I’m writing this on Thursday because I have a Student Leadership day tomorrow at the Tech School. I love our Student Leadership days - they're probably my favourite although, in saying that, I did have two classes from Ballarat Special School today for prototyping and they’re also my favourite. I’m lucky enough to have quite a few favourites.
Having lots of ‘favourites’ comes in handy when life throws you curve balls. If you can appreciate as many things as possible then it becomes quite hard to have a genuinely ‘bad day’. Yesterday Alice came home from school complaining that she’d had a bad day. Frank had a bad day because it was pouring with rain so his first cricket game was cancelled and I had discovered that I didn’t make it into the Williamson Leadership Program next year. By all accounts, it was grounds for a perfectly bad day but it wasn’t really that bad. If anything, it was simply a day with disappointing news.
I was supremely disappointed about not getting into the leadership program but to be honest, I have zero years experience in traditional ‘leadership’ so it’s not surprising that there were applicants who were a better fit. I would’ve been a wild card at best. They want me to apply again next year so it's not a ‘hard no’ which is encouraging but it still sucks when you get bad news.
I watched this great documentary the other night at the Ballarat Film Society called “To Thank the Room” where the star and subject of the documentary, Maggie Fooke noted the importance of being able to sit with bad news. In Maggie's story, she had to sell her amazing artist hotel/retreat, the Brooklyn Arts Hotel (which hosted over 25,000 guests), in Fitzroy because she could no longer afford to keep it open. The doco follows Maggie around for the last 3 months of the Brooklyn Arts Hotel as she reflects upon all the amazing guests she had over the last 15 years. It's a complex process of grieving and celebrating that is often overwhelming. There are moments where Maggie admits how deeply saddened she is about losing the hotel but that's ok. Sometimes we have to sit with emotions that aren’t our favourites - things like disappointment and sadness.
We so often avoid or repress these feelings but Maggie did a wonderful job of showing the power of sitting with them. Not getting angry or cross but just ‘being’. It was a lovely reminder that when things go wrong it's ok to not be ok. You don’t want to be in these spaces for too long or if you’re not feeling safe and secure in other areas of your life but it’s ok to be sad. It's ok to be disappointed. It’s ok to be annoyed.
All these feelings make us very human.
I was watching Alice get more and more wound up about her bad day. Not only was school shit but she didn’t want Kung Pao Chicken for dinner either. Then Frank was too close to her and wasn’t allowed to look at her. She was on an angry downward spiral that was just getting worse. Nothing we said was helping so I just gave her a hug (which she resisted for quite some time) and told her it was totally fine to be angry. This obviously made things worse initially but she eventually softened when I suggested we do one of her favourite activities - drawing. So we sat there and drew comic books for 20 minutes before we had dinner and she was fine. So was I.
