Rachael Allen’s Margin Notes

By Rachael Allen

The book I’m reading has made me long for Canton Dolphins swim practice at Massasoit Community College. At the time, I half-hated the winter sessions, dreading the sensation of shedding my layers to jump into the water and the aftermath of running from pool to the car with wet hair that froze in seconds. But this book, The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka, brings out what was always the beauty of swimming: the peace of repetition, lap after lap after lap.

Rachael Allen

During a recent assembly at the school where I teach, a visiting psychologist put a name to this feeling: soft fascination, an activity that captures part of your attention, thereby allowing the rest of your mind to wander, reflect, and problem solve — closing mental tabs, she said.

Sometimes, space to think isn’t helpful. Space can enable us to ruminate over what a friend said or the tone of that email from our boss or why exactly our problem, whatever it is in that moment, is suddenly the biggest problem in the entire world. In those moments, we need hard fascination, an activity that captures our complete attention. Stories are one example of this: a TV show or movie or book you can lose yourself in. The distancing helps stop the mental spiral by giving us some perspective or simply a break from worries.

Perhaps you’re thinking this is self-explanatory. But imagine you’re 13 years old. Or 16. You’re overwhelmed with feelings and opportunities to compare yourself with others and things to do — so many things to do. You can’t share what you’re feeling, not the true extent of it, because a part of your mind is convinced that no one has ever, ever felt this way.

Ten years out of high school, I found myself unexpectedly taken with this visiting psychologist — not only with what she was saying but the fact that she had come to the school in the first place, talking with families, students, and teachers. While each session varied, the message was consistent: Schools should teach students how to process emotions in the same way that they teach them academic material.

I remember the visiting speakers who came to my high school. A former professional basketball player who shared his experience with substance abuse. A lawyer who told us about a case involving alcohol and date rape. A social media expert who dove into cyberbullying. Each of these assemblies must have done something right — I still remember them — but these lectures stand out as warnings. Here is what to be frightened of, what to look out for, how not to act in the world.

I would have loved to hear an adult at school — an expert, someone the school had paid to come — say that it was normal to feel insecure, stressed, or anxious. More than that, to be offered a framework for how to take care of myself in those moments, rather than willing the feeling to go away. Do you need to talk about your day with a friend or distract yourself with your favorite television show? While my family has always been an emotional support, lessons hit differently at school. To have mental health prioritized as part of the curriculum, to have it emphasized that these weren’t conversations particular to me, might have changed my relationship with my own feelings sooner.

The youngest generation is often mocked for their attention to self-care. Skincare, meditation apps, expensive water bottles. Jokes and commercialism aside, I think they’re on to something. Teaching kids how to think critically and play nice with others doesn’t work if they struggle to respond to the daily ups and downs that can feel world-ending.

Still, one part of the assembly bothered me. The visiting psychologist mentioned diving into schoolwork as a way to respond to stress given that “fixing” the problem eases the emotion. Reasonable, right? And yet, for so many of the students I teach, too much work is not, in fact, their problem. It is ours — the society that has gotten to a point in which five extracurriculars and six hours of homework and two different club soccer teams is the norm. The expectation.

If we’re going to prioritize mental health as a society, we need to not only teach kids how to work through uncomfortable feelings, but also reconsider whether the difficult situations we enable for them are worth it. A student who consistently stays up until midnight only to wake up at 6 a.m. doesn’t need tools to respond to stress — they need less things on their plate.

For this to happen, perhaps the adults in the room need to take a swim and turn inward. What preconceptions do we have about what it means to be successful? What would it look like for not only our children, but for us, to lead truly heathy lives?

Rachael Allen grew up in Canton and is now a writer and high school journalism teacher in New York.

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