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. I tell him how much earlier I got him compared to the day before, and explain I have to work, and of course, what does that matter to a sad and exhausted 5-year-old. Yesterday as he lolled on my propped-up legs at 4:30pm, waiting for dinner to be ready, he said, “Everything in my life has changed! Our house, my school, the trip to Cape Cod!” I know to some extent he’s parroting what we’ve said to validate his experiences, but it describes how I feel too.

In my circle of grievers, we’ve been talking about the importance of honoring the incremental and accumulating losses, not just deaths but changes in relationships, work contexts and colleagues. I didn’t realize how drastically life can change in one’s mid-30s, between aging & dying parents, the way parenting changes you (me), and professional role changes. Granted, some of this is the weirdness of academia, with its extended adolescence of long training periods that can cause people to delay attempting to become partners, parents, homeowners etc. (An interlude to acknowledge that the choice to become a parent is no longer as accessible and requires privilege, and homeownership is similarly privileged, and for both, geographic location and intersectional forms of oppression are major factors, and that not everyone does or should want to become parents or homeowners). This week marks the 1-year anniversary since my JAMA article on grief and its intersections with academia was published. It’s still one of the papers I’m proudest of, both for how it captured the feeling of that time and for what I learned about myself in the process of writing.

As a colleague reminded me today, both grief and the chronic stress of the pandemic depletes people’s capacity for dealing with stressors. This certainly is true for my own household, but we’re seeing it among our loved ones too. Over the last month few weeks, as we’ve visited with a wide swath of family, we’ve been attending to generational differences in parenting styles, gender roles/expectations, and related concepts. Reminding myself of how quickly (relatively speaking) things have changed helps me react with compassion and understanding rather than frustration and annoyance. Yet at the same time, I’ve been thinking about the harms (often small, sometimes large) caused when our experiences are invalidated (e.g., you’re doing that wrong/differently than I think you should). It’s one thing if people provide advice when asked. It’s another thing when people offer opinions unsolicited, especially when they make us doubt or second guess our experiences or instincts. Again, the need for compassion for myself and for others is substantial.

As a result, in my mentoring and teaching these last two weeks I’ve been trying to explicitly help people build their own instincts. I model self-compassion, share a few different ways that I might approach a problem, and encourage people to experiment with what makes sense for them. I’m also practicing asking permission for sharing the approaches I would take…but I admit that so far, I fail at this more often than I succeed. Here’s hoping you have the space and support to trust yourself in your endeavors this week.

Interesting things on the internet

• From me, thoughts on building a mentoring team, choosing mentors, and transitioning to a mentoring role

• Summer sale at Juniper Ridge, where I’ll be stocking up on juniper campfire incense

• Benedict Cumberbatch reading Nick Cave’s letter about grief

Recommendations from people around me

• A book to read: On Rotation

• Bay Area ice cream to try from Salt & Straw, Mitchell’s, Garden Creamery, Fenton’s, Bi-Rite, and Souvla   

• Colleague writing in the lay press on pandemic depression and still masking

• Colleague photographers: Landon Haller

• A tool a colleague uses for time-tracking at work that I may experiment with