Community Tuesdays Chat: Checking in on each other

Highlights, lowlights, high fives... and the whole truth

Apr 08, 2025

Save the Date: Our next In Tending online gathering is coming soon! We’ll circle up on Tuesday 4/29 at 8pm EST.

The topic of our discussion (and, we hope, many others to come) will be about claiming our agency in this historical moment, setting intentions for the spring season ahead, and supporting each other through both synchronous meet-ups and asynchronous tools, like the chats we’ve been hosting this month (see below).

To get on the list for our next meetup, please fill out this form if you haven’t already. To join the In Tending community chat, click here. (You may be prompted to download the app if you haven’t already, but once that’s done it does make the reading, commenting and chatting aspects of your subscription experience much easier to access.)

We’re halfway through our first month of Community Tuesday chats — can you believe it? Which means it’s now time for a check-in about how it’s going, in terms of the intentions we set way back in Week One, and the supports we love to receive in Week Two. You can hop straight into the Week Three chat thread here:

A bit of backstory: For this first full-moon check-in, I thought we’d borrow a routine I used back in the day when I worked in tech called Highlights, Lowlights and High Fives — with some necessary tweaks.

The additional context I share on this below isn’t necessary if you’re eager to get to chatting, but it may be of special benefit for anyone who’s feeling like their work is intruding on the intentions they’ve set for their home life in this season, or vice versa. (Which I’m guessing is true for many of us.)

Back in 2011, I quit a beloved teaching job in Seoul to move back home to Buffalo, to help my little brother navigate a new and crushing brain cancer diagnosis. I longed to get back to teaching as soon as possible, but I didn’t have a Master’s degree in education yet, so I had to fall back on my prior resume in media. My desperate need for cash led me to leap at a marketing position with a tech startup, as their one and only woman-on-the-ground in Buffalo, a new and exploratory market for them.

My team members the time were mostly based on the East Coast, in places like New York City and Boston. I saw them in person only rarely. It was a lonely experience. Each week, however, we engaged in a ritual that helped to anchor my fragile professional dinghy to the great mothership of our regional team: the weekly East Coast Conference Call.

During this call, we would go around sharing highlights, low-lights and high fives. While I didn’t love everything about working for a tech start-up, I often loved these calls. People shared highlights that were work-related, of course, like snagging a great partnership with entities like the Newport Folk Fest outside of Providence or the Governor's Ball in NYC. But they also shared personal milestones, like the day my counterpart in Brooklyn got engaged to his now-wife.

There was an air of sympathetic joy around these moments of celebration — what Buddhists would call muditā — that was hard to find in other spaces. In the American culture to which I’d returned from Seoul, it felt as though people were pitted against one another, forced to compete in every way. During the highlights round, we could drop this sense of hyper-independence and celebrate our interdependence instead, feeling our friends’ wins as if they were our own.

I loved the low-lights round, too, as much if not more than the highlights. It acknowledged the same hard fact as the First Noble Truth in Buddhism: that suffering is a part of life. No matter how clever your strategy, or how well organized your spreadsheet. Even the hardened New Yorkers in our midst were surprisingly willing in these meetings to show their soft fronts, admitting to moments of panic when an event venue’s plumbing burst the night before, or when a conflict broke out during a party we'd sponsored.

The high fives round, too, was surprisingly meaningful, despite the elementary-school nomenclature – a place for us to give compliments to each other for a job well done, or for helping a friend in need. We all worked long hours, and many of us, like me, labored alone all too often. So it made a big difference to know that someone in Boston or Buffalo had actually noticed and appreciated what someone else in Pittsburgh or Providence had done to pull off something extra special, something that actually allowed them to flex their creativity or do something meaningful for their communities with the marketing dollars we were given.

What I am saying is that when these meetings were good, they were very good.

There was just one big problem with them.

They often took place during or just after my brother's appointments with his oncologist. And the contrast between those two conversations could not have been more stark.

While good personal news was always welcome on these calls, it would have been going a bit too far to share, during our lowlights round, about how my brother was vomiting from his meds, losing his hair, struggling to keep up in his college classes or to hold down a job.

It would have been just as unseemly to complain to my brother about the complexities of getting a liquor permit for a future party, when he could barely keep food down.

So, as I stepped into the waiting room of the Roswell Park Cancer Center to take these team calls, I carried the weight of my brother’s waning health and happiness alone. When it was my turn to share a lowlight, I'd carefully choose something else to talk about – a marketing partner who had flaked on me, or an event that got rained out. Just like everyone else.

Then I'd put myself on mute, put my head in my hands, and try to make it through the rest of my day.

I hated that I couldn’t bring my full self, my full story, to any space in my life. Ultimately, I left to build a life, and to find a form of livelihood, where I could.

This is how I ended up going back to school for that M.Ed, and teaching kids for the next ten years.

But I never did forget those calls, or how connected they made me feel to something bigger than me. I also never stopped lamenting how much deeper that connection could have gone, how much more rewarding and supportive that setting might have felt to me, if we had all felt we had permission to show up to work as our whole selves. Struggles and all.

In our Community Tuesdays check-in chats, I want it to feel as though we can tell each other the truth. I don’t mean that we need to force ourselves to be vulnerable with strangers online if that doesn’t serve us. What I mean is that I don’t want us to feel as though we have to hide some part of ourselves away, if that doesn’t serve us either.

Because sometimes, when we’re struggling to live out an intention we’ve set at work, it’s because of something entirely unrelated to work. And sometimes, when we’re struggling to be present or patient caregivers at home, it’s due to forces entirely unrelated to what’s going on under our own roofs.

This shouldn’t be a source of shame or stigma. It’s simply how it is sometimes, no matter how clever your strategy or how well-organized your spreadsheets. That long-ago tech gig did teach me that.

So this week, I invite you to tell us:

* What’s one small way you were able to connect to your intention from Week 1?

* What's one struggle you've encountered along the way?

* What's one way you might appreciate being supported in your intention, in the final weeks of the month, given your answer in Week 2? (What do you like to receive?)

For extra credit: I’d love it if you’d affirm the person who posted before you in the chat with a virtual “high five,” letting them know that you see them, or (if relevant) that they’ve influenced your thinking in some way. That they matter. Even if it’s just a quick “great job!” before you click off to another tab. Because as caregivers, we often don’t get the same kinds of consistent feedback as we might in a place like that tech start-up, where metrics are king and quarterly performance reviews are de rigeur. The other exhausted adults in our homes might not realize we need that. The people for whom we care might not be able to speak their gratitude or encouragement to us in words.

Caregiving can be the most meaningful line of work in the world sometimes, but sometimes, it is quite literally thankless, and that’s hard. Both things can be true.

So let’s cheer each other on here, shall we? Because we all need people to climb alongside us sometimes. Let’s be together in the both/and here, telling each other the truth about how hard and beautiful that climb can be.

In Tending