Our Mental Health, Our Realities: A Reflection in 4 Parts

I was recently laid off.  It was a job where I wholeheartedly aligned with the mission and vision and fully committed myself to my job description's stated goals and outcomes. I’d venture to say that's what most people do when they are hired to do work they truly believe in. As a clinician, I also recognize how having one's job unexpectedly eliminated can impact a person’s sense of self and overall well-being.    

I grew up in the 80s playing Atari, first in arcades, and then in the ’90s, Nintendo somehow made its way into our living room. My brother, cousins, and I would hover around a floor-model TV and embody Mario and Luigi, hopping through different worlds, collecting coins that would give us life, all this to save the princess. That was the noble mission and vision we worked wholeheartedly towards in those days. The fixation caused us to abondon our outdoor play, left us all sleep deprived with every Mario Brothers sound effect etched in our brains and yet somehow joyful.

 Last weekend, my family experienced a virtual reality game for the first time. The best way I can describe it is that we freely roamed a virtual reality space where we were tasked with slaying fire-breathing dragons. In this virtual world, we had to rely on each other to succeed in our mission. The technology combined full-body motion capture and high-quality haptics, so we were in an entirely realistic and utterly immersive experience, needless to say, a long way from Atari.

I began to reflect on these early game experiences after reading a blog article that discussed grind culture and how it doesn’t align with Montessori. While the piece highlighted a few good points, as a social worker and equity practitioner, I’ve always been more interested in what’s not stated.  Who tends to be most susceptible to this game of grind culture and why? How do we see grind culture's short- and long-term impact disproportionately affecting BIPOC Montessori educators, leaders, and students?  

During this third week of Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, I’m reflecting on how our Montessori organizations maintain and perpetuate work cultures, systems, and ways of being that can damage the psyches of targeted and marginalized employees, faculty, and staff. Ultimately, I’m most curious about what’s behind a concept like grind culture how we all are subject to it, and its impact on our relationships with each other and broader humanity
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So, back to the fire-breathing dragons. Before we began, a man descended from the sky, outlining our mission and instructing us on what was required for success. He equipped us with tools and weaponry, delivered a motivational speech, and dispatched us on our quest. Despite knowing it was a game, that none of what I was witnessing was real - neither the spiders falling from the sky nor the eight-foot-tall robots assaulting us from all directions - I was wholeheartedly committed to completing the mission. My determination was genuine, evidenced by the sweat on my brow, palpitations in my chest, and the lingering pain that wracked my body afterward. Throughout the entire VR experience, I couldn't help but be curious about what was occurring in real-time. My attention was completely absorbed by the task at hand, and I discovered that attempting to process the events as they transpired only served as a distraction, causing me to lose focus. The man from the sky made well-timed appearances throughout the ordeal; just when we felt overwhelmed, he would reappear with another pep talk and new tools, reinforcing the power dynamics and reasserting our focus on the objective.

What does any of this have to do with our mental health?  I’ll answer by asking more questions for us all to ponder.

• How much of yourself do you feel you give over to your job/organization?
• Where do you go when you need to process the realities of your job?
• What short/long-term impact does your job have on your physical body?
• What happens when we fully invest in someone else’s mission/vision, even if there seems to be alignment?
• What happens to our psyches when we are told we can no longer contribute to our organization's mission, when our tools are deemed useless or when positions are eliminated without explanation, when classrooms are downsized, priorities shift, and when contracts aren’t extended? 
• How does the Montessori community hold space for the mending that needs to happen when our realities shift before our eyes? 

These are questions I intend to explore in my daily practice.

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