Unmute

Seizing the Moment Sometimes Requires Screwing Protocol

At our monthly school Zoom, in the minute before the meeting started, a teacher I don’t really know began talking about how she worried she might be losing it. She laughed, her tone light, self-deprecating, but with an unmistakably earnest underpinning. I don’t know, she said, maybe it’s just me, but I can’t multi-task anymore. I was folding clothes and talking on the phone, but I had to stop because I couldn’t do both at once. It was like the stupid folding required all my attention. It’s so weird to me because I have always been the ultimate multi-tasker. But now, it’s like…and she trailed off.

The rest of us were automatically muted, per school Zoom protocol, so her decision to start talking required her to unmute herself, which took guts, or maybe desperation. Our principal, running the meeting, was also not muted, but she might as well have been because she said nothing. The rest of us sat- some, maybe, like me, wondering if we should unmute ourselves and respond empathetically- but there was nary a yes, I get it, me, too; I think we all feel like that some days. Instead, we formed a silent honeycomb of faces, noticeably relieved when the principal started talking about how we might view this pandemic time as an opportunity, rather than a stumbling block.

But, after seeing so clearly my fragile self in my confessional colleague’s shoes, trying to juggle activities that were never before mutually exclusive but realizing I lacked the emotional bandwidth, I couldn’t reframe the year as anything other than sucky.

The fact is, these days, I talk to myself. I talk to my dog. I didn’t used to, at least, not so much. Too often I am sad and lonely but I actively avoid people. My focus is moment to moment. I am chronically anxious. I get tired easily. I get nervous before I have to teach over Zoom. I have a beer every single night without fail that feels way more like a necessity than I want it to. Some mornings I wake up and the weight of my emotions is physical. It takes all the will I possess to haul my sorry ass out of bed. My body aches, because my spirit does.

I don’t even know if I have it in me to teach next year.

I wish I could go back in time and tell that unguarded teacher that I feel her. The times we crack through our reserve or fear to talk about our feelings should not be shuffled under perky, aspirational workplace initiatives, but examined in the rare offered moment. It takes an honest voice, heard and supported, to turn community-building from abstract to actual.

Compassionate humans of the world, unmute.