Lately my anxiety is doing something interesting.
I’m introverted and my anxiety tends to be worst when I do something new, or something I haven’t done in a while. If I can get myself to try a new thing and do it two or three times then my anxiety quickly dissipates. Most aspects of daily life as an adult are made of things that, at first, were really challenging for me. Meeting new people, hosting friends, driving in new streets, even buying groceries (or anything, for that matter). Teaching was terrifying for me at first, although I think some of that is normal in a first big job. Standing in front of a group of teens all day, pretending I knew what I’m talking about (even when I did know, it felt faked), making decisions about grades and classroom management, de escalating conflicts, speaking up in staff meetings…
In my work, I became much more comfortable and pretty quickly felt like a champ. I could do all of these things without anxiety, often without even really thinking about it. Every single school break, however, would reset things a bit. I’d have that same newbie anxiety slipping back a little each vacation, and the length of time away made a difference. A week off brought some jitters. Two weeks off brought some panic. It was comforting, though, to meet other teachers and see their panic rising at the end of summer break, and to know that it’s normal to feel some trepidation.
Quarantine has done something interesting. Some of my anxieties are comforted by not having to leave my house, not having to go into work. New anxieties around germs and financial stability have obviously popped up. What has surprised me, however, is how challenging I have found this anxiety from lack of exposure.
I don’t socialize in person much anymore. So on any given day, my social anxiety is WAY down. Yet, when I do socialize, it’s so much worse than it was before quarantine. I feel like I’m out of practice, that the social cues I’ve struggled my whole life to make sense of are now in a language I’d forgotten. I’m hyper aware of my hands, my posture, my face, my words… I have to think before everything I do, the way I had to think every moment of teaching when I first started. It’s exhausting.
Most of me is sick of quarantine and desperate to wake up and find that COVID has disappeared. But I’ve just noticed a part of me that’s terrified of what happens when it’s over. I’ll have to go back into my classrooms, back to face-to-face staff meetings, back into people’s homes, back to bustling stores. I feel like I’m teetering on a bike that I’ve forgotten how to ride, and everyone around me thinks that the instincts will come right back. But what if they don’t? What if I have to relearn all of it, with an audience of everyone who finds these things easy or even exhilarating? The thought is exhausting.
The good news is, I am pretty tough. I have supports and skills and therapists to step in when these thought patterns crop up. What worries me is my students. What happens when teens with already worse-than-mine anxiety, or trauma, or learning differences that aren’t acknowledged by their world, try to come back? We’re all expecting kids to be psyched to come back and I’m sure most of them will be on some level. I just want to be sure that I, and the other teachers and supports out there, are ready for the students who are terrified and out of practice.
If we come back to in-person learning this fall, it will be all of that plus the anxiety from COVID. We’re going to need a whole lot of love, compassion, and patience from one another.