Week 90
View from the Houseboats
The last two days have felt a bit easier. I’ve gotten a few days of consistent exercise. I’ve made progress on my writing and thinking – nothing solved, but tangible progress – and been writing down my accomplishments daily to reinforce that I am making progress. Today I got up extra early and thus had some time to meditate and catch up on my journal for the first time in the last few weeks. The afternoons were warm and sunny.
I’ve been reflecting that while professionally, my CV shows meteoric success (which I’m still wrapping my head around frankly, as it feels like such a change in trajectory), I’ve also had this ongoing parade of hard things in varied parts of my life such that I can feel like I’m perpetually reeling. Since my father died, I’ve noticed that when I don’t have normal work and childcare routines my emotions feel unwieldy, tangled, and unpredictable. Last week we stayed home and made a Thanksgiving meal for ourselves and my mother. The food turned out perfectly, and the cooking much easier with my mother able to help entertain Theo. Yet my grief and emotions were all over the place, feelings that felt true in that moment but are not true in a larger sense. As we reestablished normal routines this week, I felt stabilized.
In a parallel experience, I was working on writing up results for a qualitative paper this week, and started to spiral – writing too much, getting stuck in the data, doubting all our prior analyses. But since I’ve been doing qualitative research for 15 years, I recognized it happening, and was able to take a step back and come up with a strategy to manage the emotions and make progress on my writing. Similarly, I suspect this will be true of my “breaks” for a few years: I will need to practice ways to identify and manage grief when I’m away from routines. I was reminded of this in the newest GeriPal podcast on burnout and resilience, where Arif says “resiliency is a skill like leadership and communication. It’s not an inherent trait. You are not good or bad at resiliency. It is just a skill you need to work on and you need people around you to work on it”.
I hope you all have the space to practice your resilience skills this week as well.
Interesting things on the internet
Advice on writing qualitative papers
Study of long-term air pollution exposure and developing dementia
OTC medications in older adults aren’t always safe (I’m just trying to catch up with my geriatrician colleagues on this one)
Distinguishing workforce diversity from health equity initiatives