already are. It’s almost painful to be self-compassionate, and it’s about as awkward to talk about it to kids.
And on top of that, I’m still feeling sick. I got to bed a few hours earlier than usual last night, and I woke up feeling so much better–but my throat is so dry it’s raw, and I can barely open my mouth to talk without feeling the pain of it. I was talking to myself last night, and I know when I’m feeling sick I have the least amount of willpower, so all my normal challenges look like massive mountains right now.
So it’s the perfect time to talk about self-compassion.
I’ve been down all weekend. Despite some fun outings with friends, an itch in my throat slowly spread until it erupted Sunday into an all-out cold. My plans to do a big weekend social media push for my Kickstarter instead ended up with me napping on the couch.
Now that the school week has begun, it’s time for me to turn my attention back toward willpower in my mindfulness class. Today’s multifaceted prompt begins by asking us to think about our willpower role models. Who inspires us most to meet our goal?
I love it when I get to use puns in my titles–it’s not quite clickbait, but it’s almost just as good. Anyways, stress. We often feel defeated by stress. We think stress is a sign of failure and inadequacy (and then we get stressed out for failing and being inadequate), but according to Kelly McGonigal, that perspective on stress is incorrect.
Instead, she says, stress makes us stronger.
One of the hidden stress responses Kelly McGonigal talks about in her book The Upside of Stress is the “tend and befriend” response: Stress physiologically compels us to help others and strengthen relationships. We can tap into this stress response, she says, whenever we’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed simply by answering one question:
What is my bigger-than-self goal?
Today’s mindfulness class brings a double dose of journaling–the first about stress, of course, and the second about willpower (the two core themes of our class).
There’s that saying about the freshman fifteen, and perhaps due to the fact that I didn’t live on campus my freshman year, I never experienced it. Even when I did move on campus the start of my junior year, I began working out more at the gym and made healthy food choices at the dining halls, so if anything, I lost weight.
The first-year-teacher fifteen, though? Now that’s a real thing.
The year 2016 is my big Year of Re-creation, and the magnanimity of this statement only grows with the realization that I won’t be recreating myself as a husband, but as a single man again. And that’s okay. Perhaps painful at the outset, but all change can be.
In any case, it’s been a while since my last shot of stress, when I took that first step from Kelly McGonigal’s book The Upside of Stress to finally make stress my friend.
It should be obvious–as a three-year relationship ends and I set out to begin my summer teaching training–that stress is paramount right now. So it’s time to go on.
The Writingwolf: Words and Wonders 