Sarrah Steele

After a hot summer and long hours, you are starting to feel the cooler weather approaching. Summer lends work, so you bury yourself in it for a season. Keeping busy allows you to ignore all the bull shit from your past and anxieties towards the future. That’s why summers are awesome, you get to chase overtime and there is plenty of sunlight to do it. Folks begin getting laid off, and you might be next. With the cooler weather comes shorter days and way too much time to think. You get bombarded with thoughts you didn’t really even have time to think all summer. They start creeping in. You’ve been away all summer, so the folks back home seem like strangers. Your crew is gone, traveling and spending time with their families. You have a pressure and nagging ache to make the most of your time off, but everything feels a bit overwhelming. You realize not everyone eats as fast as you or falls in line when walking. Your family seems to think you’re acting different. They seem to have expectations for things to resume as normal, before the season started and you were gone making money chasing overtime. You try grabbing a beer with your crew members, but they are all unavailable. You somehow feel empty in a strange way. No more circling up. No more gaggles. No more hold and improve. No more keep your head on a swivel. No more “at least no one got hurt” or “at least no one died”. Just the normal grind. But what is normal anymore? You’re sick of doing more with less. This is not some touchy-feely B.S. I am not going to sugar coat things. A great mentor of mine from the Forest Service taught me something really important. “Bureaucracies are not made to be changed. They are built to be solid. Let’s stop complaining about the system and start teaching folks to survive within it”. Allow me to support you in focusing on what matters most, YOU. Let’s figure out how to strengthen the most important safety zone of all, your mind. The reason I speak of this particularly, is rooted in my personal background. Can you relate? The overworked single parent, recently divorced, doing more with less. The mother fighting Post Partum, who is struggling to live up to her expectations placed on her by herself and society at large, to perfect her parenting and make life look like an Instagram post. The adolescent, who is simply exhausted from the experience of being a teenager during this time, full of conflicting messages and expectations, and tempted by culturally supported maladaptive coping skills…. This is for all of us. We are all in this together.