As a Teacher in a Pandemic, Where Does Work End and I Begin?

Integrating the personal with the professional was helpful in the chaos of 2020. But by 2021, I often lost track of whether I was a teacher or a therapist.

On the TV show Severance, people who undergo a medical procedure to bifurcate their work selves (“innies”) from their nonwork selves (“outies”) have awkward first dates.

“You don’t know who you work with or what you do or anything?” Alexa asks Mark, the show’s severed protagonist, over dinner.

“That’s the idea,” Mark answers, taking a swig of booze.

“You could get married and have kids and forget they exist for eight hours a day. That doesn’t mess with your head?” she asks.

“For some people, that’s the point,” Mark replies.

Mark undergoes severance as a condition of his employment at the megacorporation Lumon. He submits to the procedure not so much for an income as to forget, for eight hours a day, that his wife is dead. No matter how mysterious, inane, or dehumanizing the work, innie-Mark doesn’t weep in the parking lot or drink alone. Lumon’s spartan cubicles, glaring fluorescent lights, and endless hallways create a corporate version of The Shining. Despite the inscrutable but undoubtedly nefarious tasks employees perform, the office offers refuge from the outside world.

As a teacher, my situation is the opposite. Cleaving oneself in two sounds pretty good, not because I want to escape some aspect of my home life, but because I want—need—to escape work.

I used to be an expert compartmentalizer and boundary setter with colleagues, students, and even friends. I learned, or perhaps inherited, stoic behavior from my dad’s Swedish side of the family. Before cancer took him, my dad never got sick, as I recall it; he must have gotten colds and flus like the rest of us, but we never knew. He never stayed home from work and rarely complained. It must be genetic: My grandma, his mother, neglected to tell us about a heart attack she had suffered because she didn’t want us to worry.

It wasn’t hard to adopt a similar approach after my dad died. I pushed my devastation into the recesses of my being so I could enter rooms, especially classrooms, and not give away how I felt on the inside. Day after day, I played the part of a functional human and teacher. After a while, it stopped feeling like a role, not because I felt functional, but because I got so used to pretending.

Two years after my dad’s death, I moved to Boston, where no one could tell which traits of mine were real and which were contrived—including me, sometimes. I didn’t want to bring that artifice with me. I wanted to leave behind my protective habit of cloaking myself, to compartmentalize by default—but only outside of work. At work, it still made sense to embrace being someone else—my severed self?—in the name of professionalism and self-preservation.

But teaching has no stable boundaries. The classroom lives on shifting tectonic plates—each semester, new fault lines emerge and thrum. Eco-anxiety reaches students earlier and earlier, as does cynicism about politics, capitalism, and the cost of higher education. Each year, I adopt new approaches to reach my students. In turn, teachers have to shift constantly, or we capsize. In 2016, Trump’s election triggered an earthquake in the classroom. I fought back tears in class the morning after, not because of the election’s outcome, but because the waves of communal grief and fear elicited such compassion in my students that my stoicism and remove suddenly seemed like the remains of a broken and useless object.

The classroom lurched again in the spring of 2020. My students and I processed Covid-19, George Floyd’s murder, and a future of uncertainty together over Zoom, transcending time and space to form what was, for most of us, our only social outlet. Even virtually, classes remained the most comfortingly normal part of our lives, and increasingly little separated students from teachers. The lowering of those boundaries felt like a personal and professional evolution. My “innie” resembled my “outie,” which felt surprisingly good.

On Severance, the process that bifurcates employees’ minds is supposedly irreversible. However, a recently fired worker undergoes a “reintegration” process that bypasses Lumon’s brain implant and gives the worker access—albeit shaky—to his work memories. But reintegration is neither easy nor safe. The worker dies from his attempts to become whole again.

This mindset—of a reintegrated me in the classroom—served me well in 2020. But by 2021, my students’ various traumas and social and academic regressions had deepened incalculably. I often lost track of whether I was a teacher or a therapist. I spent hours talking to teary students whose anxiety and depression made sleep impossible, who lost family members to Covid, whose families split apart under the weight of quarantine. One weekend, a student notified me that they were going through a mental health crisis. I called all the numbers for mental health resources on campus, but because it was a Sunday, they routed to voicemail or to the university police. For the entire day, I left my computer only to use the bathroom. I was at home, but I wasn’t my “outie” anymore. I couldn’t open a door to the outside world like the Lumon employees do and forget what had happened.

At work, it still made sense to embrace being someone else—my severed self?—in the name of professionalism and self-preservation. But teaching has no stable boundaries.

Being a teacher, I’ve found, is better than being a paralegal, a marketing editor, an administrative assistant, or any of the other corporate positions I’ve held over the years. But when I was a paralegal, I could punch out at 5:45 p.m. and not think about the firm again until 8:55 the next morning. As dehumanizing as punching out for lunch and bathroom breaks was, I knew when I was on the clock and when I wasn’t. Punching in and out was like the Lumon employees in Severance riding the elevator down to work and then back up at the end of the day, a physical act acknowledging the “innie” and the “outie” in each of us, a clear delineation of where work ends and their “real” selves begin. Sometimes, I miss that mandated compartmentalization. I even sometimes feel nostalgic about how openly I loathed my corporate jobs, how much I drank at lunch, how little I actually worked in a day. How simple my basic life formula was.

The disappearance of the line between “innie” and “outie” makes it nearly impossible to escape work stress and worries about students. I started using a meditation app and increased the frequency of my therapy sessions. My therapist regularly receives calls or emails from suicidal people who need immediate support. “When that happens, I’m all in,” she said. “And when the crisis is over, I pull back and get out.” I should do that too, but how? Especially when one grades, prepares for class, and answers student emails on weekends, or when one teaches in a program that takes freshmen overseas for six weeks.

Even when I’m not checking my email, my unconscious mind mires me in student concerns. Students frequently show up in my dreams. Once, I dreamed that a student in crisis turned into a White Walker from Game of Thrones and that I had to catch them while in Heathrow Airport and administer lifesaving medication. While I do get to go home, play with my cats, and hang out with friends, I often feel all in all the time.

Some of the “innie” characters in Severance steal opportunities to learn about and even inhabit their nonwork selves. When an “overtime contingency” process provides an employee named Dylan a glimpse at his outer life, he learns he has a son. Dylan’s boss tries to convince him that this knowledge changes nothing, that it’s irrelevant to who Dylan is on the inside, but he can’t redivide his memories, can’t forget.

It’s true that teaching isn’t corporate life, not exactly, despite most universities being akin to corporations themselves. That said, both career paths have a tendency to overwhelm and consume those who walk them. A recent Inside Higher Ed piece argues that the motivation to teach leads professors directly into a boundary trap: “As higher education professionals, we are trained and coached to serve students above all else, so we agreed. Before we knew it, our office hours were never truly over, emails that poured in at 3 a.m. were expected to be answered before the next workday and we became trapped in a situation with no off switch.”

I similarly fear I’ve lost that off switch, which is ironic given that, after my dad’s death, I sometimes worried it might remain permanently fixed in the off position. No matter how the plates shift or how I adjust, it seems I’m either too compartmentalized, too protective of the self I regard as “real,” or too invested, too open to nightmares and other wounds.

As dehumanizing as punching out for lunch and bathroom breaks was, I knew when I was on the clock and when I wasn’t.

Over the past two years, I’ve regularly acknowledged that likely none of us, myself included, are functioning at our best either in or outside the classroom. We all have to communicate regularly and be honest about what we can and cannot do. I’ve implemented aspects of trauma-informed pedagogy, such as weekly check-ins, relaxed attendance requirements, and generous paper and project extensions. However, this semester, students have been unable or unwilling to follow directions. They’re late when it rains, when the wind blows, on days ending in y. I receive a dozen last-minute extension requests for each paper, roughly a third of students routinely skip Friday lectures, and some have missed more than ten classes.

I don’t take it personally. Inside Higher Ed conducted a study that found that only 10 percent of the college students surveyed have not experienced mental health issues in the past two years. The mental health crisis with teenagers and college students—a perfect storm of already-brewing loneliness, anxiety, and depression, as well as the pandemic, politics, and the environment—is bigger than any teacher, class, or institution. Again, I don’t blame students for it; I can’t even imagine being nineteen or twenty right now. But another boundary I struggle to find is where trauma-informed pedagogy becomes enabling.

Implanting a chip that divides oneself as happens in Severance wouldn’t work for teachers, given that we interact with students in classrooms rather than work on computers sequestered away in a basement. But it seems that I’d have to undergo a radical procedure or cleave myself in two to do what my therapist suggests—to be all in one moment and out the next; to be “innie” and then “outie” at will. Sometimes I envy the professors who effortlessly remain at arm’s length from students, who don’t bother reading their teaching evaluations, and who don’t adjust policies or deadlines during pandemics. For some, obtaining tenure seems akin to getting severed—one can stop bringing home their work with them, as professional consequences largely cease to exist. Sometimes it seems the answer is simply to care less, to flip the switch to “off” as often as possible.

Despite fantasizing about doing that, I wouldn’t even if I could. As much as I don’t want my job to consume me, I also don’t want to embody the worst of higher education in order to prevent it. The only way out of this quagmire for some teachers is quitting. Teaching has become Sisyphean: There’s only so far that teachers can push boulders up mountains until the rocks roll back down, often flattening us in the process. “I don’t want to give up what was a joyful profession and hate even more to abandon it,” says an anonymous professor, “but something has to change.” But what, exactly? And how?

A few weeks ago, one of my strongest students came to office hours for help with a research paper. She couldn’t decide on a topic and had convinced herself she would pick the worst possible idea. I told her that a creative and insightful student like her could make just about any topic work.

She said my approval meant a lot, and then she said, “I hope this isn’t weird, but a bunch of us call you ‘Mom.’”

I laughed and noted the irony that I don’t have or want kids. But I was flattered. No student ever said that to the pre-pandemic version of me. At the same time, I felt an inner tightening, an awakening of old guards.

Sometimes, as I sit at my computer toggling between writing an essay, checking work email, and grading papers, I think of Irving, the devoted Lumon disciple who quotes the company handbook like scripture. Irving’s “outie,” however, listens to death metal and paints pictures of unending hallways leading to ominous closed doors. The frantic brushstrokes, the glops of black paint slopping onto the canvas, the release of all he keeps buttoned up at work, the heavy black residue of work that seems to seep not only from his paintbrush but from his very pores. The manifestation of his inner self—perhaps his very soul—crying to be released not only from the rules and regulations of work but also from its psychic hold over him, which vampirizes both his “innie” and his “outie,” his conscious and unconscious selves, reducing them to sludge.