The Coronavirus global pandemic hit the world at the start of the year 2020. I was in my second year of PhD and after the one year of rigorous classes and research, I could not help but appreciate the idea of the university shutting down for a while and all for a noble cause; to keep the virus away. The idea of being able to work from the comfort of my home meant pure joy for an introverted soul like me. The first few months, I went into a high of balancing my work and exploring my hobbies.
I was working on two major projects. The first one involved developing a kind of sampling device for environmentally harmful organic chemicals like Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) that were banned in the USA in the late 1970s for their carcinogenic properties but persisted in the environment because of their very stable structure. The second project involved mathematically modeling the uptake of these chemicals into a sheet of polymer (like Polyethylene). I had been struggling to set up the MATLAB code for this model for several months. But, I was unable to find time between working at the lab and at the desk to understand the mathematics behind the diffusion equations to work on my beginner level skills in MATLAB coding. But, being home just meant, I could finally devote all my time to understanding the math, without getting distracted with the lab-work. So, by the first few months, I was getting comfortable with MATLAB and was beginning to work around with the basic code to achieve my objectives for the project. By the end of September, I was almost ready to write a paper on the work done and the aims of the project getting partially answered.
Meanwhile I had been distributing the rest of my day into cooking, painting and learning to play the ukulele (I had no idea that the four stringed turquoise little thing could challenge the agility of my fingers so much!). By September, I had generated almost 20 original pieces of art (I use the word ‘generated’ because I was literally working like a machine churning motivation on the paper from the food I ate!). It was hard to stop me.
By the end of October, when the first wave of the pandemic in the US was subsiding, Aniruddha and I were tired with the mice infestation in our old apartment and moved into a new house with two other roommates. The new house had a terrace opening into the little forested plot of land behind and overlooking a creek. It was a perfect place to start fresh. As days passed, we were settling in little by little. However, I was never feeling quite satisfied with the setup I had. Since I was working from home it was very necessary to have a comfortable place to work in. The first break in my peace of mind came with the surge of the first wave in India when my parents tested COVID positive. And then my grandmother, a woman in her mid 80s, broke her chin and hurt her hip. She had suffered several major and minor heart attacks before this and now she barely has much control on her limbs and other body functioning processes. My parents got busier than usual with their own health, my grandmother and their day jobs. I barely got to talk to them for weeks which only got me paranoid about their health and more homesick by the day.
Aniruddha and I struggled to find a balance between the need for privacy and feeling lonely while working or sitting at the desk for hours together. After several months of stressful arguments followed by a week of taking a break from each other to find ourselves, we decided on some workspace agreements. I bought some furniture and personalized my half of the space to help me feel more at home. He, being the minimalist that he is, kept his side more empty. We placed our monitors facing each other’s so that no one could pry on the other one’s screen and pass judgements on what the other person was up to. I couldn’t watch sitcoms during my breaks and have my noisy laughs, while he would have to make the effort to make a conversation with me while he was taking a break. By April, we were finally beginning to find ways to tolerate each other for an entire day, week and eventually a couple of weeks at a stretch.
When I finally started to regain my focus on the lab work in late April I realized, everything was in a mess. The device we built was not functioning properly. The shelves where I stacked the resources for the projects I was working on, were highly disorganized. My first reaction was frustration and feeling hopeless and lost in the middle of all the work left to be done. With time I have let things settle inside me for some days now. I have started taking things slow. I think with almost a year worth of drop in the regular lab-work hours which varied from 3-6 hours everyday, to 3-6 hours a week, it would take a lot of time to recover the regular pace of work and make some substantial progress.
But maybe, it is still not as bad as it could have been. Surely, I have had several emotional breakdowns for varied reasons and and my creative cells have been in a state of limbo for several months now. But at least I have the luxury to be safe inside my home, where everyone is physically healthy, in a nation where the government has been able to provide vaccinations to most of the country’s population. I worry for my parents in India though. I long to see them and be with them soon.
