I am a teacher and work with 900 high schoolers in a library setting. On June 11, 2021, I came home from work and cried my eyes out. I don’t usually cry, which is most certainly a problem, but that day, I didn’t understand at first why I was so sad.
After crying it out and discussing it with my husband, I decided that I was letting out all of my feelings of sadness related to teaching with a mask on during a pandemic. I had been called back to work on June 18th, 2020 and had been actively working with students for an entire year. This is not normal for a teacher, as many have summers and vacations off. I do not have that schedule, and I had not had many chances to relax and recharge or to process everything.
I started to acknowledge my sadness and worked on understanding it.
I was sad because:
*I love my students and had watched them struggle all year. They were depressed, discouraged and sad.
*I had been scared about COVID and getting the virus. Although we had good mitigation strategies and I wore my mask faithfully, I was scared for a whole year.
*Many of the fun things that I do with kids couldn’t be accomplished. I kept a positive attitude (which was exhausting), but felt sad and frustrated inside.
*There were many things that were negative and hard during the past year and we were starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This made the sadness come to the surface because it was no longer necessary to push it down.
I hesitate to say that I have PTSD, but I think in some ways, that is what I am dealing with. I feel better already after having talked about it with friends and family members. Bawling my eyes out certainly helped, and I am hoping I can do that more often.
The lesson in this is that we need to let ourselves be sad, but also need to analyze the sadness, respect it, give ourselves time and by all means, let it out.