mental health – Page 2

Surrender

A road map of Illinois. There is a red flag below Champaign-Urbana.

Despite the chaos and uncertainty of my health at that moment 20 years ago, I allowed my colleague to attune to me. I allowed his protection of space around me to create our own little bubble world that was perfectly quiet, still, and safe.

This moment of letting go was completely contrary to my default way of walking through the world, where I _always_ masking myself, attuning to others, and acting as their caregiver.

Magic items

I have a childhood memory of owning a “Barbie suitcase.” It was a small case that could hold two Barbies and clothes, shoes, and accessories. The Barbie suitcase held the objects that mattered to me at that age and that I tended carefully. Its magic feels like tenderness, serenity, innocence, play, care, and reverence.

Truthtelling

Wonder Woman is standing inside the mouth of a giant lizard or dinosaur with dozens of sharp teeth. She is holding open the jaws.

Parrhesia is an ancient Greek concept of an obligation to speak the truth for common good.
Truth: Say what you know to be true
Frankness: Say all you know
Criticism: Criticize those in positions of power
Duty: Obliged to speak the truth
Danger: Speak the truth despite the risk

Learning Communities: The Golden Ticket to Teaching Centers for Graduate Students

a beach with large boulders in the foreground, a yellow sun rising in the distance. There are light clouds in the sky.

For most people, orientations are likely their first and last interaction with the teaching center. A subset of people take advantage of a consultation or three to talk through a specific teaching challenge, draft a new approach, reflect, and revise. I contend that the learning community is the Golden Ticket™ to your teaching center. If your CTL has one for graduate students specifically, it’s where the really great CTL stuff is.

Cherishing wild things

Three banners go across a bundle of wild flowers; each banner has one word of the phrase "cherish wild things." The wildflowers are different colors, and there are animals among them: snake, turtle, bird, butterfly, squirrel

I should have made a plan for returning to work, both in August 2021 and again in June 2022. Guess what? The work culture hadn’t co-evolved during my leave to align with these lessons. While I had found new values and ways of being during my leave that were important to me, productivity mindsets were still the dominant force. The work detritus tried to bury me again.

The parenting manual didn’t include a chapter on pandemics

A yellow flower in the foreground held between two fingers. There's dark purple nailpolish on the thumb. In the background are two shadows: on the left a woman with shoulder-length hair and a dress, on the right a slightly shorter shadow

What aspect of pandemic parenting should we be talking more about? The hard stuff: the reality of human cruelty, Bandaid solutions to bleeding out situations, and relationships that got developmentally frozen in 2020. And also the human capacity for love, acceptance, truth, communication, interdependence, liberation, rest, reciprocity, stewardship, and emergent abundance.

Exploring my relationship to grief

A small pink balloon, lit from underneath, is floating about 12 feet above the ground. There is a neighborhood with two houses in the background. The sky is at sunset, light blue with a few clouds.

Like many of you, I’ve experienced a lot of grief during the pandemic. Yet I had convinced myself to keep working at full capacity through these transitions in relationships. I spent some of my leave of absence processing grief.

Spread sunshine

A complex, tessellated, radiating outward pattern of dots on a square black background. The dots are white, yellow, orange, and red. In each corner is a flame pattern pointing inward to the middle

For much of my professional life, I have maintained an impossible, “I will enjoy myself and life when…” fantasy. But I was denying myself the rich life I was trying to offer and protect for others.

Journey back to integrity: Therapeutic relationships

A black and yellow striped butterfly with long tails, perched on a long green stem. There's leaf litter and green woods in the background

My current role in a graduate school doesn’t automatically have direct, community-building work in it (which opens up lots of questions for me). As I went on my leave of absence in April, I knew that when I came back I would need to deliberately engage in work that is in integrity with my heart and spirit: community-building with graduate students.

My return from leave

A woman seated below a wall mural that says, Peace Love Tybee. ." T

I took a leave of absence because I was burned out and exhausted from working and parenting during the pandemic. When I’m being honest with myself, however, a misguided, naive goal I had for my mental health leave was to “cure” and “get rid of” my mental health challenges.