In My First Year As A Teacher, I Told One Of My Classes that I Wasn't a Happy Person, and Let Me Tell You--They Were Shook.

I don't even remember how it came up. It was a casual conversation during work time. I didn't expect it to be a big deal. I just remember saying something like "I mean, I'm not happy, and I'm doing okay." I'll never forget the look of shock on their faces. "Mr. Howard... you're not?!"

The message was, again, supposed to be "I don't think I'm happy, but I'm doing just fine." What they heard was "I'm not happy." Mental health issues seem to be more prevalent than ever for teenagers. Maybe they look up to us thinking that those issues go away when you become an adult and feel like you have more control over your life. Maybe knowing that I was struggling despite having a job that I loved was too much for them. Or maybe they just felt bad for me. But it made me realize that I don't really know how to talk about mental health with students.

When someone like Anthony Bourdain commits suicide, it's earth shattering for a lot of people. Why? Because we look at smiling celebrities on the TV screen and feed off of the perceived happiness. Maybe you can't get out of bed, but at least you can throw on a show and live in a land where happiness exists in a way that feels totally inaccessible to you. We see the on camera. We don't see the behind the scenes. How would you act if you constantly had a camera pointed at your face and you knew that millions of people were watching? I may never know that feeling, but I do know what it's like to interact with over a hundred teenagers on a daily basis--teenagers who range from experiencing what we might call a normal level of anxiety and doubt for a teenager to the students diagnosed with severe depression. And I don't know what to say to them, because I don't even know how to talk about my own issues.

But maybe conversations about my mental health should stay out of a professional relationship. I'm there to teach. They are there to learn. Passion certainly shows through, but there is no reason that emotion should. But when you spend every day with someone in their formative years, you start to notice things. You notice when a student seems down. You notice when they have a string of days when they always seem down. You have a series of objectives you want them to master, but you start to realize that there might be something going on that will make that goal impossible no matter what you do. So maybe you offer some words of encouragement. You don't want to overstep, but you don't want to ignore it, either. So you say something like "Hey, I noticed you were a bit down today. I'm here if you ever want to talk" or "Let me know if you ever need to take a break from class." But that never feels like enough. All you really want to do is shake them and say "I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE GOING THROUGH BUT I KNOW IT PROBABLY SUCKS A LOT AND IT'S TOTALLY VALID AND IT MAY BE AN UP AND DOWN STRUGGLE FOR YOUR WHOLE LIFE BUT YOU ARE STRONG AND IT WILL TOTALLY SHAPE WHO YOU BECOME IN A BEAUTIFUL WAY" and so on and so forth. And yeah, that type of thing is not in our job description. That type of thing falls more to the counselors. And they do a wonderful job. It's not in my job description because it's not my expertise. But then it just feels so weird for me to say "Hey, I know you could barely get yourself out of bed this morning and every morning but hey here is this thing that I'm asking you to give your remaining mental resources to:"

But if a student is feeling crappy, the fact remains that we still have work that needs to be done. I think the hardest part about dealing with mental health issues is realizing that they don't really just go away suddenly. You have to learn to live with them. You have to learn to function. You have to have the self-awareness to say "I'm really not doing okay, and this may be the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but I am going to press on." Then, maybe you start to build up some momentum. You may even have some good days. Maybe, eventually, you have enough good days that it starts to feel normal. You start to find some success in school. You find people and things that pull you along, and you start to feel a little lighter. I want to recognize that people experience this kind of thing on a wide spectrum, which is another reason it's so complicated to talk about. Some people need medication and professional help. Some people just need a friend by their side. But on all levels, what I have found to be true is that you need to keep moving. 

So I know my message can't be "I know you're going through some terrible stuff right now, we just aren't going to work for a while." Maybe that's appropriate and needed occasionally. But I believe the overall message needs to be instead "I know you're going through some terrible things right now. And that sucks and it's going to make everything you do a lot harder. I will be here for you through that struggle. Learning to fight through this is going to be what defines you. Let's get to work." And sometimes I want to tell them that I need to hear that message just as much as they need to hear it. And I want to tell them that sometimes people tell me that exact message and I ignore it anyway. It's a complicated battle. Sometimes we take losses. I want to say that, but I haven't found the best way to navigate that conversation as the professional in the room. My expertise is math and teaching. Any thoughts I have about mental health are all built from experience and observation. I want to help you, but I don't know what to say. I want to help you, but we need to do math. I want to help you, but I don't know how to do that in the hour and half we spend together twice a week. I want to help you, and at the same time I'm not always sure how to help myself.

If any students are reading this, you should know that sometimes I am doing really great. Sometimes everything clicks and everything feels right. I do what I can to appreciate those moments and figure how to create more of them. Sometimes everything feels really hard. I'm doing my best to embrace and learn from those moments too. Sometimes I am flat out not okay, and I'm learning to be okay with that. And if you are experiencing your own struggles, I am here for you to support you, even if I don't always know how.