Back-to-School Planning for the End of the World
Don’t confuse information with answers
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I'll return to teaching in about two weeks.
I'm not ready.
I've swept off my desk and deep-cleaned my apartment and drawn up a broad plan for the books we'll read, but my mental landscape remains cluttered with sundry anxieties.
In the spirit of counting my blessings before diving into my snakehole of fears, here's what has felt really good for the past two months: a cool breeze and hazy-horizoned views while hiking parts of the Cumberland Plateau with my dad. Balancing on a paddleboard on the Tennessee River with my mom. Eating potato chips and talking about the Holy Spirit with one grandmother. Watching an Esther Williams movie with my other grandmother, while she declared Jimmy Durante "not as funny as he thinks he is." The subsiding tang of Flamin' Hot Cheetos as friends and I read Richard II aloud one Tuesday night. A satisfying gallery wall of pictures, which I finally mounted after two years. Command-hooking the shit out of the errant cords in my living room: now they are off the floor, contained to the baseboards, and hidden behind the furniture. All delightful, but this last gives me a concentrated dopamine hit like a wine-fueled kiss under starlight in Paris.
Nevertheless, as I try to get my head right for back-to-school time, I find my brain tizzying in every other direction but the books. In two weeks, I'll walk across town, mask up, and teach children about literature and writing. I'll do this while this pandemic persists into a second autumn, after the US has withdrawn from a 20-year war in Afghanistan and leaves that country in turmoil, and as the UN declares a "code red for humanity." A bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils is just not going to fix my pre-school jitters this time.
What's an anxiety-prone, cautious overthinker to do? These global events over which I have no control concern me, and I have more worries to spare.
To find a reliable index of my anxieties large and small, I went to the most unsparing of sources: my internet browser. Here are the tabs, read but not yet closed, which hover like demographically specific ghosts in my Chrome closet:
Several online shopping carts where I am avoiding an impulse purchase, but still clinging to a dream of silk pajamas and better-fitting late-pandemic jeans.
A page where I could buy Meaghan O'Connell's book about "Motherhood before I was ready," because I'm afraid of being too old to have kids but also petrified of motherhood before I am ready.
Personal finance articles with titles like "How much money do you need to buy a house?" and "What is an FHA 203k loan?" and "This rule of 72 might inspire you to save more,” because I worry I will never have enough.
The Hamilton County, Tennessee tax assessor's property database, a deeper and more local layer of my desire to know if I could ever afford a house in my hometown, which also leads me to wonder how long I'll want to stay in New York, which also makes me wonder if I'd miss my friends here too much to leave.
Kitchen windowsill-related queries like "How to grow mint indoors”
A reference article about recovering from "Hamstring Strain"
An on-the-nose essay by a former colleague about "Back to School Anxiety"
The CDC Covid data tracker for my county. Do I think the CDC will forget to update this if I don't keep it on my radar constantly?
An online save-the-date for a friend's wedding next year! It’s not all fear!
Fittingly, a Wikipedia article about Taylor Swift's song "champagne problems"
Am I a high-strung, college-educated white woman in her early thirties? Obviously!
I see the tiny tiles in my browser window as avatars for my questions and undecided actions. No tile promises resolution. Maybe the internet promises information, but each article can merely update me on my more or less constant concerns, remind me that I haven't yet bought a plane ticket for that wedding, figured out which therapist will accept my insurance, or saved enough for a down payment in Hamilton County. Each tile is just a gateway, hyperlinked to keep me reading, clicking, and searching for the best deal, the best approach to a milestone, the clearest explanation of whatever byzantine system I am trying to navigate.
On my phone, it looks like a grid, but it's still a web. Content is designed to whip-catch my interest and extend my anxiety by suggesting more links to click. No personal finance resource can really answer the soul-deep question of whether I'll be okay in the future (five years from now, next week, or at retirement) with any answer better than "Maybe!" No home-buying resource can tell me if I should leave New York or stay forever.
Marie Kondo inspired us in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up to release things that do not give us joy, or as a New Yorker cartoon puts it, to find "the life-changing magic of shoving everything into a huge Hefty bag and leaving it for someone else to deal with." Sometimes curiosity and panic-googling soothe me, at least momentarily. Some part of me appreciates the ability to search and find answers (or at least ideas) for everything. From intractable problems of global foreign policy to the minutiae of practical indoor gardening, the internet validates my concerns. I'm not the only one to wonder about this. I'm not the only one who is confused.
But can I search-engine my way out of fear or distraction and into joy? Consider the websites that follow up on my questions. The ones that reach out to see if I found what I was looking for. Those emails, as you probably know, come from online retailers who send an abandoned-cart alert if you visit the site without making a purchase. The ones who care if my questions could be resolved are trying to sell me something.
Many of these tabs are my fears disguised as research. It is okay, and it will not worsen my dilemmas, if I spend mental energy on other things (like my job) just for a little bit.
I decided to clear my browser and mind by closing them out. Doing so allowed me to acknowledge my anxieties one by one, but also to set the problems aside as too big to solve, too early to tell, or too much for right now. It was less a banishment than a thanks to each one for its service in my learning so far. Each essay, graphic, and post had come flying to my fingertips in my quest to be more comfortable in my larger size, to grasp the cost of home ownership, to glimpse the demands of motherhood, to look clear-eyed at the state and future of the planet.
I began to send each link gratefully back to the internet whence it came. But how to say goodbye?
The online shopping carts: I selected some jeans that would fit my post-quarantine body, thought to myself, "It is okay to buy a size that fits more comfortably," clicked "Buy," and closed the window.
The home-buying sites: "Right now, I do not need to buy a house in another state. I have a year left on my apartment lease in New York City. I was curious to learn about home prices, and I learned that homes are really expensive right now. I'll keep saving, and I'll revisit my thinking around this big life decision in a few months." Tab: Closed.
The personal finance sites: "I have been reading these all summer, and I have put my money in the wisest places I can think to put it. I am not going to learn anything new by keeping this article open to read again tomorrow." Close.
The Taylor Swift wikipedia article: "Nice to know, and I will probably never need it again." Done.
The Hamstring Strain WebMD article: "Time to RICE my leg and close this article." X-out.
The coinsurance vs copays article: "I talked to a human being from the insurance company this morning, and she confirmed what I learned. I can come back if I need a refresher. The information is not going anywhere."
Closing all my open browser tabs helped me understand what has been on my mind. It feels like a lot.
If you use your browser like an ongoing list of Things to Research, but really it's a list of Reasons to Stress About the Future, I recommend giving yourself the refreshing gift of a clean sweep. It's permission not to solve all problems right this minute.
Let the internet re-absorb some of that uncertainty so that, at least for tonight, you have the emotional and mental bandwidth to attend to the moment you are in. A childless person such as I am right now does not need to learn even more about how hard it is to afford childcare in the United States. I cannot save democracy or myself by doom scrolling.
A colleague of mine described her terror in flying, suggesting drily that some part of her must believe her hypervigilance keeps the plane aloft and intact. I am suggesting to myself that injustices and climate change and unreachable adult milestones and weight stigma will carry on causing strife in America, all without my unflagging support. Perhaps a chest-puffier stance is to tell myself I don’t need these fears, but I think it is truer to say that these fears do not need me. These things represented by internet tabs, the things I’m obsessing over or trying to ignore by learning Taylor Swift trivia, are fearsome all by themselves.
The stressors have done their job. They have clued me in to what matters to me, such as housing, a family, being connected and informed.
But what also matters to me is my job. I have lessons to prepare; I have problems within my power to solve. Before I can feel the warmth of freshly copied handouts and the pleasing heft of a stack of Twelfth Night, I send away these weightless but persistent vectors of my anxiety.
Tap, Whoosh. Thanks.
For now, off they go.