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Dropping yourself off a chain of five close friends from work will likely cause much more drama than slipping away from a 16-parent discussion about uniforms for your kid’s soccer team. Plus, the larger the group, the more unrealistic it would be for you to try to set parameters. TNS
You’re a part of a group text that’s been flooded with messages as of late. Is it best to lay boundaries with the rest of the group or just leave altogether?
Group texts come in all shapes and sizes, and it’s unrealistic to think that everyone’s communication needs and styles will align perfectly. From time zone discrepancies to emoji overuse to whatever tech glitch causes some people’s “likes” to replicate an entire text thread all over again (why, oh why, do some phones do this?), it can be enough to make you want to pull the plug altogether.
I remember the meeting the SELF health team had before I really grasped that COVID-19 was going to be…well. What it became. The meeting was on what would become one of our last days in the office before we packed up and started working from home “out of an abundance of caution.” (For a few weeks, we thought. Or months, tops. Well…hi from my bed nine months later.) Our editors put it plainly: This disease caused by a novel coronavirus was becoming a
thing and we needed all hands on deck to help cover it. So we brainstormed. We planned. We got our assignments. We started writing about COVID-19.
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Even if you know, intellectually, that the holidays are not actually the most wonderful time of the year (and can, in fact, be incredibly stressful), coping with feelings of loneliness, guilt, anger, and despair during the month of December can be very challenging. And thanks to the ongoing pandemic, a
lot of people are feeling bad right now. The news is bleak, pretty much everyone is stretched thin, and comfort and joy are in short supply, making it that much harder to muster the energy to celebrate or even to reach out and ask for help.