Plain Plain Casey Jane

The Sunday Scaries are a millennial term for the feeling of dread and anxiety that hit our guts Sunday night after a weekend of all of our favorite things. We go from non-stop weeks of alarm clocks, offices, appointments and emails to drinking beers, sleeping in, enjoying the sunshine and catching up on episodes we’ve missed (or love too much to let go of). 

In my twenties I’ve been a full-time college student, fourth grade teacher, a non-profit manager, a yoga instructor, and now a R&D strategist, and to some degree I’ve experienced the Sunday Scaries with each of these occupations on my weekly schedule. I felt it most strongly when I was responsible for 80+ ten-year-olds and I knew that five a.m. alarm clock was coming for me. Even now, writing this blog post, I feel a bit of sadness saying goodbye to a weekend spent with friends and extra hours in the gym. 

The Sunday Scaries are, in fact, scary. They are not fun. But I don’t think they mean that you aren’t where you are supposed to be. 

“Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is the phrase that I personally attribute a lot of millennial anguish to. For the first time much of our generation was raised to believe that we could do anything and that we had options open to us. We started searching eagerly for the thing that would fulfill all of our needs, financial, mental, social, and spiritual. When one job didn’t check all the boxes (paycheck too low, pressure too high) we dutifully updated our resumes and hopped on board the next most promising ship to sail off in a new direction. 

Just like you shouldn’t expect your future partner to provide for everything, you shouldn’t expect your job to provide for everything either. I think the Sunday Scaries stem from that expectation, from the belief that if we aren’t 100% happy 100% of the time there must be something wrong. Instead, I think there are ways we can fill the gaps and assuage our anxieties so that we can head into our Monday’s with confidence and excitement.

Of course, if your boss is a tyrannical nightmare or your desk job is leaving you listless, or you just know that there’s something out there that fits more with your passions and purpose, YOU BETTER DO IT. But, if you’re not looking to jump ship and just want to enjoy your Sunday nights a little more, here are some things I do that help: 

Explore your discomfort

When that ugly feeling starts blooming in your belly, take a second to just sit with it. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert describes a process in which she communicates with her feelings. Yogis go for meditation. For me, it’s making a list and then unpacking that list. Usually I go from the “how am I feeling?” List to the “why am I feeling that way?” List to the “what can be done about it?” List. 

Get to the root of your less-than-desirable Sunday state and unpack it. Find the reason behind your emotion and tackle one small thing within your control to change it. It won’t fix the entire problem, but it will alleviate some of your worries and allow you to move forward without feeling paralyzed by nerves. 

The more you can do this in anything that makes you uncomfortable, the more you can learn about yourself and actually use those emotions to your advantage, #lifehack. 

Use Sunday nights to plan your week

If you couldn’t tell from my previously mentioned lists, I basically live to organize. So scheduling time to get organized and focused on Sunday nights was easy for me. Maybe there’s something else you love that you can add in to your Sunday evenings if you’re not a fan of planning. It could be a phone call to your family, or choosing a book or podcast that motivates and inspires you. Choose something that fills you up. 

For me, looking at my schedule to find out how to maximize my minutes gets me really jazzed about Monday. I use my goals to plan out my days, and I usually like to geek out and get pretty specific: I mean, I plan EVERYTHING, including when/what I’m going to eat, when I have large chunks of space to focus on longer-term projects and tasks like writing, and of course, gym time. I write out how I’m going to get myself closer to my goals over the next five days, including writing out the title of the book I’m reading and reminding myself that I need fifteen extra minutes after my workout to practice handstand drills. 

Doing this has become a wonderful practice in gratitude for me. As I look over my schedule it’s clear how lucky I am that I have the autonomy, but also the self-discipline, to pack in all the things I want for myself and then get after them week after week. And that get’s me really pumped for Monday. 

Have a treat and watch a movie

If all else fails, my old Teach for America roommate and I patented the Ultimate Vanquisher of Sunday Scaries: get some ice cream and watch a movie together. I promise you’ll head to bed feeling satisfied and assured that you’re ready for the week ahead. 

I like goals. So I came into adulthood at basically the perfect time for me, parallel to the self-optimization/self-improvement/self-help era. Everyone is looking for the next book to read, the next podcast to listen to, the next journal or app or program to improve their time management or character or leadership skills and I was right there in the middle of the search. Goals are great; they combine so many of my loves, from list-making to list-checking-off to reading and learning to that really good feeling of humble bragging to your friends (we all do it, don’t even start with me). 

I’ve been a goal machine since high school, tallying up hours spent studying, checking off the books I read or miles I ran, stacking up my achievements and living inside them like armor, like an igloo, like a home. I didn’t meet all of my goals (200 lb back squat, I’m looking at you), but there’s something innately satisfying about putting something onto paper and then working towards building it into reality. 

In April, I moved across the country from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to San Francisco, California to start a new job, a fell-out-of-the-sky-and-into-my-lap kind of job that didn’t give me the time to plan and prepare like I normally do. I left most of my belongings in a closet in my parent’s house or at Goodwill, taking only one suitcase of clothes and shoes, a few boxes of books, my yoga mat, my laptop. I sat in my new apartment and looked at the empty space, wondering what to fill it with. From the top of my San Francisco hill I looked out and wondered what to take in first. My brain went into over-drive, visions of who I would be and what I would do and all of my new goals, my hands twitching for the Notes stored in my phone, for a pen and paper, for anything. 

But then there was the craziness of moving, the unpacking of boxes, the meeting new people, the figuring out which bus to catch, and what time, and when. So I never got around to writing those goals down, and eventually I honestly just forgot about them. I just lived. 

I will never be an advocate of a goal-less existence, but I can tell you that it is now almost June and I haven’t crossed anything off of a checklist. I haven’t PR’d or reached a new personal best. I haven’t seen my name published in an article or stenciled across an award. I haven’t really stood out at all. 

But here’s what I have been doing; I’ve been going on walks, and sitting in parks. I’ve been drinking coffee and reading fiction. I’ve been eating lots of fruit and yogurt and ok yes, ice cream. I’ve been enjoying my new bed and my new sheets and going to bed by nine. 

I’ve also been learning how to code (sort of). I’ve been writing a novel, sentence by sentence every night on the train. I’ve been the first at the office and the last to leave. I’ve spent entire nights in the city from sun down to sun up. I’ve been holding handstands. I’ve been trying and sometimes not failing at cooking dinner for myself. 

And it’s been really fucking lovely. 

Sometimes even the things we love can start to feel like work. Sometimes a life lived under the constant scrutiny of social media and the self-improvement era can leave us feeling constantly inadequate. Sometimes what we need most is just do, anything, whatever we’re curious about, for no reason at all. 

I’ll get back to my lists and my pursuits and my hustle eventually. But for now I think I’ll just live, for a little while longer, and know that everything will be waiting for me when I get back. 

My job as the Kiva Tulsa Program Lead came to me at a time when I needed to prove myself to myself. I was unsure about my future, what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be, and where I was going. So I took a chance on a job application for a position in an industry I knew nothing about (and for those of you that are unfamiliar with Kiva, you can check out their website, but basically we offer community-supported business loans at 0% interest through crowdfunding, and it’s pretty sweet and desperately needed for entrepreneurs worldwide) and in true founder form a few people took a risk in giving that chance back to me. I was hired. 

Running a program and becoming immersed in the world of startups was like being enrolled in a business/investor/motivational speaker crash course, and I picked up my fair share of lessons along the way. But as I wrap up my time with Kiva, I’m thinking back on the most important pieces of advice I was given, and areas that truly altered my perception of my work and my life: 

Presence: Be in the moment with people 

Our days are a constant balance of tuning in or tuning out. As you approach the counter to order your morning cup of coffee, as you take your seat waiting for a presenter to being speaking, you have the opportunity to take full advantage of the present moment or to distance yourself and let time pass. You can observe the people around you, be genuine and appreciative of the barista serving you, and take a few moments to be in your moment, or you can take out your phone and tick through a few emails, update your Twitter feed. 

Now listen, I’m all for a good social media break. My current obsession is hand-lettering, and my Instagram feed is filled with videos of swirling color and beautiful words across the page. We all can appreciate taking a moment to ourselves, I just want to bring awareness to the moments when we could connect instead. This includes those bigger moments, when you’re in a meeting and you’re tempted to let your mind wander, or when you’ve agreed to get coffee with someone on a particularly stressful day. It’s easy to give yourself permission to tune someone out for a few minutes to doodle, or to write off a new person before you’ve even been introduced. It’s much harder to approach each situation giving your authentic, focused, best self. It’s more draining, for sure, and maybe it won’t always be worth it. I’m just saying, I’ve had my world shifted by so many moments I could have overlooked if I’d been perfecting my cat doodles or looking at Facebook notifications. 

Passion: If it matters to you, it matters

I believe that the world is a significantly better place because our human brains are capable of caring about so many vastly different things. Our minds are weird and vast and have an insatiable capacity for new ideas, hobbies, and perspectives. I’m grateful to the people who unabashedly chased their own passions, and encouraged me to do the same. Working with entrepreneurs taught me to capture whatever it is that excites me and hold it close. There is no limit to what we can think about, dream about, or be about. This goes for looking into a new career path, starting your own business, or learning something new. 

I used to choose to do things based on what other people would be impressed by, things that I could label as “accomplishments” or “making a difference.” But what a satisfying feeling it can be to rest in knowing that if I am interested in something, then that’s enough of a reason to pursue it further. Knowing this led me to Kiva, it led me to rock climbing, and it led me to start this blog. This type of passion-filled wandering has brought me most of the good things I have in my life, including an adopted dog that I’m pretty sure is actually an alien. 

Public speaking: It doesn’t get easier, you just get better

And now for a more grounded piece of advice: you will never say exactly what you mean to when you’re speaking to an audience, and even if you do, it will never come across exactly as you intend. Know that you will never get it perfect. But know that you can still produce an effective, inspiring message and that every opportunity to speak in front of people is a chance to get better at sharing your own story. 

I have no idea why I’m so drawn to roles where I’m required to be in front of an audience. Days when I was asked to speak on a panel, participate in a Facebook Live interview, or give a talk in front of entrepreneurs were days filled with anxiety and multiple outfit changes. I much preferred days of researching, one on one meetings over coffee, and filling out or organizing reports and forms. But I also felt that what we have to say at Kiva is important, and that the stories of our borrowers and our world view are worth sharing. I wanted to be the person to share that, so I had to get comfortable with the discomfort of all eyes on me. 

There are plenty of experts out there who can give strategies and tangible tips to improve your public speaking. I’m just here to say that it’s better to get up and speak out than to wait silently for perfection. 

Positivity: More than sunshine and rainbows

I am not a naturally positive person. Ask my Crossfit coach. Ask my mom. Honestly, my natural tendency leans towards whining. I’m easily stressed out, and possibly the most anxious person I’ve ever met. But I couldn’t be that way and be good at my job, or good at my life. Thankfully all my worrying about not being good at my job led me to change, little by little. It started with an attitude adjustment. 

Positivity has the power to make you a better person. When you have a mindset that is centered around positive outcomes, you’re more likely to be efficient and effective at the task at hand. But in my mind, positivity had always resembled a bouncy bubbly cheerleader, which doesn’t sync with my own self perception. So either I had to change how I viewed myself, or I had to change how I viewed positivity. 

I changed positivity. Remember my Crossfit coach? Now, instead of a cheerleader, I’m starting to see how positivity resembles that coach. It takes way more grit and determination to be positive than to be negative, and when I’m checking in with myself and thinking about how to show up intentionally as the best version of myself for that moment, I find that I’m able to bring out more authentically felt positive emotion than when I’m just marking items off of my to-do list or counting the minutes until 5 pm. 

Purpose: Finding What’s Next

The question I’ve been asked ceaselessly over the past month: what’s next for me? The answer: I don’t know. But I’m looking, through glasses filtered by my purpose in life, just slightly more clear after this experience. 

I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m curious to find out. And I’m eagerly searching for the lessons I’ll learn on the way. 

Written across a toilet seat in a grungy coffee shop in the mountains of North Carolina is this phrase: Create something today. Even if it’s shit.

Of all the motivational books I’ve read, inspiring quotes I’ve scrolled through, and uplifting speeches I’ve heard none has resonated with me as much as these words Sharpie-d across the seat of a toilet in a coffee shop in the middle of nowhere.

Six months ago, I set a goal for myself. I started a blog with the hopes of posting something new at least once a month, if not more.

This was six months ago. Up until today, there have been only two posts on this blog. Every week it’s been on my to do list: write blog post. Most weeks I have an idea, an a-ha moment that gets me started typing, but after a few minutes my fingers have faded and I’m closing my Word document, sadly clicking ‘No’ when asking if I want to save the changes I’ve made.

These past six months, I’ve been making changes. But they haven’t felt big enough, or good enough, to save.

So I started thinking about all of the reasons I would start, but not finish, something I cared so much about and wanted so badly to do. Here’s what I came up with:

I’m tired (Read: I’m scared)

I’m busy (Read: I’m scared)

I’m lazy (Read: I’m scared)

I realized that my relationship with my blog has become a self-fulfilling cycle of nothingness: excuse –> anxiety –> remorse –> excuse. Here’s what it looks like for me.

First, I make an excuse for why I won’t work on the blog today. I tell myself that I’ve got too many other important things on my plate to focus on, or that I deserve a break, or that I’m simply uninspired and should wait until I feel more in the mood to write.

Then, I feel anxious for not doing what I’ve always wanted to do, which is write. Last, I start to associate my decision not to work with my ability to write. I tell myself that the idea I had wasn’t really that interesting, and even if it was I tell myself that I don’t have the skills as a writer to relate to anyone else, let alone inspire them to make a change. This negative self talk reverberates around in my head until I force myself to feel better by heading back to my excuse, or coming up with a new and even better one. The cycle repeats.

Maybe you recognize this cycle in your own life. If not with your empty blog, maybe with your new year’s resolution to run a marathon, or your goal to reach a promotion or a raise in your job. I have to assume that a fair amount of us feel something like this every day, because I have to assume that we all have dreams we continue to strive for. If we are all reaching for something better, we know what it’s like to achieve that just as well as we know what it’s like not to.

A wise friend told me that saying “I’m stressed” is the socially acceptable way to say “I’m scared.” Our response to stress, and fear, is to hide. We coat our choices in titles like ‘self care’ or ‘me time’ and refuse to admit that maybe all we’re doing is refusing to face the problem. Because y’all, I am scared. I am so freaking scared all the time. I’m scared because there is so much I want to do, so much I want to be, things I can’t even comprehend yet and every day that I’m not moving towards those things I know that I’m moving away from them. I want to do SO much that I end up doing nothing.

We start our days trying to figure out how to do these difficult things we want for ourselves. Maybe it’s setting aside time for meditation, committing to a new relationship, or learning to speak Spanish. As soon as we get started all these little excuse start whispering in our ears. And excuses are not always lies. I am tired! I am busy! We all are! We are all juggling our multiple lives in the era of the millennial multi-tasker, simultaneously trying to be the most incredible boss/dog mom/athlete/student/innovator/human possible. It’s overwhelming, so procrastinating on the things that are hard is our reward, and adding things to our plate that push our priorities out of whack is our solution to being afraid.

But eventually what happens is we stop doing the things we really want to do. And we start telling ourselves that maybe we didn’t want it that much in the first place. Think about this: how many of us still do the things we loved as a child? And think about this: how many times have you started out Monday morning promising yourself a week of clean eating, only to be derailed by a donut in the break room or an invitation to happy hour. One decision skews your choices for the rest of that week, and by Thursday night your sitting in bed with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s thinking “oh well, guess I’ll try again next week.”

What have you given up on just because it seemed like you had missed that opportunity? What has been on your to-do list for months now that you need to revisit, or recommit to? How many business ideas, cook books, art galleries, building designs, personal records, families, or non-profits has the world lost because we were too afraid to pursue them?

Hear me on this: pleasure seeking instead of pushing towards a goal doesn’t mean you don’t want it. It means that you’re too scared to pursue a goal, and are pursuing pleasure instead.

People are always telling us to find a job where we don’t have to work a day in our life. While this paints a nice picture in our heads, it’s just that, a nice picture. Because being the best version of yourself takes work. And work is hard.

One of my favorite podcasts is hosted by a successful writer who says that writers like having written, not writing. We like the product of our work, not working. But there’s no other way to get there, so what do we do?

We have two choices: we pursue, or we pleasure. And we’re going to spend the rest of our lives doing both over and over again, because that decision never goes away. Sometimes we won’t make the choice that lines up with our goals, so we start over. And we keep starting over as many times as we need to, building on the start we made the time before.

Here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to chip away, everyday, at the goals I have set for myself. I’m done throwing out my goals because of one decision, or one day. And I can’t live gratefully and be anxious at the same time. So I choose gratitude. I choose to realize how incredible the world is because of what we put into it.

So do something today. Show it to someone. Then do it again. Trust me, it feels damn good. Even if it takes you five months to get back to it.

On April 2nd, teachers across Oklahoma walked out of their classroom to advocate for better pay and adequate public school funding. Today, on April 4th, classrooms are still empty.

Teachers walked out in order to walk towards something better for themselves and for their students. But what didn’t make the news is that I walked out of my classroom almost a year ago. After completing my second year of teaching, I walked out on my students and walked away altogether, convinced that I couldn’t heal the fractured system that is public education in Oklahoma.

I became a teacher knowing that I would work long hours for little money and little respect, and well aware that I was teaching in a school system that has been broken for decades. I knew that my students wouldn’t be able to bring in their own supplies because most of them couldn’t even bring their own lunch, and I knew that the resources I would have access to might be out-dated or scarce. I also knew that my students shouldn’t be underestimated, and it never crossed my mind to take it easy on them or think they couldn’t accomplish just as much as the students sitting in private schools across town.

If you’re picturing an innocent school teacher with a shiny apple in hand, you’ve got the wrong idea. I had done my research. I had a goal to get my students learning at or above grade level by the end of the year, and nothing was getting in my way.

And you know what? Like most teachers, I did that. Like most teachers, I worked every day (yes, that includes summers and breaks and all those other times people like to throw in teacher’s faces as “time off”) to get my student who couldn’t count to 100 to multiplying two digit numbers. I got to school at 6:30 am and left after 5 so that my student wouldn’t have to wait outside because her mom was working three jobs. I visited the homes of every single on of my kids so that they would know that I knew them, that I loved them, and I believed in them.

I don’t say this for your praise or your appreciation, because I also ultimately stopped teaching. After two years, this all-consuming job burned me out completely and I had to stop. I need that to sink in: that a successful, driven, young and educated person would enter a profession and two years later have to leave it because they have nothing else to give. Even having a team of the most inspiring and supportive teachers didn’t change the fact that there were days where I had forty kids in my classroom and only enough chairs for 25. Even being given a Golden Apple award by the superintendent didn’t dissuade the feeling that there was so much I needed to do for my kids and I couldn’t do it all, and how heartbreaking it was to fail at an already impossible task.

Because what I didn’t know about teaching was that you can never stop working when it’s for your kids. If you’re a parent, you get it. Now multiply your kid by 50. Now add 50 each year.

I didn’t know that teaching would become so ingrained in my life that it would take over my life.

I didn’t know how amazing it would feel or how bad it would hurt. In February of my first year of teaching, my students wrote short stories and then used crowdfunding to publish them into books. In December of my second year of teaching, my students showed the most growth on their math scores out of any other math class in the school. These memories come with the memory of a girl who missed two months of school because her family struggled to return from Mexico, and the boy whose uniform I would take home and wash each week because it was the only thing he had to wear and his parents couldn’t afford a laundry machine.

I didn’t know that it would be difficult for my roommate and I, both teachers, to qualify to live in a two bedroom apartment because of our income.

I didn’t know that when people asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was a teacher that their response would be, “that’s cute.”

I honestly can’t get into a debate with anyone who wants to discredit the merits of this walkout or say that teachers are asking for too much because obviously if I am a single person having to work a second job just to cover my basic living expenses, there’s a problem with teacher pay. And if the pencils I’m provided by the state run out in November and I spend the next six months buying them on my own, there’s a problem with public school funding.

What I can say is that every person, regardless of your beliefs about this walk out, should visit a local public school classroom for a day and see what it’s like to be a teacher in Oklahoma right now. Everyone should walk into a school at 6:30 am and leave at 5 pm and then look me in the eye and tell me that they still think this is what our kids deserve.

Being a teacher in Tulsa Public Schools for two years almost pushed me to a breaking point, but I wouldn’t change those two years for anything because they introduced me to my role models, a bunch of 4th grade students who taught me how to stand up for what I believe in with passion and conviction and have a damn good time doing it.

My students will be the ones growing up and growing in to our society. They will be the new teachers, entrepreneurs, legislators, and parents. I hope you’re on their side because trust me, if not, this is a battle you’re going to lose.

And also, fuck you Mary Fallin.

(((Want to support teachers but aren’t sure how? Check out this cheat sheet by the amazing educator Rachel Estariz!)))