August 28 Friday Update: Just All the Church Thoughts

1.

This month has been... oof. So much depression. Has made it hard to get any words out. But I'm working on it.

2.

I observed a conversation this week with a group of evangelicals who are, maybe some of them for the first time in earnest, processing and working through how the Christian church can/should be working on anti-racism. I disagree with a lot of members' beliefs on it right now (definitely a few "if we stop talking about it it'll go away" folks which, well, turns out it doesn't work like that) but I think everybody's learning and the conversations are good and hopefully challenging to all of us, including me as I continue to work out how my faith should inform my passion for social justice.

This week, though, a hot-button topic was how churches can be more inclusive. And every suggestion that was made, someone else had a reason that wouldn't be a good idea. And as I'm processing what to say to that, these are the two points I keep coming back to:

• Inclusivity does not happen without intent. You can't just carry on the same as always and expect that magically, somehow, you'll draw in a more diverse crowd. It hasn't worked before, why would it abruptly work now? That's that "definition of insanity" business, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Choosing to do nothing has the same functional outcome as choosing exclusivity.
• There will always be non-race-related reasons to avoid making changes. We live in a country (and frankly a world) built on segregation and have really only recently begun to change that. So when we take steps to make a change, we are working against hundreds of years of established systems and, yes, it will be difficult. If we wait until it is easy or until there is nothing we need to sacrifice to make way for diversity and equity, we will never do anything. If we prioritize diversity, yes, it is very likely we will need to listen to other people's experiences or change our hiring practices or repaint sanctuaries or sing songs we don't know or like. Some of those are more difficult than others, but all of them are things I've heard named as "too difficult" or "not important" and thus a reason to not try and diversify. And those aren't good enough reasons, at least not for me.

3.

I had not expected, incidentally, that sitting through a discussion of why churches should not change anything about themselves to appeal to minorities would be as triggering as it was. And then I cried for like an hour that afternoon. But that issue taps into a similar thing as my own struggles with church. Both carry the message, You do not matter, your struggles do not matter, you will fit in to us, we will never adapt to you, and if you think we should, you are the problem. And it just hurts, and I hurt for anyone else who is getting this same message from their white evangelical churches, and I'm sorry I was ever a part of that for anyone else.

4.

I ended up having a good conversation with my dad this week about some of my struggles with those "beauty of church" sermons I stopped listening to. And then we chatted a bit about what we might say if tasked with sharing a sermon on the beauty of church. Like, why do we think it's important that someone finds the beauty of church? And what is it?

I think it is important to find beauty in church, but then again I'm an artist, I think it's important to find beauty everywhere. For me it's about vision casting, inspiration, and fighting disillusionment. It also means that it can be possible to find value in it even in its imperfection (which I think is what my old church is trying to do, we just see very different imperfections and get frustrated by each other's definitions). Like, you'd think a sermons series on the beauty of church would be exactly what I needed. It's probably easier to convince me church is beautiful than it is to convince me it's necessary -- and it's probably a better way of framing it for me, since it shifts my point of view from church as a vegetable I begrudgingly eat to church as a work of art that I just need to find the right way to frame.

The problem is that to believe the church is beautiful, you have to on some level believe its members that make up its pieces are beautiful, and I'm not sure the leadership in that particular church believes that. If they do, I'm not sure they would say it.

5.

A friend the other day shared a post about how we cannot rely on our own feelings, sense, reason, or self, we can only rely on the Bible. And while I know what they're saying, it leaves out two truly important things. First off, we rely on our (and others') feelings, sense, reason and self to interpret the Bible in the first place, so even if you believe in the inerrancy and inspiration of Scripture, you have to be willing to question your understanding of it, which for many people equates to questioning it itself.

But secondly... these "we can only trust the Bible" posts always seem to have a conspicuous absence of the Holy Spirit in them. What role does the Spirit play for the people writing and reposting this? And how do they think he/she/it speaks to us if not through a combination of our selves and the Scripture?

The evangelical tradition I grew up with definitely doesn't know what to do with the Holy Spirit. They don't really teach on it, they get real nervous about denominations that do emphasize it. The Spirit is usually only active as either as a conscience to convict you of sin or a guide to bring you to the Scripture you need to hear. So, weirdly, the emphasis becomes not "look to the Bible to find God" but is instead "look to God to find the Bible."

"I Thought About You - Live at Vine St." by Shirley Horn (150 Albums by Woman #131)

NPR compiled a list of the 150 greatest albums created by women. I've decided to listen to these albums, from #150 all the way up to #1. But to give myself a bit of forward momentum and have a sense of when I was "done" with each album, my method is to listen to the album one time all the way through, then with each subsequent listen, I'd remove my least favorite. This lets me listen to the best ones most frequently without having to sit through too many that didn't work for me at all.

My next journey into the Top 150 Albums by Women from NPR's list is a live jazz album by pianist/vocalist Shirley Horn. More than many of the other albums I've listened to, this one really does all blend together. It makes sense, given that it was a recording of a single concert, but it does make it difficult to tease out a top five. Overall the album is pleasant background jazz to listen to but it doesn't stand out for me as much as I want it to if I'm listening to the whole thing. Nothing I didn't enjoy here but nothing I really loved either. But let's look at the ones I enjoyed most.

5. The Great City
The biggest challenge about choosing a top 5 is that a lot of these songs have a very similar vibe. Turns out jaunty laidback piano-based jazz is a definite mood and then everything just sounds like... that. This one is fun to listen to but has the least distinct personality of all the remaining songs, so it falls to the bottom my top five and I struggle to find much to say about it.

4. Our Love Is Here to Stay
This one is the most ballad-y of the songs remaining in this playlist, but there's enough jauntiness that it still feels upbeat. I particularly like how she plays with silence and pauses in the accompaniment in the first minute or so of the song.

3. The Eagle and Me
This kept sticking around largely on the strength of the final 30 seconds or so, when suddenly this easygoing tune tosses in some unexpected syncopation and goes out on a *very* strong note. But the rest of the song is pretty standard and doesn't hold up against the other two.

2. Nice 'N' Easy
I think this might be the only standard on this album I was really familiar with before I started listening, and it's still a great song. The lyrics really lend themselves to the super chill vibe too.

1. Something Happens to Me
The opening song on the album is definitely the strongest tune for me in this bunch. It's such a cheery little tune about love. The lightness of the piano and the dynamics of Horn's voice combine in a really enjoyable way to convey this sense of... surprise and wonder and delight at falling in love. Just charming and fun.

The albums I've listened to thus far in this project, in order (and yes, I've done a tiny bit of reorganizing):

1. The Roches - The Roches
2. Robyn - Body Talk
3. Norah Jones - Come Away With Me
4. Patty Griffin - Flaming Red
5. The Breeders - Last Splash
6. Iris Dement - My Life
7. Solange - A Seat at the Table
8. Shelby Lynne - I Am Shelby Lynne
9. Fanny - Fanny Hill
10. Alicia Keys - Songs in A Minor
11. Shirley Horn - I Thought About You (Live at Vine St.)
12. Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas
13. The B-52's - The B-52's
14. The Bangles - All Over the Place
15. Yoko Ono - Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
16. Oumou Sangaré - Moussolou
17. Terri Lyne Carrington - The Mosaic Project

August 14 Friday Update: What Does Encouragement Mean?

1.
Today's old church sermon intro informed me that if I have trouble seeing the church as beautiful, it's probably my fault because I'm "too focused on the negative." I swear, the subtitle of this series should just be "Every Sermon Talking Point That Gave Hannah Church Anxiety." For being a series of sermons about how beautiful the church is, it's really doing everything it can to convince me otherwise. LOL.

Fortunately I'm in a pretty good mental health space today (wouldn't have attempted to watch it if I wasn't, I learned that lesson last week, haha), and can catalog that shame trigger, sign off, and let the rest slide off of me. I think that's partly because I did make sure to check out my Lutheran service's sermon today. It looked at the disciples in the storm and Elijah hearing God in the silence, and the takeaway was "God is with us, let us look for him and be comforted by him." There is a 95% chance that the takeaway from any of my previous churches would be "Stop sinning by doubting God, get yourself together." Which, I mean, isn't actually comforting.

2.
A Facebook acquaintance this week claimed that capitalism is the economic system that most recognizes an individual's inherent worth, and I just... don't think that's true. Perhaps in some idealized form, but definitely not as it has played out in the US. While, yes, capitalism allows for a lot of freedom and choice, I refer back to my previous blog to say that freedom means freedom for some and not for others. In this case, those who are able to work get more freedom than those who don't. Those who are rich end up with more freedom than those who don't.

And more importantly, I believe that the US' form of capitalism actually encourages us to link the worth of a human with their productivity instead of their actual inherent humanity. We see this in the outcry against providing housing and food for those who cannot afford it, in how those who are too ill to work have much greater difficulty getting healthcare, in the insistence that "we don't want our tax dollars paying for freeloaders" -- essentially, that if someone is not being productive up to our standards, we do not believe they deserve food, shelter, and medical care, at least not enough to do anything about it.

We make basic human needs contingent on whether not people have earned them, and if that's the system that most values humans' inherent worth, then we need a brand new system, stat, because this isn't cutting it at all.

3.
I do keep coming back to the idea that many of my evangelical friends seem to perhaps equate "encouragement" with "correction." Like as possibly the primary meaning? I'm trying to figure out how to ask this of them and do an informal poll without sounding like I'm being a judgy jerk. I've just been realizing more and more that that's usually how my former church pastors used the word, to the point where I tense up a little any time a Christian says to me, "Let me encourage you" because there's a good chance they're about to tell me I'm doing something wrong and I'm actually going to walk away discouraged.

4.
My card memorization skills are not speeding up at all these days, but they are getting more accurate. 14 minutes is still about the minimum I can do, but I usually get no more than one wrong. So... getting there, but it's not very impressive or cool yet.

5.
So this is set to post in about six hours. It's about 4am for me here, and I am just... not sleeping tonight. Stuffed up, congested, feel like I can't breathe, and it's most likely just allergies or anxiety attack, but either way I can't lie down comfortably so I left the bedroom and am just chilling on the living room couch.

I did learn, however, that business-y detail-oriented emails, which take way more effort and time for me than I think they do for most people, are easier to write when you're sleep-deprived at 4 in the morning because you're too tired to second (and third and fourth and fifth) guess everything. So I've just drafted all my emails for the day, read through them a couple times to make sure they don't say anything overtly wrong, and will mail them all out at a more normal work hour. This is not a strategy I typically suggest for anyone after, like, college, but I guess it's a reasonable pandemic work strategy too, should you already happen to be awake way too early/late.

August 7 Friday Update: Don't Forget How Much You Suck

1.
Sermon shame trigger update!

Got about 5 minutes into a 30-minute sermon this time. We're still talking about the importance of/beauty of the church -- apparently last week's sermon (which I lasted like all of 30 seconds in) ended by saying the relationships built within church are better and deeper than regular friendships. This has decidedly not been my experience, heh, but I think it probably has been for some folks, and I can see it as an aspirational goal, and I couldn't even listen to that whole sermon, so I'm not going to really critique that.

This week's sermon began by being about unity, and using our disunity as a reason we present badly to the world, which is... confusing to me because the issue of disunity among believers is an accusation I'm not sure I've even once heard levied against the church. If anything it's usually the opposite -- the issue of Christians who are fiercely loyal to each other and to a system to the point where they will not even consider whether it needs to be broken down and rebuilt. This feels like the strawest of strawman arguments, but it wasn't a shame trigger, just an "I'm not sure that's true" nudge, so we move on.

And then we come to the idea that unity is only possible when we leave behind our arrogance. Because when it comes down to it, we are all sinners, we all suck, we all deserve hell, we are all the most hideous beings on the planet. Nobody has anything good to offer as an individual, it would be better if we were all just erased and it was just God hanging out with God in a church building, why are we even here, we're just in the way, ugh, we're the worst.

OK, maybe everything after "we are all sinners" wasn't said out loud, but it was the thought pattern my brain went on. That one little concept, the idea that unity can only be possible when we remember how unworthy we are, launched all that.

Sometimes I get told that I'm overreacting, that I'm reading stuff into this. But let me point out that I've been listening to sermons for like seven weeks now and haven't been able to get more than five minutes into a single sermon without being overtly told that I need to remember how much I suck. None of those sermons in the first five minutes have overtly told me that I am loved, or that I can do great things, or that I matter to anyone else, or that I even should matter to anyone else. But they've all taken great care to tell me how unworthy I am.

This stuff piles up, you guys.

I went to church my entirely life and didn't realize until college that God liked me. That he enjoyed any piece of who I was. And that felt like a daring and possibly heretical thought, the idea that maybe God didn't look at me and either go, "uggggh gross" or at very best, say, "oh good, you're doing all the right things and are on the right path, I haven't had to fix you yet so I guessssss you're okay at the moment but ANY SECOND you could veer off and then you'll suck again."

This. Stuff. Piles. Up.

No wonder the evangelical church has such a crappy record with mental illness. They tell me the exact same things as my depression does.

2.
There's no such thing as freedom for everyone. There really isn't. Every freedom one person has means somebody else loses theirs. We're just always having to decide which and sometimes whose freedom is more important -- the freedom to kill or the freedom to live? The freedom to keep our belonging or the freedom to take others'?  The freedom to wear no mask or the freedom to safely leave your house?

Stop framing it as freedom vs. lack of freedom. It's a false dichotomy.

3.
I just keep coming back to that sermon I listened to this week, and how it made all good things dependent on constantly remembering how awful we are. Like... how can you believe that so strongly and also have anything resembling a positive relationship? My best relationships are with folks who do not, in fact, spend most of their time reminding me how unworthy of love I am the way the church does. They are the ones who assure me I am worth something, who encourage me (literally "give me courage"), who see me at my best when I see myself at my worst. Is that just "catering to my flesh," as it might be phrased in evangelical lingo?

I cannot be bold or good or faithful to my beliefs while buckled under the weight of my own self-loathing. The relationships that bring out the best in me take that burden off of me and encourage me to not take it back on.

Nobody is ever going to convince me that church relationships based so heavily on how terrible we are is one that is beautiful or worth pursuing.

(And if that's not the church relationship you're advocating for, pastors, then.......... maybe don't make that your main speaking point in the first five minutes of your sermon.)

4.
On a related note, it's probably smartest for me to take a short break on my "can I listen to my old church sermons safely" experiment, ha. While it made for some good blogs and some good analysis, and I think I'm untangling some stuff nicely, this one has now broken me for three days. All I did was hear five minutes of it and none of it was even new to me. I got told all the time in church how little I mattered, it shouldn't hurt as much as it does. But it is stuff I'm fighting to unravel in myself, and stuff I'm fighting my mentally ill brain to stop saying. Fortunately I have some amazing friends able to step in and say, "Yeah, so that's a lie." But maybe I need to take a break from having to face those lies. Heal this particular one a bit longer until it stops being quite so... trigger-y.

July 31 Friday Update: Wanting Friends and Losing Friends

Here we go!

1. 
I did not make it very far in this morning's sermon from my old church, ha. I thought it might be a tough ride because apparently they're going to do a multi-week series on the importance of church, which made me go, "Oh, crap, it's going to be saying from the pulpit basically everything that gives me anxiety about church attendance."

The sermon opened by referencing the Cheers theme, the "sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name" bit. When I was in NLDC, we had a skit that used this song to talk about church as well. A character has a really bad day, and in the middle of a sobbing breakdown, the song starts playing, and the remainder of the song was a mimed depiction of him deciding to go to church, where everyone greets him by name, welcomes him, makes him feel loved, and his day is better. Super cheesy but I enjoyed the sentiment.

So I figured that's where this sermon was going and I could get on board with that. ("Wouldn't it be great if church was as welcoming as a bar?")

I was so wrong.

The response to that is apparently "People think of church like the Cheers theme song and want to be somewhere where they're known, and that's bad, because the church isn't about relationships, and sometimes people even leave the church because they feel unknown, or churches, like, change their programming to try to make people more comfortable there, and it's because they don't understand what church is supposed to be."

I'm still somewhat curious as to what he thought the actual purpose of church was, but I was about to explode from anxiety, so I tapped out.

So let me walk through what this sermon intro says to me. Because, yeah, I didn't feel like anybody knew me in the church. Some of that was because I felt pressure to act and be and speak a certain way to be taken seriously as a Christian. Some of it is because the church service isn't a great format for introverts to meet with or connect with people. Some of it is because my personal experiences got dismissed if they had the wrong emotional tone or the wrong "message" at the end of it. But it was an exceptionally lonely time for me, and it definitely made it easier to step away.

This sermon responds to that by saying if you feel unknown and unheard and unloved in the church, you should stop thinking it's about you. Church isn't a social club (direct quote). Church isn't for spending time with friends. If you think it's a big deal that nobody knows you, you're obviously just prioritizing the wrong things, and if your priorities were in the right place you'd be fine with being unknown and uncared for in your faith community.

Another reminder that my anxiety and my struggle with church is a sign to many people that my faith is weak, if even there at all.

It's a problem with me.

2.
This week I had the first instance of a truly close friend who I may have to cut ties with because of pandemic and politics. I am not a blocker. I tend to hold out hope for everyone to have good intentions and am happy if I can be connected to them and share my opinions for them and can trust that if they seem to be acting unempathetically, I am missing a piece of what they're thinking and why it doesn't seem unempathetic to them. I probably give people far too much benefit of the doubt, but I've also seen people change their views drastically and come to me as one of the few people they know in their circle who will be okay with their changes.

So when I do block people, it's as a personal safety boundary for me. It's because their behavior is causing harmful depression spirals. It's only happened a handful of times, and never with anyone I was close to.

Until this week. Not getting into the details of it, but they keep messaging me with "COVID isn't a big deal" propaganda and I have lost at least three full days to anxiety and depression after reading/watching what they've sent. I'm obviously never watching any videos they send me anymore, ha, but it's so depressing to see someone I was very close to spreading things that are actively harmful to me. I've asked them to stop. We'll see if they do.

My boundaries are about self-protection, not teaching lessons. I don't block just because I disagree with someone to make a statement about separating myself from them. I block when being connected to them is actively bad for me. And I'd like to think my friends care about that and would understand if I had to block them for awhile.

But I don't know. They might just say I'm overreacting, that I'm letting politics come between people, that I'm causing more division.

But my other option is letting myself be hurt over and over again. Just because they said I should. And that serves nobody -- not me, not them, not anybody else I could be giving my time to were I not drained from these interactions. That's not a workable answer.

3. 
Some of these mini-blogs are basically just regular blog-sized blogs now, huh?

July 24th Friday Update: Showtunes, Memory Palaces, and Shame

Microblogging time!

1.
Just watched a YouTube video where a vlogger named the showtunes that reduce them to a weeping puddle of goo, so I figured I should compile my own list.

Turns out I already had a Spotify playlist of "Showtunes That Make Me Cry" which consists of 26 songs, so I'll pull out my top 10, from "make me cry the most" to "make my cry a little less."

Rent- I'll Cover You (Reprise)
Godspell- On the Willows
Avenue Q- Fantasies Come True
Fiddler on the Roof- Chava Ballet Sequence
Matilda- When I Grow Up
The Last Five Years- Nobody Needs to Know
Rent- Will I?
Dear Evan Hansen- Words Fail
The Last Five Years- I Could Never Rescue You
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog- Everything You Ever

Kudos to Rent and TL5Y for being the only ones who needed to be on the list twice.

2.
This last week or two has just, like, sucked for depression stuff. I'm just completely out of spoons to do much of anything but also full of anxiety and panic at how little I'm doing. And it sucks.

3.
I ended up writing this as a comment on a friend's post but wanted to share a slightly amended version of it here, too, it encapsulates some of what I've been thinking about this week:

I admit I've been struggling myself with "God is in control" language, as so many of my evangelical friends and acquaintances have turned that into their reason for not being cautious or look out for each other, and now those words actually bring up more fear. So while I do believe God is in control, I've found myself needing to reframe the concept a bit before I can really let go of my anxiety. So for me, my mantra has been that God is the only one that can pick up where my efforts end. That doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't fight HARD for safety procedures, or feel stressed or angry about where things are, or research overseas grad schools. But it means that when I come to God, sobbing that I've done everything I can and don't know what else to do, he's like, "Yeah, I know, you've done everything you need to, I've got it from here." And I've been working on leaving that with him. So difficult, but working on it!

4.
So my policy over the last couple weeks for watching my old church's sermons is "I watch until something triggers shame, then I turn it off, document what that was, and return next week." Some weeks I can get through 3/4 of the sermon. Other weeks I'm done 5 minutes in. I have not yet made it through an entire sermon.

I think there are two pieces to this. On one hand, I am well-versed in training myself to feel ashamed (or "convicted" as I would have framed it as a teen). Could you even call yourself a Christian teen leader if you didn't repent after every sermon and repent of like a whole BUNCH during every summer retreat? I mean, you probably could, but the vibe I got was that the more often you were convicted, the better a Christian you were, so I got so, so good at narrowing in on the part of the sermon meant to make me feel bad. I never really sought to be encouraged. (I'm suddenly having memories of pastors saying "I want to encourage you today" in a context which clearly really meant "I want to convict you today." ...I wonder if people think they are the same thing?)

So on the flip side of that, while I definitely am good about ferreting out the language I'm supposed to use to shame myself, there is a lot of that language in the evangelical church. Like we can only make God look good by making ourselves look bad, or we can only motivate people to do good out of fear of doing bad. So the church trained me to read these sermons this way, and I eagerly accepted, and we worked together to build a really strong shame response to, like, everything, and called it the Holy Spirit.

So I'm documenting the phrases, the analogies, the verse interpretations that I'm trained to respond shamefully to, in the hopes I can undo some of that conditioning.

5.
Reposting this thing I wrote on my Twitter. I quote-tweeted someone saying, "Normalize 'hey can we reschedule I don’t feel like hanging today' without people getting offended cuz some days I really wake up and don’t feel like doing anything" and then wrote the following:

So this is getting just CRAPPED on in the comments. "Don't make plans if you can't follow through." Which, I mean, you obviously should follow through on commitments as much as you possibly can.  But on the other hand, the logical conclusion of that is believing "people with chronic illnesses shouldn't make plans or try to hang out with people." Because life can be unpredictable for us!

If you would rather we show up to hang out with you but be miserable the whole time, then that's fine, you just maybe shouldn't be a friend to vulnerable people, because what you value most isn't what they can provide.

And there are compromises. If you keep moving your schedule to spend with them and they keep needing to flake, start scheduling your times with them for when they're truly convenient for you is you won't be resentful if they step out.

I've been the one who flaked. I've been the one who pushed through and was glad she did, as well as the one who wished she hadn't. I've also been the one who's been flaked on and just started relabeling people in my life to "don't count on them but I hope they're there" status.

And sometimes it's just a friend incompatibility. There are friends I can't make space for for months, because I don't have emotional spoons to carve out time to be with them and have them not be there. But when I do, I will. And if I never do, I hope someone else will.

TL:DR;

6. 

So I just finished reading this book about memory competitions and techniques, and it was intriguing, and I need like a party trick because I don't have any, so I am teaching myself to memorize shuffled decks of cards. At this point I can do it, just verrrrrrrryyyy slloooowwwwlllyyyy -- not a good party trick yet, it's like 15 minutes of memorization and then another 5 to recall them.

The basic idea is to use visual and spatial memory to create associations with the cards. So for each card, you're supposed to come up with a specific visual image of a person doing an action with an object. So, for example, my ace of spades is "The Phantom of the Opera playing music on an organ." And then you memorize them in sets of threes -- so you imagine the person from your first card doing the action on your second card with the action for your third card. So then for each of set of three, you place them along a mental pathway with a clear linear progression.

The one I've been practicing with is a walk around my house. So, for example, I imagine my front door, and with the cards in front of me, I see Lady and the Tramp (2 of hearts) stabbing each other (nine of spades) with beer steins (seven of clubs). Which is a truly bizarre mental image, and it sticks. Then I mentally walk through my front door, and directly to the left, in my front closet, there's Christine Daae (six of diamonds) trying to warm herself up (ace of hearts) with mustaches (three of spades). That's my second set.

I was kind of startled how well it worked. On my first try, I memorized about 24 without going back to them or trying to remember them at all, but then when I did my mental walkthrough, there they all were.

Right now the slowest part is remembering which cards goes with which image. I had to redo my images a couple times just because I could NOT remember them, so I ended up grouping them by numbers -- so all my tens are Steven Universe characters, my nines are Star Wars, my fives are New Life friends, my Jacks are people who make me laugh. And then I even tried to think about associations I'd naturally make between suits and those characters. The diamonds characters usually have something to do with money, the hearts are often people whose central storyline is about love, spades tend to be stabby people, clubs tend to be strong. Whenever I could make an association, I did.

It's fascinating and I love it and I am going to be so cool in an exceptionally nerdy way when I can get my time down.

7.

While "2020 sucks" is pretty widely-agreed upon, I'm learning that some people mean "2020 sucks because people are dying and I can only do so much to stop it" and some people mean "2020 sucks because masks are annoying."

We're not in the same boat.

July 17th Friday Update: More School Questions!

Microblogging, whooo! Lots of CW for depression.

1.
I wish I had the spoons for my friends' problems. I just feel like I'm shutting people out a lot these days, because I have to, because I'm going to explode. But I wish I had more. I'm trying to figure out how to recenter things in my head to make space for... something. I just don't have it yet.

2.
A few more questions I've seen for those pushing to open schools in the fall:

• Most classrooms are barely big enough for desks as is, let alone desks that need to be 6 feet apart. Are class sizes shrinking? (If so, where are the extra teachers coming from?) Are they moving to new larger classrooms that don't exist yet? Are we going to say we're social distancing but we just don't?
• Do students get masks at school? Do teachers? Do student masks get replaced throughout the day when inevitably they take it off and lose it or another child thinks it's funny to take it off them? Obviously you can't guarantee kids wash their masks at home, so if schools provide them, will they be cleaning them as well? How?
• Will there be any additional PPE for teachers? And are teachers paying for that out of their own pocket?
• How are we dealing with poor air ventilation in schools without ACs or classrooms without windows?
• Are lockers still being used? How and when? Kids will have more supplies to haul around now that they can't share.
• Who is having the conversation about how to reevaluate testing for this year and next? Nobody thinks we can just continue on as normal and apply last year's standards to this year's kids, right? ...Right?
• What about very young students who need assistance opening lunch, using supplies, tying shoes? Teachers cannot help them and social distance, so what's the plan?
• How about kids with special needs who needs hands-on caregiving at school? 
• How about young students with separation anxiety? How are they to be comforted from six feet away?
• How are school discipline policies being reevaluated during this time? Student behavior can be heavily influenced by stress and trauma, which every child is currently dealing with, and calming a panicked or furious child is much tougher from six feet away.
• Will school libraries still be able to be used?
• What about playground equipment? How are kids going to play at recess if they cannot share equipment or be near each other?
• Buses. We don't have nearly enough buses or bus drivers for students to be able to social distance in a vehicle. Are more buses being purchased or rented from other locations? Are more drivers being hired? Will bus routes be adjusted so that buses make multiple separate rounds? 
• What is the procedure for if a student comes to class sick with COVID symptoms?
• Schools don't have enough sinks and students can't congregate around them. Are classroom times or passing periods being expanded to allow for the abundance of hand washing needed? Are classes relying solely on hand sanitizer?
• Let's talk school nurses. Some districts share a handful of nurses between all of them. What is the plan for COVID-symptomatic students when the nurse is at a different school? Are the nurses getting additional PPE?
• One of the reasons for getting back to school is so kids can socialize again. Is socializing six feet apart wearing masks, unable to share any playground equipment or supplies, truly going to meet that need? Enough to run the high risks of opening?
• With the shortage of teachers and subs but the higher need of monitoring, are there plans for additional hall monitors that ensure students are keeping masks on/social distancing/not touching each other's stuff?
• Substitutes usually serve multiple schools. Will they be restricted to one to limit exposure in case they test positive?
• Is anyone in education doing re-training on instruction and classroom management during social distancing? It requires just as much re-doing as Zoom classes, since it eliminates the possibility of group projects or pair work entirely.
• I saw one plan that indicated that children whose family members are exposed should quarantine. If a child or child's family members test positive or are exposed, will parents of that child's classmates be notified?

More to come. Inevitably.

3.
It's hard these days to distinguish between depression and just "I live in the US in 2020."

4.
I'm intrigued that some of those advocating against mask wearing as an inherent violation of freedom are also those who adhere so strongly to modesty culture. Being told to wear or not wear something specific because it might hurt someone else is hardly new. We've just got life and death stakes this time, and it affects everybody.

5.
Even more about masks and the pandemic and stuff!

There's an article going around now where the CDC is saying we could, in fact, beat the virus with 4-6 weeks of everyone wearing masks and social distancing. There's a part of me that doesn't want to believe it because it's so depressing to think we could be that close to being done with this but that it will instead drag out for months, maybe years, because somehow masks have been politicized so nobody's going to follow those restrictions. It's hard to know that and not feel angry.

Additionally, may I just add, there is no better way to reinforce my brain's depression lives of "You don't matter" and "Nobody likes you" and "Nobody wants you here" than to be vocally anti-mask. Because that does indicate I don't matter and those people don't want me here, not if it's going to inconvenience them. Had a massive depression breakdown yesterday because I just didn't have any more ammo to throw at that. I still don't. It's a very very very good thing my depression has never come along with suicidal ideation. Like... very very very.