Incremental, Microscopic, Unknowable

Well it’s been a year and it’s been A Year.Previously on Infrequent Missives from a Businesslady: I got Bell’s palsy, my column went on indefinite hiatus, I reflected on my long-term hospitalization back in 2010, and I pondered the challenges of narrating an experience from a place of midstream ambiguity. Good thing we’re now in a period of utter certainty and solid precedent! Oh, wait.In many ways my life over the past 12ish months was the perfect preparation for that-thing-we’re-all-dealing-with. The Bell’s palsy healing process has been excruciatingly slow, measurable only in hindsight. Medically speaking I’m “fully recovered” in that I’ve regained motion in one side of my face. (Somehow I restrained myself from explicitly complaining about this in my last dispatch but: for nearly two months I COULD NOT CLOSE MY RIGHT EYE. We had to tape it shut every night. It was exactly as awful as it sounds.) In comparison to that, my current woes seem shallow. The corner of my mouth twitches when I blink, my face isn’t as expressive on the palsified side, and—ironically—my once unblinking eye now gets excessively squinty when I smile. So I’m better than I was, but not the same. Will I ever get back to normal? Who knows!Like I said—I’ve been getting used to living with uncertainty. A day before my April 2019 tinyletter went out, I had a consult with a reproductive-health specialist who confirmed what I’d long suspected: the scar tissue from that 2010 abdominal infection was impeding my ability to get pregnant. Which, uh, my spouse and I had been quietly trying to do for some time. Again, these stories aren’t easy to tell while you’re still anxiously awaiting the conclusion.After IVF treatments last summer we got one lone viable embryo for our troubles, which is now growing into a baby that’s due in June. (Obligatory bump pic! Oh yeah and I also joined Instagram, sorry for burying the lede.) Of course, that one-sentence summary elides SO MUCH: literally hundreds of injections, dozens of doctor’s visits and blood draws, and uncountable bouts of worry. So much effort expended in the hope of an invisible biological success—buoyed by scientific best practices but ultimately beyond human command. Maybe I would’ve gotten pregnant without any medical intervention after all, or maybe I would’ve tried for so long that even the best doctors wouldn’t’ve been able to make it work. There’s no way to know.All the hoping, and the waiting, and the worrying of the IVF Times feels like a strange inversion of the crisis we’re living through now. Instead of anxiously trying to cultivate a vaguely parasitic life within me—let’s be real, that’s what pregnancy is—I (along with everyone else) am desperately trying to keep an external invader from using my body as its host. And just like with fertility treatments, there’s an interminably long wait between Doing the Thing and Seeing If It Worked, accompanied by the constant reminder that something could still go wrong despite your fervent attempts to do everything right. Two weeks after the grocery-store visit you feel confident you didn’t carelessly touch your face with a contaminated hand, all the while wondering if maybe you got infected after all and are now an asymptomatic carrier. And if you do get sick, you nervously await the end of that story, hoping you make it to the other side as a recognizable version of your former self and—if you’re anything like me—feel foolishly guilty about what you did, or failed to do, to cause it. We think we’re in charge of our bodies but there are so many systems burbling beneath the surface that we cannot understand, let alone control.That brings me back to my long, slow recovery from Bell’s palsy. For over a year now, I’ve been doing a series of face stretches and/or exercises almost every day, and (until I had to go into lockdown) was regularly getting acupuncture treatments. It seems to have helped—I believe that it helped, and have some evidence that it has—but I can’t say what would’ve happened if I’d done nothing.Even though the misery of this moment is highly individualized, we’re all weathering some version of the same experience: trying to stay (or get) healthy, worrying about the ones we love and ourselves, wondering how this story ends. Obviously I’m just as lost as the rest of us, and however well the uncertainties of the previous year may have helped prepare me for the present, it hasn’t been an inoculation against anxiety by any means. I can tell you, though, that there’s power in the doctor-recommended rituals that give you a little bit of agency. We’re all mostly powerless to fight a pandemic, but we do have some power, and if we wield it collectively it’s formidable.I hope everyone who’s reading this is hanging in there. If you’re feeling isolated, feel free to reply—especially if you have new-baby tips to offer or questions about IVF/infertility/Bell’s palsy. (Or about your job! Because of how I used to have a career-advice column! On that note, last year’s post on working remotely has become even more broadly relevant lately.)Usually the main purpose of these letters is not to wax philosophical but to share recent writing, so here’s an abrupt change of subject into that mode. I’ve published two pieces for Inside Higher Ed, one on developing a strong renewal/tenure case and another on applying for fellowships. It’s a bit more niche than my Dear Businesslady stuff but if you know anyone in academia, spread the word—applications are my professional specialty and it’s exciting to have all my expertise written up in one place.I plan to write more for IHE and maybe send out another one of these tinyletters with a less-than-12-month turnaround, but I have also heard that caring for a newborn is challenging so we'll see how much mental bandwidth I’ll have in the future. Maybe all I’ll be able to do is tweet. Whenever you hear from me again, I’m trying to have faith that it will be in a happier time.  ~court PHOTO TIME: In order to truly do all the things, my spouse and I also bought a house, after nearly two decades of renting. It is a lovely historic home from the 1850s—befitting a scholar of 19th-century culture and his growing family—and the fact that it needs some work has served as a useful concrete repository for my more ambient, useless stresses (pregnancy, pandemic; see above). And it has a FIRE PIT, which is one of the many small pleasures that sustain me these days.