Exhaustion

A friend of mine at another university, finding the energy among the students in one of her classes flagging, invited them to share how they were feeling. These are anonymous virtual post-its, and I'm sure almost any class in the country - in the world - right now might generate similar expressions of shame and guilt given an instructor compassionate to inquire. We're all worn out, on many levels, but her students, like mine and many others, are also struggling with all this through screens in their childhood bedrooms or parents' basement. My friend remarked: isolation from peer groups means that many students don't have school social groups to talk to, which helps to contextualize and collectivize their feelings. Many of them are taking in the exhaustion as an individual failure. Seeing each other's distress may have helped here! How compassionate we need to be to each other in this pandemic time, and how much we still cannot fix.