Back to Normal or the New Normal?

Happy Wednesday Folks,

Yes, you're not mistaken, I've missed two days in a row of posting to my blog, and it's 3:45pm on Wednesday and I am just now getting to write down some thoughts.  

I guess that things are getting "back to normal" because the days are humming, and I am finding little time in my day available to put down my written words of school counselor wisdom.  This is both good - it means I am seeing you all more in-person, and bad because I think that the info being shared is important and can reach a wide audience.  So I am going to continue to do my best until the end of the year to post as regularly as possible.  

Things starting to get back to normal gives me pause.  I am happy to be vaccinated and slowly reconnecting with my family.  I am happy that my kids are both playing a sport this spring and that we are at the local park four days a week.  I am happy that I am working with students in an afterschool activity two days a week, but I am also feeling more stress of being pulled in lots of different directions as the school year begins to draw to a close.  Going from nothing (for the most part) to a full-on busy schedule has been kind of a shock to the system.  

It has afforded me some opportunity, however, to reflect on the things I liked about "the new (or the old??) normal" that we all had to adjust to over the past 12+ months.  I really liked the slower pace at times.  I liked being more connected to my kids and my partner.  I liked spending lots of time reflecting on my feelings and our collective existence.  I liked the focus on removing the stigma around mental health and confronting our feelings.  I liked the skills we practiced around personal responsibility, time management, boundary setting, and technology usage, and I liked how thoughtful we all were able to be about what was most important to us.  

Now that we are getting "back to normal" we need to work to hang on to the things that were better - or at the very least incorporating them into the normal.  Writing for me has been cathartic - as I've mentioned before - and it has helped me reach a wider audience in my practice as a school counselor.  I need to figure out how to do it regularly next year and beyond.  Placing a strong emphasis on asking for mental and emotional help when we are struggling is something that we need to continue to do as a community.  Asking for help does not mean you are weak!  On the contrary, it means you are incredibly strong, and I encourage you to share how you feel with those that support you.  Your bravery will hopefully get you what you need and may encourage someone close to you to share their struggles as well.  Lastly figuring out what is most important to me and my family has helped us to narrow our focus and save or plan for bigger things that are most important to us.  I hope to continue to review my family's most important values regularly and make sure that we are acting in alignment with them.  

I hope that you too will take stock of the back to normal vs. the new normal, and what you learned during the past year.  How do you want to incorporate what you've learned with how you will continue to move forward?  If you want to share your thoughts, feel free to post a comment and share with other readers what is important to you.  

I hope that over the past year, we have found ourselves a bit.  I hope that we have created a story for who we are, who we want to be, and how we want to share ourselves with others moving forward.  

 

  

I hope to be back here sharing more with you tomorrow...

Peace,

Mrs. Hempey