What is the "new normal"?

Long time no see. Right when I started to settle in the new job and was getting ready for new posts, the
Covid-19 pandemic hit, and the blog slipped to the back of my priorities. I don’t really know if blogs are even relevant right now. Everyone is more active on Twitter and used to short-form communication. But…though I like Twitter, I don’t necessarily thrive on it. It tends to be more of a chore where you have to calibrate every word and sometimes you just have to sit there and breathe as things spiral out of control.

So, back to the blog, which was originally a place to put thoughts on paper to share with a few friends and then took a life of its own. The pandemic has been hard and useful at the same time. In the middle of it all, I had to move to a new home during the shutdown, go up for tenure, and restaff the lab with socially distanced training. Plus, all the additional burdens we have all been going through, the distance from friends and loved ones, watching some people run marathons in their neighborhood when I could hardly get off the couch, the endless procession of Zoom meetings that leave me exhausted, the animal colony woes, the budget cuts. The general sense of dread that this whole thing may be just too much to get over putting a permanent brake on my career.

Very early on, I made the decision to approach what was happening as an opportunity for reflection on what is important for myself and the lab. To accept that everything may change and ride the wave wherever it may bring us. To focus and refocus quickly on the most important projects and experiments that could be done in the limited time we had in the lab. There was so much cause for uncertainty, fear, and despair, that I had to find a way to cope. Also, maybe misguidedly, since I was funded and relatively comfortable, I thought I’d step in with grant and paper reviews to make sure other scientists out there could get funded and published. Serving on 8 NIH or foundation study sections in the past year was kind of insane in retrospect. And the angst that follows with getting back to writing my own grants when we could barely do what is written in the ones we have.

Yet, as we see the end of the tunnel in the distance, I’m hopeful that we’ll come out of this stronger and different. I’m grateful for the enormous resilience my lab has shown and how they carry on with laughter and humor. I’m grateful that I am in a supportive environment with great colleagues and that I am finally home. It’s strange that as I glance towards the Freedom Tower at World Trade Center in the distance, I’ve been thinking about the weeks and months after 9/11, how we were tentatively trying to find a “new normal” after enormous trauma. There is great comfort with standing on solid ground while the world catches fire around you, but the long-lasting effects of what happened with Covid and is happening on our collective mental health are hard to predict. In 2001/2002, all my energy was focused on coping and “getting back to normal” and the trauma snuck up on me after several months, just as I relaxed.

As the fire dies down and the vaccination campaign continues to speed up, there is a glimmer of hope that things will settle in a new normal in 2022. We’ve been anxiously talking about what it will feel like when the masks come off at work…whether there will be a permanent sense of uneasiness, whether social patterns will change. The catastrophic losses that have hit many labs may provide an opportunity to look at how we manage science funding and academic research, but I don’t know if universities will bury their heads in the sand. On the other hand, the speeding up of data sharing and the efforts to collaborate more widely to remain afloat may be here to stay. Similarly, the accessibility of talks and conferences on online platforms may help make science more available and equitable.

We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m excited to come back to the online world with new posts from a truly mid-career academic scientist.