Surge Capacity

 If you haven't already read Tara Haelle's article on how COVID has sapped our physical and emotional reserves, go read it here.   

I hit a wall shortly before Christmas.  By this I mean I just got absolutely cranky and fed up with things. The pandemic had totally depleted my surge capacity and left me totally drained.  After sewing a bunch of masks for gifts and making a bunch of holiday cookies I just got absolutely fed up with doing anything for anyone other than myself. I know that sounds horribly selfish, but at both work and home I had been putting my own needs and self-care at the bottom of the priority list. After a week of being a slug, I had returned to normal, more or less, but some recent collaboration drama has taken a toll and it will be good to have a different set of responsibilities for a while.

I’m super privileged and recognize it, but I’ve hit a wall/just gotten completely fed up with things a few times already.  I haven’t said much about it because I know I have it so good compared to most people. The first time was shortly before lockdown ended, because I was burnt out from doing virtually everything around the house.  It started out randomly enough, with our dishwasher dying shortly before lockdown, but then we were stuck without one. Add to that me working from home and Joe still going in, but doing a lot of the duties of his furloughed colleagues as well as his own.  He fell into a funk, and when this happens he usually becomes lazy AF.  I fell into the trap of doing almost everything, either because I was home during the day or because he was really tired after work and I thought that letting him chill would help him snap out of it. That strategy works for me, but rarely works for Joe. The endless dishes pushed me over the edge and I blew up at him a few times before the new dishwasher was installed in early June.

I hit another wall in the late summer.  I was back in lab full time and was trying to do my own work and at the same time most of the extra COVID hassle/logistics was still around.  Things were very much up in the air with all the undergrads coming back to town, and the grad students/postdocs were a lot more needy than in pre-COVID times.  Some of it was just coincidental (e.g. new postdoc working on my project) but some of it was a result of there being fewer people around – my boss was mostly working from home, as was our admin, a bunch of people graduated, and we were social distancing so there were just fewer people around at any given time, so most of it ended up coming to me. I could feel it coming in slow motion, and mostly just let myself ride the wave of crankiness until things settled into a new equilibrium.

The latest wall was not a surprise at all, although the way that it hit was unexpected.  I had known I’d be tired in early/mid December since I had a proposal due on my birthday. Joe was falling into a funk at the same time and starting to slip into slug mode; fortunately I recognized that early on and offloaded a lot of the cooking to him.  This helped a lot and I suspect that if I hadn’t done this I would’ve gotten fed up much sooner.