View from the Houseboats

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".

This week I managed to teeter on the efficient side of overwhelmed. I did a few indoor spins… where my computer ran out of battery despite being plugged in because it couldn’t run all the programs I had open at the same time. What a metaphor. For the first, I called it a success to have exercised at all; for the second, I called it a double success because I had used to time to read through a grant I need to review and I took a voice memo of things to say in the evaluation. Is this high quality exercise or work time? No! But it was better than nothing. And in fact, it helped me stay a little more balanced to have the cardio and to have made some headway on the to-list.

I canceled or skipped a few meetings in order to have time to pound my way through my worklist ahead of deadlines. Another meetings or two were canceled because the other person was slammed with work. I kept a short to-do list and did not let my brain think about all the other to-dos. I created a “release valve” by asking for a deadline extension for one project and for another, telling myself I could use the first day of my PTO to work without meetings as long as I use some of the day to find myself more PTO time. I got a revise and resubmit drafted and sent to my senior author. Ditto on a grant progress report I had written last week but didn’t save properly. I made final revisions on a long, long-beleaguered paper that was finally accepted after the third round of extensive revisions; this is a paper we started 3-4 years ago, with we have learned 1000 ways to do things “wrong”. Another paper that started 4 years ago and has been much-delayed by hardship was published this week, and after tweeting about it, I noticed I missed a formatting error in the final table. Sigh. Oh well.

This is symbolic of the strangeness of these last few years for me: the successes and hardships are tightly layered. The good (Theo’s laughter, his art) are marbled with the bad (the losses, so many losses, more this week); any moment can have both profound joy and the ax of deep grief. As indicated, I’m taking next week off at home to catch up: on deadlines, on household tasks, on thinking, on reading, on grieving a third not-birthday.

Gratitude

• A little bit of rain in the Bay

• Trading voice memos with a friend, cheering each other on, providing new perspectives, trading parenting and grant-writing advice/commiseration

• Having enough bandwidth to send friends celebratory flowers and grief care packages

• A spouse who recognized his (our) limits in the Verizon store and after 2 hours, suggested we walk away without triumph and come back for new phones another time

• When Theo refused a dinner this week that he loved last week, being able to come up with a 3-minute alternative

• That Theo skipped drawing after bedtime one night to get additional sleep (one night this week he drew a sabretooth tiger and a well-fed cheetah, another night was a mermaid, a leopard and baby dear, and jaguar pouncing on a caiman).

• Teaching qual methods to small group of med students via a journal club, and using a paper I wrote with another med student on data I collected in fellowship to talk about real-world constraints and how to manage them

Goals for next week

• A hike

• A bike ride outside

• Acupuncture

• 2h of my own writing time

• Reading a hardcover book

How are you managing your own self-care – or at least forestalling cracking – in this tumultuous time?

Krista