The last few weeks have been tough weeks to be a parent. Frankly, they’ve been tough weeks to be a human. It’s hard to process information that is coming at you fast and furiously, regulate your own emotions, and get the laundry done and dinner on the table.

Having to try to navigate and modulate that for folks who have underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes, a soccer game, a paper due tomorrow and access to corners of the Internet that you’ve only heard about, well, something is burning in the kitchen, and the towels now have a funky smell to them.

What do you say to your kids? How do you help them make sense of a situation that doesn’t make sense to you?

How do you say there was another school shooting, and I don’t want you to live in fear, but I also don’t ever want you to let your guard down?

How do you say you have a right to your beliefs and your opinions, and I want you to own them and express them — but maybe don’t say them where other people can hear them and definitely don’t write them down anywhere or even mention any of them because someone somewhere could take them out of context and use your opinions to hurt you?

How do you tell them to stand up for those who have no voice, or can’t speak up for themselves, but don’t make a target of themselves?

I don’t know the answers to any of that, but I do know I did not think that these would be questions that keep me awake all night long, every night.

I don’t feel that I have ever been censored. For as much as I’ve shared and expressed on social media, the only post of mine that was ever flagged was one where I may or may not have suggested that I might inflict some harm on a certain canine who had mutilated the only pair of no-show socks that I’d ever found that were both comfortable and stayed in place.

While I believe it was pretty clear that I would in no way shape or form actually cause harm to the canine in question and that anyone who understood what a treasure those socks were would by sympathetic to my aggravation, I also appreciated that there are people out there who do in fact do that to animals and my making a joke of it in the heat of the moment was not appreciated. Lesson learned.

At the same time, I’ve expressed many opinions over the years. Some have engaged others in intelligent debate. Some have elicited angry comments and led to unfriendings, both online and in real life. Obviously, that is not the desired outcome, but over time I have come to realize that certain opinions and the people who have them are not good for my mental health, and doing the same thing, over and over again, is in fact, insanity.

The poem “Desiderata” is a favorite of mine, and I have mentioned it before. “Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and ignorant; they too have their stories.”

Of course, I realize that I probably cycle through being the one to speak my truth, and being the dull, ignorant one, and I’ve made peace with that. One person’s dull and ignorant may be another person’s cup of tea. The very next line, however, “Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit,” well, that’s the difference, isn’t it? Dull and ignorant versus loud and aggressive. The boring and uninformed deserve your attention, the clanging gongs do not. It is easier said than done to follow that path.

Unfortunately, social media and the 24-hour news channels have created environments where the loud and aggressive can continue to bang that gong ad nauseam. In fact, the only thing that draws attention from them is a louder gong banger. The quiet and clear are lost in the mayhem.

I am reminded of an exercise conducted in a few of my elementary classrooms. While chaos reigned, the teacher would sit quietly at a desk or come to a podium and begin class in a quiet manner, simply repeating quiet instructions, so only those that quieted themselves and paid attention could hear. Eventually, everyone would get the hint, and class would continue.

Of course, there was always the teacher who called the class to order by slamming a giant book on a desktop. I’m not sure if a loud, sudden bang is appropriate for school settings these days, but at one time, both were effective ways of bringing order to the classroom. One of them just took a little longer.

I’d like to believe that the slow, steady, calm, clear arguments will eventually prevail, but there are a lot of vexed spirits out there right now, my own included, a lot of people who just want to bang their gongs louder than the next person.

I will not try to prevent a person from speaking their truth; I respect their right. However, I can choose not to listen to it, and especially not to internalize it, when I find it loud and aggressive. Let the unvexing of my spirit begin.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturdays in the Times News