All right, so that's a melodramatic title. But you guys, I was a vibrating stressball last week before the events at the Capitol, and they did not improve either my focus or my peace of mind.
There's a reason they tell you that you have to return to work for a year after your sabbatical or else pay back your sabbatical salary, as I discovered in a visceral way on Monday. I suspect that this year is especially weird -- people at work are frayed around the edges after a tough fall semester, and it shows. I am walking back into a weird and volatile mix of stuff that would be unwise to blog about, so I will be vague and make optimistic noises. Challenges! Challenges help us grow strong! So many challenges to embrace!
If you are an academic still recovering from a tough fall semester, you might want to skip this paragraph, because I am going to talk about some of the ways that sabbatical was harder than expected. I knew that the work would be hard, because science is hard. I knew that I would be working alone all semester, and that I would need to find ways to feel less isolated; COVID complicated those efforts. But it was also hard in ways I did not expect. About 80% of the time I felt like I was not doing enough work, even though this feeling was not borne out by the actual outcomes of my sabbatical. I was worried that the lack of external deadlines might cause me to be too soft on myself, but -- surprise! -- it had the opposite effect. There was a ton of kid stuff to deal with at the same time. Handling the online school hassles was one of the top-ten most unpleasant things I have dealt with in 24 years of parenting. The parenting issues also stirred up some marriage issues, regarding which I will only observe that emotional labor is hard work, but I can assure you it was No Fun At All. All of it together has been wearying.
I think my colleagues are expecting me to be refreshed and rarin' to go after a semester in which I was free to focus on my research, but I am finding myself in a pretty different spot. It would be impolitic for me to be frank with them, because they really did have a tough fall. But oh, my friends in the computer, may I tell you that I also found the fall difficult, and that the winter so far is not an improvement?
Today I've been remembering that the day before my first triathlon I was overwhelmed with worry about the race. The biggest surprise of the next day was how much fun I had -- there was joy where I had only thought about catastrophe. I think I have just been put together as a person who feels cautious about new things, and I have to do a bunch of new things this semester. I am reminding myself that focusing on catastrophe makes it harder to perceive joy. I am taking deep breaths and trying to hope for the best.
Wish me luck.
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