Week 68
View from the houseboats
First, the report on the “practice backpacking” with Theo and Sam last weekend. I’d call it ¾ of a success. The first night and day were surprisingly good (as was the backpacking pad thai). We all slept well (though Theo went to bed two hours late without the blackout curtains). On Saturday we (unintentionally) did an estimated 8 mile hike that Theo walked all of…though we had to distract him with the plot to all 9 Star Wars movies that he’s never seen. Sunday night there was less sleep, Sunday morning was full of miscommunication and crabbiness. Theo got to watch a bunch of movies that afternoon, because…balance. Monday, which we had planned to take off for backpacking, we sent Theo to school and Sam and I had a date day, with a 2.5h mountain bike ride (aka 2h of climbing, 30 min downhill) with lunch on our way home. Sam and I are generally pretty good about showing gratitude to each other for the mundane acts of service to the household, but I liked this article on how to show gratitude to create positive feedback loops.
At work it’s been a week of official transitions, with the new fellows starting. I joined my first in-person work lunch (outside at the VA in July, which means I wore a coat and wool scarf and wool socks and boots against the fog and wind) to greet the T32 research fellows, in my newer roll as (co)Associate Director of the T32. (As a sidenote, one of the stranger things I’ve learned about academia recently is that fellowship director or associate director positions are generally unfunded, especially research ones. This is another reason fellows should practice asking for what they need and “managing up” – because systems often make no sense when there are few resources behind them.) It was wild but lovely to see people in 3D. It also meant that because I am not in the habit of working at the VA, and haven’t made time to get an updated badge, I drove back & forth over the bridge in between zoom meetings, and then back over the bridge to get Theo at the end of the day. I have a feeling my clinical colleagues will be way ahead of me in figuring out how to re-invent their lives for this new era. I continue to be resistant to major changes; things are working well enough for me at the moment.
My summer lab seems to be gelling. People are starting to get to interesting analytic problems – including how to make space for processing emotions when reading heavy qualitative interviews – and we’re having good discussions. I love having the other team members facilitate meetings; one’s even routinely been suggesting music to listen to. I’ve been enjoying co-creating a Microsoft Teams-based infrastructure to support them, including unofficial team bios, daily productivity posts, section for analytic questions, library of qualitative methods and content papers (e.g. dementia, hospice, and palliative care). At the same time, I’m feeling a bit sad that the community I helped develop over the last two years (on Slack) has withered a bit, not least of all because the active collaborations are fewer (and perhaps as the intensity of need for pandemic supports has waned). I’m wondering if there are ways to merge or evolve these two groups in the fall, after the intense summer period.
On the GriefCast podcast, there have been repeated analogies between the pandemic and grief this season. In some ways, this season of re-emerging remind me of grief too: the period after big, intense, sudden loss, after the shock and then acute grief starts wearing off, where part of the brain thinks you “should be ok now”, and part of your brain is still full of grief. For those of you to whom this analogy is inaccessible: I hear in the voices around me that reentry should feel amazing and exciting and a relief and everything should be improving. And yet. For many of us it’s exhausting, logistically complicated, confusing. The reduction in perception of acute danger can mean that unprocessed grief, trauma, or other emotions have space to emerge. So, if any of you are feeling like, “why am I falling apart now when I made it through most of 2020 ok”, think about that sentence in a different light. Congrats on making to the place where it was ok to fall apart. I hope you’re getting the multiple layers of support you need to reconstruct yourself. Someday I’ll go back through the posts I wrote last year about all the ways I’ve done this over the last few years and summarize. Here’s a few about the early days of the pandemic and the analogy to earlier stages of grief, and the resources I curated from my posts of 2020.
Given Theo will be unvaccinated for another 6 months (probably) we’ve also been checking in with each other about risk-perceptions and risk-tolerances. Because it’s pretty easy for us, we’ve decided we’ll keep masking if we’re indoors, try to do our socializing outdoors, and try not to eat indoors with other people, whenever possible. I know this NYT article has a helpful chart comparing risks for kids, even with Delta. But right now wearing masks is a lot easier for us than not driving (or frankly, being in range of drowning hazards), so that’s the path we’re taking.
Today’s missive is late because after my morning meetings ended I took PTO for the rest of the day and met a friend in the city for lunch, coffee, and ice cream. Tomorrow, we get to see family we haven’t seen in a year and a half, including a pandemic “baby” that is 6 months old. I can’t wait.
Here’s hoping you and yours are well.
Krista