Pandemic Reflections
A source of support.
When the first Bay Area shelter-in-place started March 16, 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it felt lonely and disorienting and pretty awful having no childcare for our 3yo with 2 full time working parents. In week 2, I sent an email to people with whom I worked closely, honoring this feeling and sharing some coping strategies I was using to create a sense of solidarity and support. This became a weekly ritual that grew over time.
In the emails, I shared a little bit about what was happening in my household as a way of normalizing the massive changes, shared strategies we were using to cope, and things I was grateful for despite everything. I invited people to reply for support and connection and to aid with professional accountability and motivation. Slowly and sporadically I invited others to join the list. Eventually, I decided the simplest way to allow people to join as they found content useful (or to opt-out if content did not resonate) was to create a newsletter and website. For the archived letters from 2020, I’ve done some light editing to provide additional context, or to remove my weekly goals. Not all have been uploaded yet, but I’ll get there eventually.
In 2021, the weekly letter has evolved into aggregations of many of my mentoring and peer-mentoring conversations. They still touch on methods I’m using to remain a whole, semi-balanced person amid parenting, grieving, and being an early/mid-career academic researcher.
In 2022, the weekly letter became a little more sporadic, but still shared reflections on things happening locally and broadly.
Week 98
I’ve been mulling over advice about integrating leadership and service into a research career from an amazing surgeon and geri/pal researcher, Dr. Zara Cooper, who gave UCSF Geriatrics grand rounds this week. The first piece of advice was a quote of Dr. Diane Meier (another giant in geri/pal research): “find your highest and best purpose”. In other words, what are you best suited to do, what is your unusual confluence of skills and passion?
Week 97
Saturday morning we woke up to a tsunami advisory, a result of a devastating underwater volcano eruption in Tonga. The potential importance of this didn’t register as we made waffles (and sent Theo to my mother’s so he’d stop swinging a stuffed iguana in circles in the kitchen) until we saw a neighbor bringing valuables to their car and heard the evacuation sirens from East Bay (granted, we didn’t realize what they were at the time). Instead of eating the waffles, we scrambled to assemble bags in case of evacuation.
Week 96
My parent friends are marveling that we are only 10 days into 2022. We’ve all been impacted by COVID – exposures, closed classrooms, or in my case, slightly shortened hours due to staffing shortages. Those of us with kids in preschool/daycare feel the looming likelihood of closures/quarantine on the horizon, if it hasn’t happened already.
Week 95
Welcome to 2022. What a strange, strained start amid the 5th pandemic wave due to omicron. Instead of hope and fresh starts, it feels…braced and uncertain. It’s currently raining in the Bay Area. We sent Theo to school today (after multiple negative antigen & PCR tests) in part because we anticipate a closure later this month, and frankly, due to the privilege of having him be vaccinated (and us and my mother boosted) and thus having less fear of infection. My heart goes out to everyone who is home with a kid today because of covid sickness, exposure, avoidance, or staff shortages (or like my DC friends, all of the above plus snow).
Week 91
Depending on when you read this, I will be/was part of a panel Grand Rounds 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.
Week 89
One day I will have reached a stopping place before time off. My sentences finished, my documents closed, my away messages up. Instead, I feel like a kitten in a yarn tangle. I keep pouncing on ideas or projects, thinking to wrestle them to an end, and instead find that I am further ensnared with no end in sight.
Week 88
It’s been a time of complexity, and so I’ve been a little more reticent, lest the responses to what I share feel unsatisfying. I’ve been a little quicker to irritability, frustration, or anger, which is my signal to step back and replenish the well – not that I’m always great at remembering.
Week 79
It’s been a strange week, one where I am grateful for the flexibility of my professional life. In the big picture all is well, but day to day life has included all the small weirdnesses. …To navigate this in my professional world, I’m practicing self-compassion….I’m taking Randy Curtis’ advice and focusing on what matters most to me right now.
Week 75
I feel a bit flattened by the week. Not least the heartbreaking and horrifying news from Afghanistan and Haiti. Hard things happening in the lives of colleagues and friends and neighbors. Zoom meetings for the majority of every work day this week. Negotiating and renegotiating boundaries and feeling like I’m disappointing people.
Week 71
I didn’t know quite what I wanted to talk about this week. Or rather, I have a few nebulous ideas that haven’t coalesced. One that’s been floating in my head for a bit is the idea that I don’t strongly associate most of my learning from a single source, so sometimes feel like I’ve learned by osmosis, or feel like I’ve always known it. That’s ridiculous, of course. It’s more like being in a pinball machine, where with each rebound I pick up another spin, another idea. Another metaphor is feeling like my self is constructed and reinforced by the network of people around me, or a web-like tunnel over the years (and given Theo’s love of spiders, I now have funnel-web spiders on the brain, ugh).
Week 70
Over the next few weeks, I challenge you to write down all the things that went well over the last 6-12 months. If you’re struggling with losses (including of opportunities, the “if only”s), consider making a separate list and make space to grieve them. Keep the list of what went well accessible (on your fridge or desktop) and keep adding to it. If there are things that are way behind schedule – wow, are you not alone. First, I recommend forgiving yourself for being a human surviving an (ongoing) global pandemic amid a social reckoning and political firestorm. Second, I recommend re-evaluating if those things behind schedule are still worth doing and if so, make a plan for getting them done in the coming months.
Week 69
Plan A for the week involved leveraging open blocks on my calendar to make some progress on my writing. Plan B involved changes in which projects I was focusing on. Plan C ended up being using some of Thursday to take a dive into learning about how to buy a home – not with certainty that we will, or that we could. But knowing that we can’t buy a house if we don’t try.