“Be aware of your students’ emotional needs,” the e-mails admonish. “Be aware that student’s reports of suicidal thoughts and substance abuse are going up,” instruct the news stories that educator friends share. “They live fragile lives,” well-meaning colleagues explain. Day after day after day, this information, these alerts, these — whatever they are — bombard you as if you aren’t and haven’t been aware of this for decades. As if you are unsympathetic to their condition.

What you want to know is this. What are you supposed to do with this information?

You’ve always wanted to know what you are supposed to do with this information.

You teach history. In a regular semester, you see them twice each week, for an hour and a half each meeting, for fourteen weeks. That’s if they and you have perfect attendance. (This is also your argument against the idea that professors “brainwash” their students. This is not how brainwashing works!) “Give them the number of the Wellness Center,” the Wellness Center and the chairs and the deans and the experts say. That presupposes far more interaction. That presupposes far more disclosure.

Last spring, online, if they did not check in or respond, there was not much you could do. That could be terrifying. Your husband, the Eminent Historian, had a student disappear for half the semester, not responding to any missives from him, the chair, the dean, or the student services, only to resurface near June having just recovered from Covid-19. Last fall, a student committed suicide, and he was the last student you would have expected. All of the testimonials at his memorial service said the same.

“Lower your standards,” they say, “cut back on the work.” How? Rather, how much more? Where, when online teaching requires some form of communication that will require reading and writing, the two things that seem to cause so much anxiety? Lower and cut back to what end? Then what am I for? What is this whole educational endeavor for?

That is to say, you were not trained as a social worker nor as a psychologist. Yet, all of these missives and shared articles and so forth seem to say that you are responsible for intervening or preventing these substance abuse and suicidal and mental health catastrophes. That your primary responsibility in your job is to provide mental health services.

You can barely get through your own day!

Yes, you know you are the grown-up, but you also take lots of pills for depression and anxiety yourself. You’ve been sober five days short of a year as of today, and everyday for the past three months you try to remind yourself of the reason you don’t just end the day amid the sweet sweet bubbles of Prosecco. You are already playing addict games with the Melatonin hoping to knock yourself out each night. Why keep existing, you ask yourself. Why bother? What are you for? What matters?

Half of your energy each day holds those questions at bay. The rest cycles through rage, shame, and melancholy for even thinking those questions, at the stirring of the questions, at the world for being like it is, at yourself for being like this.

You did not have children for a reason. You did not go into a caretaking job for a reason. You turned to books and research for a reason; and this job did not require this much of your person back when you entered the profession.

Now, you feel as if you are expected to plug a hole in ninety other people’s lives while you yourself struggle against the gigantic black hole that tears you apart from your own center of yourself.