March was a surprisingly challenging month in our house. I last wrote the week the R01 went in. Some of the to-dos I tackled in the subsequent week was taking Smitty, our nearly 15 year old cat, to the vet: she has a mass in her belly with a prognosis of weeks; I declined to learn more detail.

Hello after a 5-month absence!

It’s been a big week(ish) here. I submitted my first solo-PI R01, passed the 10-year anniversary of my dissertation defense, the 3-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic, and the 4th birthday my dad is not celebrating.

Four weeks in a row now I’ve opened this document, written or changed the date, and then stared at it. Or wondered if I had anything worth sharing. I’m writing this today, on a Monday, because the light is gorgeous and I’m still on the endorphin rush of an outdoor morning ride in perfect weather. I somehow have no meetings today and so am using it to reset after this wild month. Granted, part of my brain is saying: “we must maximize efficient use of this rare experience!” but it’s been overruled, and this day will be deliciously inefficient.

This past week marked the autumnal equinox and start of fall. On the one hand, that historically meant lovely weather in Sausalito (and it has been this week). On the other, it marks a turn toward holiday seasons that can feel particularly lonely to grievers. If you are having a tough week this week may not (or may) be sure of the reasons why – you are not alone.

These “weekly” letters are …are part of my broader mission to create more compassionate systems that mitigate suffering – in this case for trainees, staff, or faculty in academia/research – by sharing strategies I use to manage insecurities, workloads, internal and external hurdles, and barriers, and work-life integration. Not least, to show that many of the struggles we have earlier in our careers don’t go away, we just get better at identifying, understanding, and managing them.

It continues to be a time of transition, this being our first full week back in meetings and school. Every night and morning Theo tells us he’s nervous about school; each day at pickup he tells me I’ve gotten him too late and he says feels terrible.

The last 20 days have been full of ordinary challenges. We spent from July 30-August 9th visiting my extended family and friends on the East Coast. Then from August 9th-16th our childcare fell through and we canceled planned work. On the 17th-19th Theo started kindergarten at the local public school. Work re-entry has been it’s own interesting experience.

As sometimes happens, no sooner did I write last week’s post that reflected a few days of feeling more at east than I slammed into a wall of overwhelm. …I’m proud of how I managed this:

Some of you may be wondering where I disappeared to, after my last regular email/post in late April. Some of you are new to the newsletter.

To recap, in May, our family (my spouse Sam, 5.5-year-old son Theo, and I, and our geriatric cat Smitty and dog Greta) moved from the houseboat

It’s now been a week since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It’s taken me a week to find words for this. It’s devastating. And yet we must not let despair keep us from action.

In the evenings my brain, like Theo’s, is increasingly overtired and a little unglued. Thursday was a fairly unproductive day relative to many others this week, because I am simply tapped out. In the evening, when Theo became overwrought we talked about how sometimes are feelings are like tigers that go savage, and how we have to find ways to keep ourselves and others safe until the tiger can be wrangled.

This was one heck of a week, complicated as it has been for the last 3.5 years, with good and hard laminated like croissant dough. But for once: a lot of good news!

I’m about to head out the door for a weekend of a last-minute assembly of ways to celebrate my 40th birthday. Our ability to plan ahead for this time has been…non-existent…not least because the next three days include the anniversary of my mother’s move out here, the anniversary of Larry’s death in 2019, and my birthday.

Daylight savings week has been a major transition ever since Theo was born, though the impact is shorter as he gets older. He’s still getting up later and going to bed later, but he’s more self-reliant. Granted, Wednesday night, after bedtime, Theo cut off his bangs and used them for a sculpture made of tape, somewhere in the middle of his usual drawing fest. I’ve gotten a lot of laughs out of this, and I gave him a real haircut the next morning.

I took this week off for what I used to call a Grief Week, but I think going forward will perhaps call a Reset Week. In early January 2022, I had extra bandwidth: I was playing cards with Sam in the evening instead of working, and getting up early to meditate or do some creative writing. In contrast, February had few margins for creativity or rest, packed instead with deadlines and to-dos. The last two weeks I’d been feeling very grief-y and very stressed. I expected this week off to be flooded with tears as a result. After a few days of unwinding, I’m discovering that instead, stress and grief have knitted themselves together in my body over the last few years.

I would like to stop having the life where “wow, that’s a lot” is the usual response. I would like the "a lot" to stop...unless it's "a lot of really good things” or “a lot of chocolate".

There is so much awfulness in the news right now: the invasion of Ukraine and domestically, anti-trans and anti-gay legislation. Some bright spots: the choice of Ketanji Brown Jackson as Supreme Court nominee, Black History Month affirmations, potential rain this week in the Bay Area.

My academic life for the last 5 years has been too frantic. A result of the scramble of trying to “make it” in a soft money environment and of collaborating with several phenomenal teams working on multiple projects and papers at the same time. With all the losses I experienced, renegotiating expectations felt too hard – instead, I just pushed through and did too much. Yet overtime I’ve realized the cost of that frantic pace – not just to me, but to my family. The pandemic slowed the pace a bit, but I’m grappling with the ways in which the pace is habitual, and I default to perpetuating it.

100 weeks. 100 weeks since the first stay-at-home order, of working from home, of the extra logistical and emotional weight in decision-making and childcare. 100 weeks of writing this perhaps too-vulnerable, mostly weekly email, to normalize and create community through the ups and downs of academic life in a pandemic. And per those usual ups and downs, this email has been delayed so you get an odd mix of reflections and explanations and extra gratitude in honor of Valentine’s Day (or Friendship Day as they are saying at Theo’s school).

Happy Lunar New Year. Every morning our house has been full of the sounds of the lion dance drumming, which my (very white) son adores. As a houseboat-dweller, I like that this is the year of the Water Tiger, a year for expanding knowledge and wisdom, new adventures and change. It sounds auspicious.