I started this blog as a means of coping...taking thoughts that were swimming around my head, sometimes uncontrollably, and trying to put them in order and make sense of them. It did help at times, and it served as a good outlet. I posted a few times, though rarely. It wasn't that things changed significantly and I didn't need this outlet or find it useful; it was just hard to prioritize it. Life is busy, man. But I would come back to it later. At least that was my plan.
2020 is here...about a third of the way through, actually...and all plans have gone out the window. We're over a month into staying at home during the Covid19 Global Pandemic. Plans from before all this are meaningless as we're shifting into a different world than we envisioned. The common phrase we're using is that we're going to be experiencing a "New Normal."
There is some exaggeration there, though it depends on who you are. Some people's lives are being turned upside down by this, but many of us are not -seeing it- yet to believe it as we're all staying in our homes and experiencing the world through TV and computers.
As for me? Life is weird. I am safe as is my family. We're home, making do. We still have a long way to go, but we're very fortunate and grateful to have our health and security, which we recognize and admit every day. Things feel different, but we're persevering and making do. We're lucky.
Work is weird. This is where challenges have come. Early on, it was purely a situation of reacting. Everyone at work had to immediately adjust to not having access to the office, their labs, the classrooms and plan not to do so for an indefinite amount of time. What would that look like? How extreme would it be? What expectations were there for performance given people needed to focus on the health and safety of themselves and their families? The situation was constantly changing and there was no chance to look ahead, just react. In some ways, it was easy: focus on the now and don't worry about what's coming ahead. With the help and support of colleagues, peers, and everyone I work with, we managed to put things in a situation where people were safe, expectations managed, and everyone was set to define what they would do and how.
Now...this "new normal" work environment is allowing me to look forward, but I'm also being forced to look behind. That's where there's lots of frustration and worry. The volume of everything in the first few weeks was incredibly high: emails, meetings, issues to address. Things had to be triaged based on priorities and urgency, with many being re-evaluated as the conditions around us changed. Some things fell by the wayside. And that's what I'm worried about. I'm sure some things got buried and possibly lost. Not due to them being unimportant, but because compared to everything else, they weren't "SUPER important right now!" level priorities. I've found a couple of things that I wished I had come back to weeks ago. I've had to deal with a few of those, "Hey, I hate to keep emailing you about this..." correspondences. But what I worry about are the ones where I'm not finding signs of them or being reminded about. They just passed without me doing anything.
So I apologize. I apologize to anyone out there that I did not get back to in proper time. I apologize to those people who asked me for something and I dropped the ball. And I apologize to myself--I wish I had been better organized and able to manage.
A key difference now is that I think I can start to accept my own apology. In years past, I would just beat myself up about these things over and over again. Sometimes for extended periods of time. And believe me, I probably still will. However, I also know that we were facing a GLOBAL PANDEMIC. I need to allow myself to recalibrate my expectations. I need to acknowledge that there were some things that were outside my control. I can't expect to handle everything perfectly, but I know I was doing the best that I could at the time. That's really all I can ask.
So I'm doing ok. Everything is weird. I wish I were more eloquent but that seems to be about as an appropriate way of describing 2020 as I can think of. I'm going to update things a bit more regularly here, including focusing on some work stuff and specifics about fun things that I'm working on with my collaborators and research group, as well as life in general with my family. Everything may be weird, but there is still good stuff out there to celebrate and enjoy. And I'm going to allow myself that.
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