Week 91
View from the Houseboats
Depending on when you read this, I will be/was part of a panel presentation today, Friday, titled “Memoir, Memory, and Caregiving”. I’ve been pulling apart pieces of the two essays I wrote based on personal experience (the JAMA one and the Health Affairs one), and some qualitative data I’m currently working with, and weaving it together for a new presentation. And since this is a presentation without the academic safety blanket of a slide deck, I’ve written out the whole essay. After I read from a published essay, the first new section begins:
“This is the opening section of an essay I started the night my stepfather died, which was ultimately published in JAMA this past August, nearly 3 years later. People have asked me if it was hard to write, or cathartic. It was neither. It felt like a search to find the precise words to describe the experience of having a boulder catapulted through the fabric of my being. Stories have beginning and middles and ends, yet I often I feel like I’m looking at a pile of middles and shredded mismatched edges. My father was a high school English teacher and he taught me that essays are attempts. So this is essay was one of the attempts I keep making to make sense of the experiences, to tack down loose edges or weave in the fraying pieces.
Another analogy I’ve been drawing is to parenthood. The sudden death of my father and parenthood were both events that transformed me, unwillingly, into someone slightly different, This despite the fact I had been to many funerals of family members growing up. These memoir/essays are helping me make sense of why this event was so transformative, and to being to rediscover who I am on the other side of it.”
I’ve also been remembering a line I deleted from an earlier draft of what became the JAMA essay: “Each manuscript published I imagine like ecdysis: shedding loss. I collect new projects, less grief-tainted.” I’m still in this liminal stage but marked some substantial progress this week. One paper submitted, one paper that will be submitted early next week, one opinion piece submitted, and substantial progress drafting three other papers. Yes, I know, this is way too much, but things too far longer than expected. I've been getting a lot of milage out of the practice I started in the pandemic of 3 small goals a day: 1 for wellness, 1 for first-authored projects, 1 for service or collaborations.
I’m headed to my in-laws next week for a Thanksmas joint holiday celebration (with antigen tests for all first), and though I haven’t canceled nearly enough meetings to take the week off, my brain is starting to switch towards “winter break” mode, beginning to reflect on learnings in 2021 and goals for 2022 – more on this in a future letter.
Interesting things on the internet
Twitter thread with recommendations for N95 and KN95 masks (in case you need more)
My summary of advice on research fellowships
My advice from the middle of writing a qualitative paper
Article on Equity Tourism
A whisper of hope for getting rid of the filibuster (and thus potentially allowing election reform to combat the gerrymandered subversion of democracy)
An OnBeing Poetry Unbound podcast with a poem that include a mention of Cape Cod, my childhood home