How can one practice self-care in the midst of a pandemic and in another semester in which familiar modes of teaching have to be adjusted? Feeling bewildered, frustrated, and uncertain are all appropriate responses to the present moment. Perhaps an initial step towards self-care is simply to recognize about these difficult emotions that one is experiencing them—and to feel them without the temptation of suppressing or dismissing them. Another key is to understand that you are not alone as you cope with teaching under the conditions of COVID-19, even if the pandemic makes it seem otherwise. In normal circumstances, it is okay to rely on each other, and in this extreme and unusual time, reaching out to colleagues, friends or making use of support services (like the Resources page of the Renée Crown Wellness Institute), and other university centers and programs (Campus Support Resources) is especially important and warranted.
In extraordinary ways, the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of our human frailty, yet our present moment can equally serve to remind us of what sustains us as human beings. In the academic setting of CU Boulder, this might mean finding purpose in the most fundamental or basic aspects of teaching: being a solid and stable presence for students, who themselves are often feeling isolated, mystified, and upset in this crisis. Also, depending on your comfort with sharing your perspective with your classes, it may be beneficial both to yourself and your students to relate your own feelings of struggle and frustration. Frank discussions of the challenges we face can help students to feel less isolated as they learn how others are faring and coping.
Scaling back the ambitions for your class this semester and giving yourself permission to do so is another means of practicing self-care in the pandemic. Such a decision allows you to define what is essential for your students to learn, and this can be a crucial means of refining your teaching and its purpose. The scope of the pandemic itself is so massive that a tendency might be to match its proportions in a grand or even a highly ambitious fashion. Identifying, however, what is most salient and realistic for your students to learn under compromised conditions may be more effective than trying to compensate for all that the pandemic has curtailed in face-to-face interactions.
Additional ways of practicing self-care are certainly available. Exhibiting kindness and understanding to others (and to yourself) can be a foundational first step. In a corollary manner, and as I have written elsewhere, practicing compassion and self-compassion as an approach to teaching can be constructive. There are other strategies as well. Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian, argues that games and playing are integral to culture and societal relations, going so far as to define human beings as Homo Ludens, or “man playing.” Extrapolating from Huizinga’s thought, I would advocate various activities of play, including impromptu dancing, writing or reading a poem, going for a walk, or playing a board game as various modes of self-care. Literary essayist Cyril Connolly, in The Unquiet Grave, advises “lunch with a new friend” as a temporary cure for angst. I might revise this, in our social-distanced times, with the following suggestion: to have a conversation with someone—a friend or a relative—much younger or older than yourself. The difference in perspective due to age can be helpful in and of itself. The poet Claudia Rankine, for her part, offers this, as a coping mechanism not for the COVID era but for all of her existence: “To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that….The sigh is the pathway to breath; It allows breathing. That’s just self-preservation. No one fabricates that. You sit down, you sigh. You stand up, you sigh. The sigh is a worrying exhale of an ache” (59-60).
References:
Connolly, Cyril. The Unquiet Grave: A World Cycle. NY: Persea, 2011.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1950.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis, MN: Greywolf Press, 2014.