You Can Do Less
The world will keep spinning & you will be better for it.
Last week, I took my first flight since January 2020. I was invited to be a luncheon keynote at a conference for youth librarians in New York’s north country. When I was initially contacted last summer, I had in my mind it was about censorship, since that’s what I’ve been primarily talking lately. But it wasn’t. This was an ask to talk about mental health. I was especially excited because of how it would dovetail nicely with what I was doing at school. I’d have so much more knowledge and experience as a mental health expert to give.
I did not anticipate, of course, that I would leave school just a month before the talk itself.
*
I’ve talked about my writing process before. What I said there I could say here related to putting a talk together. I often wait and wait, letting the shape of the thing coalesce in my mind before committing anything to a document. This time, I felt like I was putting it off and putting it off in a way I haven’t before.
It dawned on me that feeling, which lingered in my bones and at the surface of my skin, was a sign that perhaps the topic was a little too close for comfort. Maybe, too, it was my body telling me something big was about to happen and that by waiting, I would better serve my audience and myself with the Truth, rather than something more palatable.*
In January, I’d written a self-care plan for school like a good student. In it, and throughout the process of writing how I planned to take care of myself during an unpaid internship required to graduate while working full time, caring for a toddler, and taking not one, but two classes, I kept getting angry. Why was so much time spent in this program focused on self-care when self-care is not the solution to systemic problems? It is important to take care of yourself, but making it an assignment on top of other assignments takes away its intrinsic value. I mentioned this, briefly, in the plan I submitted to my professor, who noted that it was important to practice self-care in response.
You cannot self-care your way out of structural problems. Pushing self-care as the solution to legitimate challenges leads you begin to believe that it is truly you and only you who is the problem.
*
Sometimes, the inspiration for a talk comes from finding the right slide show theme. I’m a visual person. Color and design speak to me in a way that I cannot articulate, and I allow myself to not only follow but lean into them. I picked a theme that was black with neon pinks and greens throughout.
Two weeks before the talk, I put together the first slide. It was a guide to square breathing (sometimes called box breathing). I’d lead conference attendees in this very simple and effective breath work exercise to ground them into the space before I talked. By doing this, I can not only center myself but offer an easy form of self-care for days when working in the library gets to be A Little Too Much.
I then deleted the slide.
I undeleted it.
Then deleted and undeleted it again.
I lost that weekend of putting the presentation together because every time I thought about starting this way– I’d done something similar in the past and used this technique when I met with counseling clients in our first session and when appropriate in subsequent sessions–it did not feel right. Something was off. Something was inauthentic, even though the technique itself was one I wanted to pass along to a room of busy, overstretched, underpaid, beleaguered library workers.
But it felt like doing too much.
*
Eventually, I elected to do something pretty basic for the talk. Attendees anticipated a conversation about mental health, touching on the things we have refused to talk about culturally around COVID, and where and how the library can be a place for young people to find…not mental health relief, because that’s not the job of the library, but a break from the things that make navigating their mental health difficult.
I broke the talk down into three key parts:
The mental health challenges facing adults in the United States right now following a once in a life time traumatic event that no one has bothered to properly talk about, unpack, or grieve, paired with the unique mental health difficulties of working in a library right now when public institutions and employees are targeted by a loud, well-funded, dangerous portion of the population. This is the portion where I would pull out my current research obsession, which is that ADHD/autism diagnoses in adult women doubled between 2020 and 2022. I like this study because it’s an opportunity to point out that it’s because more women are advocating for themselves and because it’s a perfect example of how many issues there are in the mental health field. If your guidelines are tailored to 12-year-old boys and insurance companies force you to make a diagnosis after meeting with a client for a whole 50 minutes in order to get paid, is it any wonder how many people get missed? How many folks slip through? Add to it that many symptoms of autism and ADHD are those which align with anxiety and depression, and you cannot blame mental health professionals for making the wrong call. They are but working with the tools they have in a field that is rigid and regulated and demands self-care over structural change.
The current mental health challenges faced by teenagers in the United States. They are largely not different from adults except that because today’s teens are more diverse in gender, race, ethnicity, and immigration experiences, their mental health struggles are amplified on the personal level if silenced on the societal level. All of that data about how bad things are for teen girls released last winter should not have shocked the number of adults that it did. But, you know, the average adult hates teenagers, the phones and TikTok are all teens care about, they are failing to learn basic skills in school, and so on and so forth. This audience, of course, was not the average adult audience, so most of the information here confirmed what they see every single day. I hoped that seeing the statistics of how much one trusted adult a teen has in their life can impact their mental health was a reminder that for many young people, that one adult might just be the librarian who asks them how they’re doing or what they’re reading every week.
Finally, I looked at where libraries and mental health intersect. What can libraries do to better address and accommodate the mental health needs within their community? It’s here I talk about things like the curb cut effect–how creating programs or event fliers that take accessibility into account helps everyone (it might sound silly to someone who does not have a mental health condition, for example, to put on a program flier that there is ample free parking at the library, but that tiny line of text can do wonders for *so many* potential attendees). It’s also the portion of the talk where looking at what libraries can do by reaching and looking outward is only effective and cognizant of mental health when libraries also look inward. Are there policies that give staff an opportunity to pull a self-care parachute if the need comes up during the work day? Are you comfortable acknowledging that because you’re not licensed mental health providers, you can and should only offer so much mental health support to your community? You can have the most incredible panel of local mental health professionals show up for an event, but if your staff is drowning, you’re not modeling wellness for anyone.
There was a lot of information in those slides and a lot of statistics. But it was the final slide that I think conveyed the most important thingt to my audience–and, as it turns out, to myself.
The square breathing exercise–plus an anyone-can-do-it guide to individual yoga and meditation–followed two slides’ worth of references and resources. I wanted that to be made available for my attendees, but I did not want it to be a distraction.
*
I’d initially felt bad when I arrived at the hotel the afternoon before the event. It was a little chilly and rainy, but here I was in a place I’d never been before. Instead of going and enjoying a dinner by myself and admiring the St. Lawrence River or spending some extra time prepping for the talk and the roundtable discussion I’d be offering, I put on my pajamas, ate some cheese curds I’d picked up at a grocery store, turned on HGTV, and crawled into the king size bed at 5 pm.
The moment I finished giving that talk, though, I felt different.
A few minutes into the first section, my throat got that itching sensation. I was going to begin coughing. I did, and before I even could apologize, there was a glass of water on the podium for me.
Then another.
Then not one, not two, but three different attendees rushed to bring cough drops to me as well.
A couple of drinks later, the itch was gone and my voice was back to normal. But when I walked away after the talk–laughably before I asked if anyone had questions–my heart grew significantly seeing how cared for I was in that moment.
I returned to that podium to take questions. The initial anticipation-cum-anxiety gone, I waited to see what sparked the interest of attendees. Several were, like me, much more relieved following the talk. They were seen as people who work within a system and could appreciate how complex it is to try to care for yourself while also being conscious of how to best serve–and change!–the structures where necessary. Perhaps it was recognizing how seen I was during that talk, perhaps it was the audience being so generous and attentive, and perhaps it was because I had done nothing but relax the evening before and morning of the talk, I turned to a question that I had been asked privately earlier.
“You call yourself a counselor-in-training. Is that for real or is that meant to be tongue-in-cheek?” the attendee who’d sat with me at breakfast asked.
I haven’t and am still not ready to talk a lot about leaving school. I did not want to lay that out with the question asker, as my feelings are not their responsibility nor should they feel the burden of them by asking a relatively simple question. In the moment, I said that I might address it in the talk and if they had more questions, feel free to ask after. I meant it, too.
In that ballroom, nearly every table seated to capacity, I said that after two years, I quit my graduate program in clinical mental health counseling. It was the first time I’ve said it out loud to people who weren’t close to me or part of the decision-making process.
I wish I could remember anything else I said after. I don’t. What happened was that a flood of relief washed over me. I stood there in my truth and owned a difficult, life-changing, unbelievably expensive decision that forever will alter my future.
That night, I took myself out for an appetizer, dessert, and a walk along the St. Lawrence. The rain could not stick to my skin because my body was releasing two+ years’ worth of doing too damn much.
*
It’s kismet when something going on in your life is supplemented by a good podcast episode or blog post on the topic and you hadn’t intentionally sought it out. Where I saw my talk being about mental health–and it was–it was also a talk about being kind to yourself as a way to buck a system that demands more and more from you and gives in return less and less.
The Monday I returned from the conference trip, none of my normal podcast listens had a fresh episode, so I went through some that I don’t always immediately turn to. That, it turns out, was meant to be.
Jocelyn K. Glei’s “Hurry Slowly” is about finding ways not only to live a creative life, but to find spiritual meaning and deep fulfillment in the creative life. Her April 17 episode could not have captured my current moment any more perfectly, even though my initial reason for listening ended up being supplanted by something else entirely.
Guest Cody Cook-Parrott and Glei talk at length about what it means to reinvent yourself in a digital space. I’ve been in the process of transitioning more of my energy to Substack, and one of the things I’m hoping to do before mid-May is fully rename this newsletter and space. When I named it “Stacked Thoughts,” I pulled from my long-time book blog STACKED. The name and sentiment still fit, but something about this space in particular feels different–it feels creatively liberating in a way I have not felt in a long time. I can talk about book bans as much as I can talk about the creative process or about why the average adult is so wrong about young people or about the books I’ve been reading.
The episode covers these moments of reinvention, but when Glei asks Cook-Parrott about what stage of change they thought they might be in, Cook-Parrott responds by saying chrysalis. They say it without hesitation–it just comes out–but then they qualify it a bit before once again landing with confidence that it’s chrysalis. A chrysalis is, of course, a point of being deep in transition, but not necessary a space where you’re divorced from your key components. You’re not yet fully formed into whatever it is that is new, and whatever you bring with you from the old is still there, hanging out.
It’s stillness and calm amid transformation that has already happened and that will happen again. You are waiting, but you’re not stalling. There is a big difference.
In the counseling literature, we might call it the contemplation stage. You’ve made–or have been forced to make–the decision to do something different. Now, you’re holding onto everything you already know and looking at all of what’s possible ahead of you without having yet stepped foot into it.
The chrysalis is stillness.
The chrysalis is a moment in time.
The chrysalis is knowing that you’ve got everything you need in this moment and this moment is enough. It is grounding and settling and sitting with the whole of who you are with the knowledge that you get to take that with you into the next place. It is a little messy but that mess is cozy, snug, safely tucked into a shell that is necessary and protective–but also only temporary.
I do remember another thing I said when I told the audience I had just left school.
“I don’t lose the knowledge, insight, and self-discovery that happened over the last two years, and I am personally better for it.”
*
No amount of creating a self-care plan can stand in for actual self-care. You can write about all of the exercise you’ll do, all of the salads you’ll eat, and all of the minutes of sleep you’ll get by crawling into bed at a specific time and getting out when the first alarm bell rings in the morning. But planning it isn’t living it.
This month has been one of my worst months in a long time, and yet, I’ve done more true self-care than I ever recall doing before in my life. Little of it has been fun or relaxing or worthy of the grid. It’s been internal as I allow time and space and nature to go on around me while I’m in this chrysalis stage. My shell is protective, but it is not eternal.
I am in no hurry to break out. I have been in a hurry for years to make everything that wasn’t working fit into spaces they weren’t meant to go. My mind, my body, and my spirit have suffered. Listening to those internal cues and calls and drives is all I need to do, and I do not need to make excuses for honoring my inner nature. My inner wants.
It is not a waste to spend the evening in bed with television, and it’s not a virtue to cram in more than you’ve given the space to. Our seasons of life do not define us; we define the seasons. For me, this is the season of cutting back, of not being tethered to a calendar of events, of dropping more balls than usual. Of wondering if it’s anxiety or depression or grief or some other secret fourth thing or understanding this is just what it is to be in this moment without trying to carve it into something it otherwise cannot be.
If it feels like too much, it probably is.
*
I lied about ending my presentation with the slide above.
There was one more slide after my references and after both the slide on yoga self-practice and meditation (which dispelled the myth that convinced me back in the day that meditation was “impossible” and “not for me”).
It was this:
The sparkly edges of a butterfly’s wings inside a chrysalis are visible on the outside for a reason. Your shine doesn’t dim when you take your time.
*The kindest comment I got post-talk was that I have this way of saying things directly but not in a cruel or authoritative manner. I like to think that is one of my skills and something that will continue with me on this journey: I don’t want to sugar coat and I don’t want dodge the facts, but I also want to give ample room and space for every person to do with that information what it is they need to do. Every person is different–that makes us enough.