i’ve been working with a lot of people the last few weeks - it’s interesting to have a global business right now.
timescales are different, and things seem to happen on different scales, but we’re all, to some extent, finding that the priorities have shifted.
the six month plan is suddenly cloudy - there might be day to day, or month clarity, but so much is up in the air.
and client after client is saying: i can’t focus. i’m angry. this doesn’t feel important right now. my brain is cloudy. my sleep is disrupted. i’m not hungry. i have no energy. nothing seems like it matters.
and, this, like others have pointed out, is grief.
many of us are mourning right now, in big and small ways. there are the obvious ways this is grief - the literal loss of life - which are enough to make anyone stop and mourn, even if they aren’t directly impacted or personally connected.
but here is a non-complete list of things you might also be grieving:
loss of access to your in-person networks
community spaces
wellness tools, like gyms
access to your data, or to the chance to get more data
the loss, or anticipated loss, of so much generational knowledge
the loss of control over your timeline
personal space
space you felt safe in outside of your home
job offers, or job prospects
optimism about the market or your prospects
celebrations and public acknolwedgement of all your hard work, like in defenses
your students and the spaces you shared together
the energy you got from teaching, or from collaboration in real time
funding opportunities
access to family and friends that live away from you
university resources, like librarians and archives
structure that kept your days and weeks on track
and those are just the ones at the top of my head that are specific to grad school and academic life.
this isn’t about equalizing it - or minimizing the situation by saying “we’re all losing something here, you aren’t special.” and it is MOST CERTAINLY not about starting a hierarchy where some people who suffer the most get the most space to be, and the rest have to just carry on. and it is 100% (!!!!!) not about the normal academic productivity humble brag olympics where we all line up and say how many words we wrote even though our lives and plans are in ruins around our desks.
this is about saying: if you are feeling awful right now, it’s not because you’re taking this personally or because you aren’t doing enough self care or because you aren’t doing a good enough job moderating your news intake. the feelings aren’t your fault. the feelings are a human response to the terror of the situation.
i describe it like this: my day to day is scary, but manageable. i’m finding new rhythms and new work arounds and starting to feel a shred of stability in the center of my routine that i can build on.
but the instant i zoom out to next month or next quarter or the end of the year, the magnitude hits me all over again. and i have to feel it all over again.
but that’s the trick. if you keep denying yourself the chance to feel the grief, it doesn’t just magically disappear. it compounds. and as anyone who has experienced grief can tell you, eventually it will catch up with you. you will feel it. it will out. and even if there was a magic wand waved and all of this went away in a week, we would still have to grieve. we would still have to deal with the impacts of what has happened, and all that we’ve been through. you will still have to address the accumulated stress in your body, in your mind, on your spirit. you’d still have to deal with it.
so the best thing you can do right now is an honest assessment:
how do i feel?
what can i do to help myself take care of this feeling?
what feels possible? can i work on that?
let yourself feel it. it’s going to overtake you - you might need some time to readjust. you might need some time to numb out. you might need to sleep, or to eat, or to play video games all day.
eventually, you learn how to swim in the waves. and if we’re lucky, we’ll see others, bobbing in their own waves, and we can build from there. otherwise, we’re going to use all our energy running from waves that will crest eventually, and be even less equipped to handle them when they do.
take care of yourself. start there.