Originally shared via TinyLetter on 30 August 2020.

I started this letter-blog as a place for some outlet about hope and determination, for a place to write about things that I am working on, and explore some public scholarship that isn’t ready for “official” publication outlets. Then the COVID-blues hit the Millennial-blues right around the time that four months of stay-at-home-if-you-believe-in-covid intersected with my 35th birthday. A week of evening lightning storms further eroded my surge capacity, and I began to focus very hard on consistent eating, sleeping and the handful of projects that I hope will bear fruit into whatever new reality we find ourselves in– as the covid-tsunami recedes and we are left looking at a landscape that needs to be re-imagined. Who will re-imagine it? Who will be able to live with dignity in it?

I graduated directly into the capitalistic-disaster-excitement of 2008 with degrees in anthropology and archaeology, with extra studies in math, ecology and evolutionary biology. Interested in the intersection between the environment, society and emerging diseases, I struggled to find a place that would pay me to think about –and act on– these things. Instead, I took a job filling out forms for orders for supplies for a lab in a hospital. Through that, I found a data job in infectious disease research. I took more science classes, considered a few careers, and eventually– through a concern about the ways that data was being used as a commodity rather than a tool for understanding the world – found my way into the intersection of technology and society: data ethics.

In 2020, we find ourselves in another capitalistic-disaster-scenario that simultaneously wears the costume of a global pandemic, while wind-shears of natural-hazards rip the walls off our houses. And, I find myself re-exploring the studies of my early adulthood, by joining groups of researchers working on disease modeling. A volunteer-apprentice in many ways, I am living my values and my passion. I am harvesting seeds from over a decade ago and re-planting them.

This feels optimistic. The future is mine, right?

Yes, and. Except. My seeds are being planted on precarious ground. I am bartering for water, praying for sun. How many more times will I have to re-invent, re-imagine my own future? Materially, will these seeds provide some of the investment I need to economically survive? To thrive with dignity, instead of living with struggle.

And, I ask this with the heavy knowledge that I can even imagine thriving — that I can still have agency to invest in an unknown future with some confidence — is evidence of my own privilege in a world where new precarity intersects with a gradient of old poverty.

With the intertwined covid-blues and the future-world-imagination that I want to create, I’m trying to give myself the grace and gratitude to struggle and to celebrate, without constraining myself to an optimism I don’t always feel — while also illuminating some exploratory paths that require some determination to follow without knowing the material rewards. The future feels very uncertain, and that is the reality many of us are confronting. We are struggling to unstruggle.

Some of my next pieces will focus more on the covid research & advocacy efforts I am contributing to — for the world, and for myself. I may share some things that I am reading (following the structure of two of my favorite letter-bloggers Simone Letter and Culture Study ).  I’m considering sharing a few things from my experiences exploring and practicing Judaism, and what it means to be a member of community of practice. And there will be more about biking and bikes with throw-backs to my original newsletter about unpredicting life, with a modified focus to account for the very un-routine life we find ourselves in. I want to interact more with y’all — I am only as strong as the community that surrounds me. And we have many more months to live through.