For all you academics out there struggling to get anything done, I am with you. I have been social distancing for over two weeks now (since 3/13) in my apartment where I live alone (except for my cat, Popsicle). This means that the only two in-person conversations I’ve had were brief chats with my neighbors on the way to the mailbox or grocery store. I started social distancing before many of my close friends and family members. These first few days were the hardest because I had trouble getting friends on the phone because they were still living their busy outdoor lives. I felt extremely isolated and miserable and spent my days obsessively reading the news and Covid-19 research studies. Once people started settling into their homes for the shelter in place/lockdown/social distancing, it was much easier to get people on the phone and feel almost like a happy, connected person again.
My last post on this blog was about how to stay motivated and focused when working from home. I have spent a lot of time working from home very productively and thought I would be able to smoothly transition away from the office. I wrote the blog post before I actually had to sit down and work during this crisis. Week one was even more frustrating for me because I could barely focus and ended up doing a lot of mindless tasks and staring at the blank page I was supposed to be filling with brilliant proposal ideas. As any good problem solver does, I looked to the internet for ideas on how to calm myself and focus. I incorporated outdoor walks around my neighborhood and spent more time videochatting with friends and family, especially people I am close to but don’t interact with much over the phone. But, I still had these extreme low points where I felt helpless and afraid of being alone with my thoughts. I worked out a plan with a close friend to go and stay with her and her family if I can’t handle the isolation anymore. Slowly, I got accustomed to this new life situation and came up with some plans for getting through the next couple months.
My motto in week two has been, “forgive yourself for doing less”. By focusing on socializing with my friends and family, eating nourishing foods, and getting outside for some light exercise every day, I got my mental health back in check (a huge improvement from the junk food binges of week one). Only after that was I able to reintroduce small bouts of concentrated work/writing into my day. As a person who is very hard on herself, last week I focused on celebrating the smaller victories like keeping my apartment clean and getting an hour or two of focused work done each day. Today I read a beautiful article that I highly recommend for academics and researchers on taking a step back from the performance of productivity and refocusing on what’s important in our work and personal lives:
This article really resonates with me because it asks us to unlearn these performative behaviors and replace them with the authenticity gained from really listening to ourselves. In this time of forced self-reflection, we have more space to take stock of what’s going well and what needs our attention as we evolve into this new and highly uncertain world. Even as businesses begin to open in the coming future, this experience will fundamentally change our society and how we interact with each other and ourselves. For me, I am at a major transition point in my life, where I’ve just begun my first permanent position and am making big decisions about the direction of my research career. For better or for worse, this is a time to reflect and refocus on the sense of meaning we derive from our work and make the changes needed to come out of this experience ready and driven to help others through our scientific research.