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 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 56
Change in the pandemic remains hard. It’s been lovely to have my mother next door and honor all the events of the weekend…and we are, of course, still working on finding a new rhythm to life. Hard things are happening in the live of people around me. I have completely neglected all my usual self-care this week – exercise, meditating, journaling. I am trying to be patient with myself, not judging, and remember that each day I can make different choices.
Week 50
Oddly, this was a good week. I didn’t exercise much, I had too many meetings, I worked in the evening, I slept poorly, bad things are happening in the lives of people I love. And yet. Some odd mix of timing, pressure, new team members, coffee and adrenaline meant breakthroughs in multiple projects where I’ve had long-time hangups. It’s so strange and yet so normal, the pairing of shadow and light. Hopefully this weekend I can self-invest a bit more (e.g. meditate, exercise, sleep) and re-set my work boundaries (e.g. no work nights and weekends). Both to allow my brain to recover and be more creative.
Week 47
You may not believe this, and you probably aren’t hearing this enough, but you are doing great. No seriously. We continue to be living in a pandemic. Many of us separated from family or loved ones, often trying to help from afar or navigating risks to help in-person. Many of us are navigating deep grief, in varying degrees of willingness to talk about it. We are all trying to make the world a little less terrible, in our own ways. Thank you for all you are doing.