I loathe icebreakers.

can't we just be a little more mindful?

September has always felt like more of a new year to me than January.

My birthday is at the start of the month and for the majority of my life, I was headed back into a school building among a whole host of new faces, inevitable icebreakers, and introductions. 

I won’t even try to sugarcoat it, I loathe icebreakers. When I was teaching part of me felt guilty when I heard the rooms down the hall playing 2 truths and a lie and we weren’t. I worried I was doing my students a disservice because I couldn’t deal with my own shit. What was the harm of sharing favorite colors and our birth month? 

Despite disdain for icebreakers, I’ve felt drawn to reintroducing myself to you. But every time I went to type something it reminded me of the games that I can’t stand. So you get this newsletter instead.

We become the stories we tell ourselves and every September as people start new jobs and enter new classrooms they are asked to recite a nice-clean story, to make statements that fit their experiences into a little box. 

The more I intentionally choose to live outside of the box and the more I own my story, the more problematic canned introductions seem to me (and just to acknowledge my privilege here, I am a cisgender, straight, white female).

Here’s what my internal dialogue sounds like even around the most basic questions: 

I am Maggie (but really my full name is Margaret and my parents used to call me May–a term of endearment I wish I could still hear). 

I live in Massachusetts. 

I am a sister. 

I am the oldest child. 

I have (what’s the correct tense to use when one of them is dead) two younger brothers.

I am (how do I feel about this? Am I still a daughter even though they’re both dead? Is this part of my identity I still want to own?) a daughter. 

I have 3 dogs (please dear god no one ask how I ended up with 3 dogs. I don’t want to lie, but trauma dumping isn’t polite either). 

I think you get the idea. 

I’m not arguing for abolishing introductions.

After all, I believe human connection is vital. I just strongly feel we are missing an opportunity to leverage these moments. In my last few years of teaching, I used to greet each student with Play-Doh on the first day of school. We got to know each other by creating our favorite animals, favorite objects, something that made us laugh, and a litany of other things. Through this process, we got to know each other and learned the answers to some of the more “traditional” icebreaker questions along the way. It just felt more human, less robotic, and at least for me safer. 

I guess all of this is just my invitation to you, to get curious about how you ask others to introduce themselves, but also how you introduce yourself. Notice what is landing. Notice what is creating dis-ease. Notice what things you’re owning, that maybe you no longer want to own.

So that being said, what animal would you make out of Play-Doh?

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