My Personal Guarantee

I’ve been wrestling with the idea that this blog is supposed to be about helping people find their authentic calling, and yet you may think I’m continually throwing random ideas at you. They’re all connected, I promise.

The blog starts with entries about being authentic. But interspersed throughout is seemingly unconnected material. In my mind, it makes perfect sense, but looking at the various entries from an outsider’s eyes, it also looks a bit off the wall.

​An explanation

For me, the Triple A - or Ascending Aortic Aneurysm - that my husband lived through was the biggest factor in changing the way I live my life. Realistically, he shouldn’t be here today. That was enough for me to reevaluate my goals, values, and faith. To read more about that, you should check out the You Never Know entry.  

Right upon the heels of that, we had Covid. You can believe whatever you want about it, but all of our lives changed drastically because of it. I’d never taught class using Zoom before that or tried to conduct a lesson while wearing a mask. For the record, I hope to never have to do that again.

But it all changed me. It all made me reevaluate how I want to spend my days and where my focus should be, just in case my time here is limited.

Steve Jobs said something in a Stanford commencement speech I used to show my students that I can’t forget. He said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

I see the connections with all that I’ve done in my life that have led up to this moment in time. I trust that I’m right where I’m supposed to be.

Along with following my authentic path is the idea that I didn’t just teach high school kids for 17 years for no reason. They were teaching me too, and crying out for help.

In the conversations I had with kids about where they felt called to go in life, there were so many who had absolutely no inkling.

But if you think about it, everything you do on your phone takes all your focus. Ask most teens to pull up their phone usage stats, and you’ll be amazed that they have time to even brush their teeth. They’re on their phones so much that their authentic voices have been pushed aside and silenced. These kids are our future.

I was listening to Channel 1 on Sirius/XM one afternoon this week, and I heard the DJ telling a story about his daughter, who is a senior in high school. He started out by saying that this year in her school, they are locking up all cell phones from the moment they get to school, until the last bell rings, “they’re literally cut off from the rest of the world,” he said.

“So she bought a burner phone. In the morning, when she enters the school building, she places the burner phone in the bag that gets locked up, and keeps her actual phone with her.”

At this point, I’m ticked off with this man. For me, eight hours away from my phone sounds like heaven. What a gift they are giving these kids to be able to retrain their brains so they can learn to focus again. But he’s not done.

He goes on, “So she and I have this deal. When she gets caught, as we all know she will, and the school calls me to tell me that they’ve caught her with this burner phone, I’m supposed to act completely shocked and offended. I’m going to assure them that she’ll be punished for this atrocity.” And he laughs.

​Yep, I’m going there…

Now I’m furious. This is why teachers can’t get anywhere with their students. Parents like this are what’s wrong with education today.

I’d love to call him and mention a few of the statistics from Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. I’d tell him that the ‘Great Rewiring’ of children’s brains began to be noticeable between 2010 and 2015. During this time, the increase in major depressive episodes increased nearly 150%. It affected all races and social classes.

This was BEFORE Covid.

Haidt and another man asked teens a series of questions during these years, about mental health. Many of those kids answered yes to questions such as have you experienced a long period of feeling sad, empty, or depressed, or a long period in which you lost interest and became bored with most of the things you used to enjoy?

Boredom is GOOD for you. That’s when your brain comes up with all kinds of ideas that perhaps you should pursue and create a crazy, amazing life for yourself. That’s why the entries I add to this blog make sense to me, and I hope to you, too, my faithful readers. I promise, authenticity is at the core of every single entry.