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I was recently teased by some neighbors for walking Maite (the Rottweiler) with my treat pouch front and center. There were some mildly macho statements that their dogs “better just listen” and “behave.” There are plenty of reasons for this thought process/understanding about dogs which I won’t get into here. Suffice it to say, they kind of think I’m weak because they see me “rewarding/bribing” Maite.

I’ve been doing trauma-informed work for nearly two decades. Asking “what has happened to you” (instead of “what’s wrong with you?”) is something like second nature to me. I have annoyed partners, friends and family members for years by coming up with alternate reasons for why people around them have behaved the way they have.

Egg rolls take time, and I haven’t made them in years. As I made them, I thought about how I begged my mother to make them pretty much any time someone said, “What will we have for dinner?” Mostly my mother said, “Not today” which makes perfect sense to my adult self. Today if I am going to make them, I need a nice clear schedule, with nothing else happening afterwards.

Emotions are not some kind of cosmic error. They exist for our benefit. Emotions tell us (sometimes before our brains get there) to move away or towards people, situations, and ideas. They are a kind of compass for our lives. But only when we allow them to be so. Curious about how that works?

Welcome back! I came here to write to you all and discovered that it's been more than a year since my last post. I read it over and considered where I am today. Guess what? I'm still burnt out. It isn't all bad, though. My partner and I made it to the Alameda County Fair this summer and to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, too. I was watching her ride the swings with some family friends when I had an itchy, scratchy, Stephen King-like thought: What if once you were on the ride, you could never get off?

It’s hard to write these days. Not just blog posts, either. It’s hard to write proposals for presenting, or descriptions of what I’ll present on, it’s even hard to write emails. I’m here today mostly because I know that writing often helps me feel better. I’m in a dark place, y’all, dark and sad. I keep looking out at the world and seeing all the hurt and harm and I feel…despair. I know I’m supposed to be holding hope, but I gotta tell you, lately I don’t feel all that hopeful myself.

When I started doing crossfit, I pushed hard. And then I hurt myself. No surprise there.

After a long recuperation period, I came back, and I’ll admit it, I was scared. I was super gentle with myself. I modified every workout, I kept the weights low. And I got pretty comfortable there, in the slow, light lane.

Then I started working with a personal trainer and discovered, hey, I actually am still pretty strong. I felt good and started challenging myself more.

Then the shelter in place happened and all that screeched to a halt.

Working from home is distinctly different when you are used to working in school buildings. If you work in an office, yes, you see your co-workers, you have small talk before meetings, maybe you talk with colleagues regularly, but none of that comes even close to how many tiny interactions you get walking through a school building/campus. Let me give you a personal tour of what this looks like for me at one of the schools I work in:

Time to go back to school, folks. I recognize that coming back (whether that’s in “brick and mortar” or online) might be tough. I mean, every year that I’ve done this work there is a certain amount of stress coming back after the break. Given the current set up, I imagine this year might be even harder. In the past, I watched teachers spend time in January re-starting the year, maybe going over classroom norms, having children set goals for the next semester/quarter and getting to know each other again.

Happy Friday, y’all. I know that many of you are celebrating today, and I have no complaints at all about that. Meanwhile, I want to recognize the many, many people who are not. As I scrolled through my insta feed this morning I saw picture after picture of folks in matching pyjamas, lovely smiles on their faces, puppies and kiddos galore.

They were sweet pictures, but I could not help but think about the people I know who are not celebrating. I’ll give you a moment – no, 30 seconds to join me – just pause and reflect on why someone might not celebrate Christmas.

I love to read. I read a lot. I finish several books a week. I am nearly indiscriminate in my reading – except that I only read BIPOC authors for the past four years (alright, I admit I did read the new Stephan King and the new Dan Siegal). I read middle-grade and young adult and regular grow-up fiction as well as non-fiction. I read about racism, school organization, sleep, food, health, teaching, mental health, the “justice” system – really anything that catches my attention.

School is under way over the country, folks, and given these strange times, most teachers I speak to are feeling…off balance. In some ways, this syndemic shifts things significantly for teachers. Whether they have lots of experience and tools or are newer to the field, teachers find themselves needing to teach in a way no one anticipated before. It isn’t just “distance learning” or technology that makes this time so different. There’s also the way racism has become visible to the world in a way that makes it impossible to ignore. and the way that young people are speaking about racism will also shift what content comes up in classes.

As a half Korean, half white, cis gendered woman, I recognize that I have a lot of privilege in the world. As race has come to the forefront (once again), I worried that my voice might not be a welcome one. There is a particular way in the US that Asians and Blacks have been pitted against one another (read about it here or here or in The Making of Asian America) and so that concerned me, too. Who am I to speak up now? What right do I have? However, as I watched protests and rallies, demonstrations that went well and so many that did not, I realized that I would not stay silent.

Just a few minutes into my Zoom presentation on Trauma Informed Schools (TIS) recently, my lovely dog, Maite, went from fully asleep to full on alarm barking, more or less right in my face, having jumped up onto my kiddo’s bed to get close to the window. Not only could no one hear me, but I was so startled my heart rate spiked and my breath got shallow. It took me a good 30 seconds to get myself back on track. This isn’t the first time she’s startled me like that, but it hasn’t gotten any easier.

Yesterday I spent a several hours in a Zoom meeting (welcome to the new world). It was the San Francisco Unified School District Board meeting, and lots of interesting things were discussed, including grading and other plans for going forward this year. Another point of discussion was Resolution No. 204-14A1, To Establish Policies and Procedures for the San Francisco Unified School District to Provide Trauma-Informed, Coordinated Care that Promotes Resilience and Healing During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic, Commissioners Faauuga Moliga, Gabriela Lopez, and Allison M. Collins.

I can hardly believe the month of March is already over. My plan was to write something the week of the 16th, but that was when the “shelter in place” order for California came down, and it flipped my world. as I’m sure it has for many of you. I laughed out loud at my previous post and my desire to decrease my hours of media. I can see that number increasing already after only 2 weeks of time at home

Kids in my office are often astounded to hear that I don’t own a TV. They cannot imagine what we do for fun in my house. Parents often also look surprised. I am honest – I tell them I do watch Netflix and also many years of an Italian soap opera (Un Posto al Sole since 2000) – but I can still see that they are imagining that I am some kind of deeply deviant human, someone who is able to decline the screen and have fun in some strange, old fashioned way.

I’m writing a book. Well, I suppose it’s more honest to say I was writing a book. I started at the end of the last school year, and got some good work done, but at a certain point I become convinced I was not going to be able to manage it. In part I wondered if anyone would want to read a book about what we can do about racial trauma in schools.

I was invited to a conference with a trauma focus, which happens much more frequently these days, as “trauma-informed” gains momentum. Ten years ago it was a rare event. I’m always interested in learning something new, so I checked out the keynote speakers.

I just got back from the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE) for 2019. I had never even heard of it until last year, when my friend and colleague from Elk Grove asked me if I was going. I owe her a debt of gratitude, as last year’s conference was transformational for me.

Last week, I read yet another story of a person who had been through tough times who has now soared above what others believed they could become. The story purported to be one of “resilience,” however stories like this one keep us stuck where we are without pointing us forward.

I am resting today. I have an uneasy relationship with rest, one that comes from my own childhood trauma, as well as the sociocultural trauma of being seen as “other” in a white superiority context.

I know that people don’t really want to talk about trauma. Trauma in whatever form can be disheartening, scary and sometimes just plain sad. Lately it’s been different, though. These days, I find myself talking more and more about sociocultural trauma - trauma caused by implicit and explicit bias (e.g. racism, sexism, ableism).