I just submitted my final grades, and I want to do a little reflecting on this semester. CW for discussion of mental health, depression, and suicide.

This was the hardest semester of my academic career thus far. And it wasn't just because online teaching is difficult, and students are exhausted, and winter in Vancouver is grey and grim. In January I went through a severe mental health break, days before the semester began.

I'm lucky: I've been in Vancouver for long enough that I've formed a community here, and that community is full of people who were equipped to help me navigate my crisis. They made safety plans with me. They brought me groceries and took my laundry to their homes to wash it.

I could afford to access mental health medication immediately, to seek out and pay for counselling that I could do from the safety of my own home. I am so, so lucky -- and I was also the most scared I've been for my own wellbeing since I was a teenager.

And for all of my ability to reach out, to tell my community I wasn't okay, to access resources, what I couldn't figure out how to do was get out of my commitment to teach a 14-week full time (as in 5 days a week) intensive small-group podcasting course.

I genuinely don't know if I could have accessed disability leave. I have a hard time imagining what that even would have looked like. I did some half-hearted googling and then gave up, remembering a friend who had to type out her lectures for a TA to read after breaking her jaw.

And so I did my best. I pulled myself together as best I could, and I kept focused on being a good co-instructor and being the best teacher I knew how to be. I used 15 minute coffee breaks to turn off my camera and cry then fixed my mascara and came back smiling.

I took seriously my responsibility to hold space for my students, to try to minimize the harm and strain on them. I did my best to be transparent about my struggles without making it their problem or their burden to carry. I don't know how successful I was.

It was SO HARD to know that I wasn't doing a great job, and to also know that I couldn't do any better. To recognize that it was taking everything I had just to make it through, and to be disappointed in myself for not being more resilient.

Now that the semester is done, and I've been talking to other instructors, I'm hearing so many versions of my story. People struggling to get out of bed in the morning but still working so hard to hold space for their students.

I did a really hard thing this semester. So many of us did a really hard thing, have been doing really hard things for over a year now. And it's hard to celebrate these things when, compared to what we usually demand of ourselves, they feel like failures.

But I survived this semester, and I'm proud of myself. I'm proud of all of us.