Oh, I started the term with grand ambitions, that I framed to myself as reasonable ambitions: get up with the chickens, and write for an hour. Then carry on with my day, secure in my awesome researcherness and ready to tackle mounds of paperwork, the unending travails of trying to schedule meetings let alone attend them, the course prep, the grading. I blogged it!
Reader, I’ve slept in.
A lot.
Yesterday, I got up an hour early, and read two short book chapters on snapshot photography. It was the first research I’d got done in a month. I feel awful–I know better! I know all the tricks, I write blog posts about the tricks! And yet, my research has receded so far into the dim recesses of memory that I don’t even know where to start if I was going to pick it up again.
What happened? And how can I get out?
First, I overcommitted. Like Julie, I need a better long range plan: I say yes to things that don’t seem like too much, but when added all together mean I have no time left. I did a keynote for a conference on campus. Then drove to Toronto to do a different short keynote and presentation the next day. Then had a yoga weekend of 20 hours duration. I reprepped my first year course, to add more assessment of textbook materials–so I not only have to grade six new reading quizzes and a final exam, I have to create these assessments, too. Without removing any of the other assignments. Oh, and there’s a new edition of the textbook. I’m prepping a new grad class for next term.
Second, I underestimated the capacity of admin work to colonize every single goddamn moment of my life. A million grad students want to talk to me, not just the ones enrolled, but the ones who’ve already graduated, and additionally ones who want me to recruit them. SSHRC letters. Meetings about how to schedule more meetings. Report writing then endless meetings about the reports. Small fires, immediately needing attention. Big fires, simmering scarily in the middle distance. Questions that require me to make decisions, and I never seem to have enough context to do these quickly.
Third, I had no slack time to absorb contingency. My daughter got sick with some sort of stomach bug and was home for two days. My husband’s job hit Peak Busy in early October and he needed me to cover for him. Then I got sick, then had another yoga weekend to go to. Then my father in law died, and his brother, too, in the same week, in two different time zones. I’m near tears and out of clean underwear pretty much all the time, recently.
Fourth, the truly unexpected: I had a tweet go viral a couple of weeks ago, and that resulted in pretty much an entire week of international media barrage on all fronts. I’m too tired of the whole thing, frankly, to link it but Jezebel, the Globe and Mail, CBC, Global, NBC Atlanta, Fox LA, Canadian Press, The Sun, a bunch of comics blogs, and thousands of retweets and mentions and emails and personal messages and the PR office on campus were pretty much happening nonstop. You’ve probably already seen it. It got to the point where I forgot that the local paper was doing a feature interview and sending a reporter over. Forgot! And I’ve done a bunch of other press as well on unrelated topics. It’s all extremely germane to my research and a high-value experience but HEAVEN HAVE MERCY I JUST CAN’T EVEN ANYMORE.
A good friend of mine told me a long time ago, in the midst of another of my panics: This is not a crisis, this is your life. And my yoga teacher, as I was grumbling about backsliding in one of another fancy pose, reminded me: This is a practice, not a perfect.
So. This is my life, not a crisis. And this is a practice, not a perfect. All I can do is admit what’s not working, and try again. It’s refinements big and little, and constant, that’ll help me find my balance. Writing this post is step one. Admit I’ve fallen off my path, and try to climb back onto it, not making up all that I’ve missed, but just starting again, one step at a time. Maybe learning some lessons about overdoing it, but probably having to learn them again later.
Hook & Eye 