Image provided by stock.adobe.com
Dear friends,
Happy September! Every fall feels like the start of the new year for me. We are still in tough times, and I hope you’re finding optimism in some corner of your life. In August I shared that I did not realize until I went on an extended vacation how much my workload was affecting my brain and body. I've been experimenting with reduced working hours for the last month, and I will report back to you in a future post about whether I can keep it up.
Grants and promotions are the coin of the realm, and in academia we need to work towards those goals. I firmly believe that we can meet these milestones without sacrificing our well-being, and I'm still figuring out how. I'd love to hear your thoughts- how do you make space for yourself when our work is theoretically endless? Not how you make space for family or exercise or other obligations, but for yourself?
As I continue to ponder my many years of overwork, I have come to a new realization. We all know women and people of color face discrimination in academic medicine, and each year that I stay in this game I am more likely to be the only woman, the only person of color, and significantly younger than everyone else in the room or Zoom. I am used to being underestimated. I thought, throughout my early career phase, that once I achieved certain milestones, like being promoted to associate professor, that I would be taken more seriously by "the powers that be." I was wrong!
I have learned that for all my funding and advancement, certain senior leaders are going to mistake me for other South Asian women faculty. Others will assume that I'm "not a researcher anymore," because I have a departmental administrative role, and I am going to have to repeatedly remind them that I am currently the PI of two R01s.
The hard truth is that none of us can strive our way out of other people's assumptions, and no achievement can stave off micro-aggressions. Somewhat paradoxically, I am finding this revelation very freeing. It's healthy to let go of an impossible goal! Instead, I'm thinking of wise words my friend and mentor Dr. Ivor Horn wrote on Twitter: "being underestimated is my superpower."
What’s your superpower? Drop me a note and let me know. I love to hear about your important work, and I'll share any ideas about reining in overwork in my next post. As always, please share this post freely and feel free to sign up for monthly emails at the bottom of the page here.
Warmly,
Urmimala