Everything in Your Backpack Was Trying to Tell You Something

My son starts middle school next week.

As any reasonable parent would, I immediately started worrying about all the things that could possibly go wrong.

Would he get lost in the new building?
Skip lunch because the cafeteria suddenly requires a level of logistical confidence he’s never needed before?
Figure out the social hierarchy that seems to materialize in every middle school hallway by approximately 8:17 a.m. on the first day?

Mostly, though…

I was thinking about lockers.

Not because he was.

Because I was.

I vividly remember standing in front of those those aggressively beige-yellow metal doors, spinning the dial one way, then the other, then back again, while the hallway slowly emptied around me. Every extra second felt like a public service announcement:

“Attention everyone. This human cannot operate a basic locking mechanism.”

So, naturally, I asked him if he wanted to practice over the summer. We could even buy one of those combination locks and learn together.

He looked at me like I’d offered to homeschool him in safecracking.

“Nah. I’ll figure it out.”

That was the end of the conversation.

Kids have a remarkable ability to borrow our confidence.
They also have a remarkable ability to ignore our anxiety when it’s completely unnecessary.

Somewhere between offering to buy him a practice lock and realizing he genuinely couldn’t care less, it occurred to me this wasn’t really a parenting moment.

It was an archaeology moment.

I wasn’t trying to solve his problem.
I was excavating the memory of mine.

Curious, I started asking friends what they remembered about middle school lockers.

Apparently, I had accidentally opened a support group.

One friend confessed she still has recurring dreams that she can’t get her locker open.

Another admitted she never even used hers. Not once. She carried every textbook around for an entire year because she was convinced that if she closed the locker, she’d never get it open again.

AN ENTIRE SCHOOL YEAR.

For fear of thirty-six inches of beige metal.

And suddenly I wasn’t thinking about lockers anymore.

I was thinking about all the strange little strategies we invent when we’re trying to feel safe.

And how early some of them start.

Somewhere between the Trapper Keeper, the mechanical pencil with no eraser, the Lisa Frank folder and the Bic 4-Color we clicked 700 times a day, we were already becoming very particular little humans.

We thought we were choosing school supplies.

Looking back, some of them feel suspiciously like early prototypes of our Leadership Archetypes.

Let’s empty the backpack, shall we?

The Warrior

Exhibit A: A mechanical pencil with bite marks.

The lead is down to the nub.

The eraser disappeared sometime around October.

It has survived fourteen group projects, three exams and one emotionally significant math quiz.

Replacing it would take thirty seconds.

You would rather perish.

Adult version?

You still squeeze every last ounce out of yourself before admitting you need a refill.

The Survivalist

Exhibit B: A Trapper Keeper that could survive re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

The Velcro rip could be heard three classrooms away.

Inside:

Band-Aids.
Extra pencils.
Emergency granola bar.
Two permission slips.
A permission slip for the permission slip.

Nobody asked you to become Logistics Manager for seventh grade.

Yet somehow…

Here we are.

Adult version?

You’re still the person who knows where the charger is.
(And has already packed a second one.)

The Happy Denier

Exhibit C: The glue stick that is ninety-eight percent hope.

There is no glue.

There hasn’t been glue since Halloween.

But if you twist it high enough…

maybe.

Adult version?

You still believe things will somehow work themselves out.
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes your optimism has the structural integrity of dried Elmer’s glue.

The Deflector

Exhibit D: The novelty eraser shaped like a slice of pizza that smells inexplicably like strawberries.

Does it erase?

Technically.

Does everyone borrow it because it makes them smile?

Absolutely.

Adult version?

You can diffuse tension in under twelve seconds.

Unfortunately…

You can also disappear inside the joke.

The Obsessor

Exhibit E: The 64-pack of Crayolas.

Not one broken tip.

Alphabetical? Maybe.

Chromatic? Definitely.

The built-in sharpener has never experienced user error.

The box still has that new-Crayola smell in February.

Adult version?

Your calendar has its own color palette.
Your spreadsheets could qualify as interior design.
Your nervous system, however, has thirty-seven tabs open.

The Professor

Exhibit F: The highlighter set with a constitutional monarchy.

Yellow is definitions.
Blue is examples.
Pink is “important.”
Green is “important but differently.”
Orange exists for reasons that require a laminated flowchart.
There is also a Bic 4-Color pen, but each color has a designated function and no, you may not borrow it.

Adult version?

You don’t collect information.
You domesticate it.

The Bell Doesn’t Dismiss You…

Every year, adults spend entirely too much money on fresh notebooks they’ll probably use for three pages.

Not because the paper is better.

Because possibility has excellent marketing.

A clean notebook whispers,

“Maybe this year will be different.”

Maybe it will.

But probably not because of the notebook.

The funny thing about adulthood is that we never really stop having first days of school.

We just call them promotions.

Career changes.
New teams.
Big presentations.
Parenthood.

Every unfamiliar season quietly asks the same question our middle school hallway once did:

Who are you going to be when you don’t quite know what you’re doing?

Most of us answer the way we’ve always answered.

We sharpen the pencil.
Pack another snack.
Highlight another paragraph.
Crack another joke.
Insist everything’s fine.
Color-code the calendar.

Old strategies have excellent attendance.

They show up for the new job, the new relationship, the new team, the new school year.

Long after we’ve forgotten where we learned them.

The gift of self-awareness isn’t throwing your backpack away.

It’s finally taking everything out of it.

Keeping what still serves you.

Thanking the rest for getting you this far.

And leaving a little extra room for whatever this school year, this season, this next chapter has waiting for you.

Because it turns out…

The most important thing we carried out of school wasn’t in our backpacks.

It was all those tiny ideas we collected about who we needed to be to make it through the day.

The prepared one.
The smart one.
The funny one.
The tough one.
The easygoing one.
The one who gets it right.

And like your middle school locker combination…

You don’t have to remember them forever.

Xo,
Elise

P.S. He #NailedIt

✨ Curious what you’ve been carrying around since middle school?

Take the Leadership Archetype Assessment and discover the stress patterns that tend to show up when life gets uncomfortable.

Because some things deserve a permanent spot in your backpack.

Others could’ve been left in your locker years ago.

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