Week 46
View from the houseboats
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about failure and resilience, misfortune and privilege, individual efforts and systems. As a result, this missive got a bit…long. We’re all healthy again, thankfully. Theo is doing his job of pushing boundaries, and we are trying like heck to be patient as we keep them. We fail a lot, but we try. We realized he’s been especially irksome this week because it’s yet another transition after last week’s change in routine. I did not end up taking this week as a writing retreat – took me quite a bit of time to dig out from emails and chip away at the to-do list of undone things that have recently accumulated – but I at least got a big block of writing time on Thursday. I’ve been catching up on my exercise, mostly via an indoor Zwift ride (sorta like a Peloton but with my real bike) every day. With the winds being wild, we can feel the boat move quite a bit at high tide, but it hasn’t been too bad and we haven’t lost anything overboard yet.
Off Richardson Bay, I’m concerned about California lifting the stay-at-home order early (could be ok, especially in Bay Area, could be pretty bad in places like LA that are particularly hard-hit) and the variant spread. The conversations among my friends about their parents or grandparents efforts to get vaccinated illustrate the inequities and inconsistencies of the ways different states are going about vaccinations, and the spaces between supply and demand. I found out my stepmother (in Massachusetts) and her roommate have COVID, but the former is thankfully asymptomatic and the latter improving. I’ve been trying to support my high school best friend navigate the nightmare of small-town-hospital care for her mother, who has advanced dementia and lives a few states away. I’ve also continued to hear from multiple people, especially those who are caregivers of kids or parents, that their mental health struggles are escalating, or they are feeling too isolated. Feelings of struggle and isolation strike me as very reasonable responses to our abnormal circumstances – we’re all living with an intense background level of stress from the pandemic, nevermind the foreground stress of our particular circumstances. Support structures, including (and especially) from professionals (e.g. therapists and psychiatrists) are essential here. Reach out to others – even if your agenda is just to ask how they are coping.
(Re)Learnings and observations
Attending to how your choices serve you: A colleague mentioned that they are particularly impressed by people who have kept up habits from the early days of the pandemic. This made me think about three different things. 1) For many of us, time was used very differently at the start of the pandemic vs. now, particularly as people were still learning what and how to shift to Zoom. So people had more time to fill up. But it seems like there’s less unstructured time these days and also more expectations for how we use that time. 2) Our choices serve some purpose, regardless of whether we’re mindful of them. I’ve been choosing to keep writing these missives in part because they give me a chance to reflect, and in part because your feedback has indicated they are beneficial to others. 3) I’m pleased that I’ve continued to make choices that prioritize my whole-self, and the wellbeing of my family, over those that would prioritize my CV. For example, this week I’ve been able to do mid-morning exercise in between meetings, whereas other times in my career I would have done something else on the to-do list.
Resilience comes, in part, from overcoming really hard stuff. The Grief Out Loud podcast #178 with poet and writer Katherine Mallory that mentioned a few weeks ago talked about how the word resilience gets overused these days, but she thinks of it as the product of overcoming or living trauma or hardship. Or, as my friend says, having to weave trauma into the warp and weft of your being. It’s a little depressing to report, but 2020 was my best year since 2016…the ones in between were really quite hard. The first year and a half on faculty were regular-level hard stuff (for an academic research mom with a newish baby): writing 5 grants, doing a faculty-fellowship, driving to multiple campuses a day trying to be part of different professional communities (and figure out where to pump), and traveling for professional stuff (often conferences) every month or two. Then were the two years of traveling for family hospitalizations, deaths, funerals, and changes in my professional setup – while trying to keep with collecting and analyzing data, disseminating research, and writing grants. I’m fortunate that privilege, sponsorship, luck and hard work aligned to give me the space and time I ultimately needed this year. I was able to make different choices about self-care this year than I did in prior years when I was in survival-mode. It gives me a larger margin for coping when harder things happen.
Learning to get really good at failure. I’ve got my son convinced he’s a scientist, and so he was telling me on the way home from school about how he’s asking questions, doing experiments, and making mistakes. A recent conversation with a colleague reminded me that so much of becoming a researcher is becoming inured to, and persistent in the face of, failure. I continue to be amazed when things go well for me at UCSF, because my memory of the path to get to UCSF felt so particularly full of failures. The very many grants I wrote and didn’t get in grad school and at the hospice, the papers I drafted and never published, the papers that were rejected by 7 journals and re-written after each, the many years it took to get each paper published. It takes a long time – and, frankly, good mental health – to learn to take the rejection less personally and interpret the failures as opportunities to improve or at least to try again. This too, is a form of resilience. I told Theo that important part of becoming a scientist is getting really good at failing.
Gratitude & appreciation
The Biden Administration’s rapid moves to ramp up the COVID response, rejoining the Paris Climate agreement, lifting the global gag rule and Trans ban in the military, and more.
While I was sick, Sam took the opportunity to upgrade my bike and put on a whole new groupo that includes more gears. We decided it would be cheaper than getting me a new bike, and I was tired of grinding my way up hills and being demoralized rather than having enough gears to spin easily and have motivation to get stronger. Not only does it feel so much better, but he adjusted it so that my (perfectly normal sized but female) hands can actually reach the breaks in the drops! I recognize those of you who aren’t cyclists may not understand a lot of that, but so much of cycling uses professional male athletes as the defaults, and poor Sam receives my feminist rants about this regularly – and took action to counteract it for me. It was a huge amount of effort on his part and is already leading to a lot more enjoyment for me, and I appreciate it.
We had a lovely family bike ride last Saturday. I was testing out the new gearing and seeing how well I felt, and Sam was handicapped by having Theo in the seat on the back (he’s a really strong rider). Theo wanted to go into the city, the day was beautiful, and we felt better than expected – so we had our first family bike ride over the Golden Gate and into the Presidio.
Sam normally gets up at 5am for alone time and an early morning bike ride. With the rain he’s been using the time before Theo gets up to do yoga and meditate. (Introverts and houses with no doors are not a good mix in a pandemic). I’m so grateful Sam’s investing in a broader range of self-care mechanisms in 2021.
This OnBeing podcast with Katherine May about wintering: “wintering as at once a season of the natural world, a respite our bodies require, and a state of mind.” She talks about the gulf between what we need and what we think we can ask for. In our house we’ve been practicing even identifying what we need as progress towards asking for it.
My Division had a wellness “retreat” this week. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I found it to be well-designed and lovely. There were two sections of small breakout groups, the first to discuss need for connection and potential solutions, the second on gratitude and how to build it into the structures of our days and lives. It was so nice to chat with people I don’t often speak with, and to have more context for my current lived experience.
In my professional life, I’ve been happily blindsided by four surprising pieces of sponsorship and opportunity coming my way, which is delightful and throwing me for a bit of a loop.
Theo was particularly chatty Thursday evening and started telling stories at dinner time. I’m not sure if he’s making them up or sharing book plots, but I’m quite intrigued by the one he started telling about an all-black tiger who stole three radishes from an old woman…who later carried the tiger to the sea on her back and threw him in.
Things we’ve been making
Sourdough discard crumpets: 4 ingredients, 15 minutes of effort, start to finish, and very tasty
Things I’m looking forward to
(per the advice of this UCSF Psychiatry webinar)
An outdoor ride with little wind
A true vacation. With childcare. Preferably backpacking so there’s no internet temptation.
As before, I invite you to share how you are doing and your small goals.
Hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy.
Krista