People doing things at home, for better or worse
Plus Cheryl Strayed! Emotional neglect! Andrew McCarthy! Oak Park, Illinois!
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Cheryl Strayed on the podcast
There are a lot of places one can go in an interview with the author Cheryl Strayed. You can talk about her experience hiking the Pacific Crest Trail back in 1995, a trip that became the basis for her book Wild and the movie version of that book with Reese Witherspoon playing Cheryl.
You can talk about the new Hulu tv series Tiny Beautiful Things, based on Cheryl’s advice column, Dear Sugar. In this one, she’s played by Sarah Pidgeon and Kathryn Hahn.
And indeed I touched on both of those in the interview. But ultimately it was more about listening to inner voices.
From the show notes:
We all have voices inside ourselves that give us advice on what to do in a given situation. Not talking about literal voices that you genuinely hear, just thoughts that you have when a decision needs to be made or something needs to be navigated. And those voices sometimes contradict each other so you need to know which one has your best interests at heart. Author Cheryl Strayed refers to her negative and unhelpful voice as her ITS, which stands for Inner Terrible Someone, while the one that’s really got her back, that makes her feel genuinely good is the Wise Inner Sage.
School avoidance on the rise since covid
USA Today has a report on the apparent rising number of cases of students simply refusing to go to school.
“We saw a larger shift in kids who were on the cusp before and then after COVID started refusing completely,” said Krystina Dawson, a school psychologist and mental health supervisor for Trumbull Public School District in Connecticut. “Once the pandemic hit and we introduced remote learning, kids got comfortable in their homes.”
School refusal cases may have also grown as students report experiencing anxiety at record levels. A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis found adolescents experiencing anxiety or depression increased by one-third from 2016 to 2020. The same report also found access to mental health services worsened during the pandemic.
“A lot of school refusers, when March 2020 happened, they were like, ‘Welcome to my world,’” Dalton said. “This was these kids’ lives.”
Meanwhile parents who work from home are suffering plenty as well
Just what a world, huh? In another article also in USA Today, the work-from-home model isn’t all sunshine and unicorns for parents.
Roughly 4 in 10 parents say that when they work from home, there are times they go days without leaving their house, while 33% say they "feel very isolated,'' when working remotely, according to the ninth annual Modern Family Index, conducted by The Harris Poll for Bright Horizons, a global provider of early education, child care and workforce education services.
No word on whether the poll was commissioned by the American Association of Downtown Office Buildings but let’s just say it wasn’t, especially because that’s not a real organization.
I’ve been working from home for a little over three years now. It was a covid thing at first, then it was a getting laid off thing, then it was a starting my own business of which I was the only employee thing. And as I type this, my wife has gone off to work for the day and my daughter has gone to school and I’m just sitting in my little room alone, save for a quietly snoring black lab (a second dog keeping guard over us for some reason from the other room). And as great as the dogs are and as wonderfully short as the commute to work is, I do experience a little gut punch knowing that I’m on my own for the duration of the day.
I can get together with a friend for lunch or coffee, if I make those plans. I can grab the laptop and go work in a coffee shop, if I manage to get myself together and find a good place with a good table and wi-fi. But mostly I know I’ll be alone. And while there are many ways in which I prefer my job now to the one I had working in an office with other people, I can’t honestly say that my mental health is better. I miss people, even though I consider myself an introvert and often kept to myself in office settings. I don’t really see the situation changing much in the future either. Maybe I’ll build some mannequins and name them Jennifer and Ted.
5 Triggers for Adults With Childhood Emotional Neglect
Psychology Today has them and number four is a good ‘un:
Needing help: Going to your parents over and over again in childhood only to be let down creates deep feelings of disappointment. Over time, you learn that it’s painful to rely on people and that asking for help is useless. This is because each time you searched for support, your feelings of aloneness were amplified. When you do need help now as an adult, you might become very uncomfortable. Asking for help triggers your fear of disappointment and lack of trust that even those who love you will actually come through for you.
Profile of artist Chris Ware
I suspect that a lot of people who read/listen to me might be fans of Chris Ware, a cartoonist whose work one often sees in the New Yorker or affiliated with This American Life.
Watching this profile, I learned that he lives and works (from home!) in Oak Park, Illinois, which is where my wife is from. Chris Ware, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Kroc, Cecily Strong, all kinds of people.
I shared the childhood emotional neglect snippet with my husband who then read the article, bought the author’s book, AND started listening to her podcast. Thanks for helping!