Goodbye, 2025

 What a wet fart of a year. It was a hard year for my work and an even harder year for the world.

Even if no one else reads this, I enjoy reflecting on my year. 

Checking my predictions

There was the potential for a lot of changes for our family in 2025, but (amazingly) the changes were actually quite modest. Adele is at the middle school we'd hoped would work out, Jon stayed in his job, I stayed at mine, and we aren't seriously thinking about moving after all. 

We did make the sad decision to put down our dear old dog, which I thought we might have to do in 2024 so she made it longer than we thought she would. Now we're doing some long-term dog sitting for two charming littermates. 

I did do a lot more cooking in 2025. We're in a pretty good routine now where Jon does the meal planning and shopping, I cook, and Adele cleans (with Jon's help as needed).

As far as the wider world goes, I think it's even worse than most of us feared. The first time around, bureaucracy did its job of making radical change hard. This time, they just broke the system. LinkedIn became the most depressing social media with all the people in my network who lost jobs and grants. I continue to give thanks for our combination of luck and privilege that has insulated us from the greatest consequences. 

Work

This year was a wild, awful ride. We had all kinds of internal dysfunction and conflict that ultimately led to unprecedented turnover — and that was just one of the problems. Personally, I felt that my team was being asked to solely carry a burden that shouldn't have been ours alone, and this caused months of conflict with my boss. 

For the first time, I felt deeply burned out to the extent that I thought I need to think about finding a different job. Even in 2022 and 2023 when I was seriously stressed out and working incredibly hard, I didn't have this thought. I even fantasized about having some temporary but serious-enough medical condition to take me out of commission for a few weeks. 

According to my timekeeping and including work travel, I worked approximately 2590 hours in 2025. This is a horrifying 49.8 hours per week for all 52 weeks of the year. I did not take a real vacation. I took a few days off here and there, but I typically compensated by working more on other days. This is clearly unhealthy and unsustainable.

Thankfully, I lead an incredible little team that was a beacon of stability and hope. I hired two new people this year, and we did fabulous work together in the midst of a tumultuous and sometimes hostile environment. I have grown as a leader, and I'm still getting used to being more of a systems architect of the work than a doer of it. 

Despite the long hours and deep struggles, I am ending the year feeling less burned out than I was this summer/fall, and optimistic about 2026. I hope that we can learn from this year's mistakes to make different ones in 2026 instead of repeating the same ones. 

Self care

Despite all of the stress and burnout this year, there were some key things I did for myself that really helped me get through the hard times this year. I worked with a leadership coach for most of the year, in addition to my therapist. Sometimes I was frustrated by slow progress with the coach, but her emphasis on the emotional aspects of work did help me get unstuck sometimes. I was grateful to have external support from two different sources to make it through the most difficult patches. 

I also maintained my weekly commitment to dancing whenever I could. Since restarting in 2024, dancing has continued to be an important physical and psychological outlet for me. There were only a couple of times that I skipped it due to exhaustion or work when I otherwise could have gone.

Even with all the crazy work hours and some insomnia-inducing conflicts, I am overall sleeping better and a little more on average than in 2024. I have gotten better at recognizing when "anxiety brain" is waking me up and calming it down so I can go back to sleep. I've taken many naps. And I've enjoyed many excellent movies, TV shows, and games with Jon and Adele. 

I've managed to stay quite healthy. I did quite a bit of travel again this year (12 trips), and didn't get sick from any of it. The only time I got sick was in January when Adele and I both got what we think was the flu from a neighbor kid who was hanging out at our house. We had to postpone a visit to my parents, and I barely got well enough for a work trip, but I managed to keep my germs to myself by masking. We all got Novavax boosters in October and I continue to use Covixyl and/or masking in most higher risk circumstances. 

Family & Friends

My biggest personal accomplishment this year was a breakthrough on a complicated family situation that I had largely ignored for several years out of fear. Although I can't go into details, I can share that it's going better than I could have dared to hope. Aside from that, there weren't really any remarkable family events or changes. We did a couple of long weekend trips with my parents. 

A college friend and her two cats came to live with us for a few months after a rough split with her longtime partner. It was fun to have another friend around, and nice to have a third adult helping with chores for a while. We're really glad that we could help her find her feet after the breakup.

Checking my goals

I did manage to do some decluttering, but much remains. One particularly impactful thing I decluttered was my houseplants. Since I have so many of them in my office space, it makes a big difference to not feel overrun by them. 

I didn't come close to my unbloggable hobby goals, cleaning the pantry, or asking for yard help. 

I did a short solo trip, but I ended up working for much of it since it was near the height of my summer stress and misery. Still, the change of scene was nice, and I did an amazing solo hike where I encountered bears! 

The state of the world

I can't possibly say anything profound about *wave hands and gesture wildly* all this. I have really focused this year on staying sane by having a positive impact through my work and chipping in other small ways as I can. I can't do it all. It's not all mine to carry, but I'm doing my part.

I look forward to writing about 2026 tomorrow. Now, I'm going to close my computer and spend time with people I love. Goodbye, 2025!

A decade of blogging

I started blogging 10 years ago, right before starting grad school. This blog chronicled 6.5 years of grad school (approximately 13,507 hours of work) and the 3.5 years since officially graduating. During that time, I lost 3 close family members, got married, spent over a year doing field work in Africa, got a dog, had a baby, moved to a new city, and had three different jobs as a PhD. This has been an eventful decade.

For the first few years, I blogged several times per month (or even several times per week). It was an opportunity for me to reflect on my experiences and practice writing. Looking back on many of my early posts in the writing of this, I am struck as much by the things that haven't changed as much as the things that have. I still love Small Friendly College just as much as in 2007 (and the post made me teary again). I see major parts my current self in these older writings. In some cases, I captured events that I see now had outsized importance in shaping my current career, like a workshop on science communication and an interdisciplinary project. There are threads and early hints of the ideas and concepts that are hugely important to my present work, which makes me feel like I'm in the right place now in my career.

In some ways, I don't think I've changed substantially, but I've learned so much about myself in the last 10 years. I've grown. I wrote in 2009 that I needed to be more of a badass. I most definitely am. My moments of greatest badass-ness are probably still finishing my dissertation before my daughter was born, then giving birth to her and going through (and recovering from) serious complications. To finish my dissertation, I toughed it out and kept my eye on the prize with intense focus to the exclusion of everything else non-essential. When recovering from childbirth, I refused to accept my limited mobility and searched and read until I found the right people and resources to help me heal. During grad school, and especially during field work, I became aware of my common mental traps and I'm much better at avoiding them now that I know the signs (like being indecisive). I am nothing if not resourceful, and as my personal networks and knowledge have grown, I have an ever-growing pool of ideas to draw upon. This last year in my new job has especially helped me realize and appreciate the breadth and depth of skills and networks I have, and given me many more ideas for how I can leverage them to do good and awesome things. I, too, can stand on the shoulders of giants—in life as well as in research.

My favorite genre of books is scientist memoirs (e.g. Richard Feynman), especially field biologists (e.g. Jane Goodall and Robert Sapolsky). I love reading about the adventures that happen in the pursuit of science. I love reading about how they live their science-y lives, what their families think, how they raised kids, what went wrong, and how they overcame adversity. Their stories have helped me imagine what my life could be. Blogs by scientists about their lives scratched a similar itch.

Blogging was also a community, and the other women in science bloggers were my mentors. I learned so much from them. I read blogs of more advanced students describing drama in their committees (I learned years later that managing your committee is a classic example of "managing up"). I read about postdocs applying for faculty positions. I read stories of scientists in all career stages struggling with chronic health issues, infertility, and difficult relationships. I was unquestionably better prepared to be a good graduate student and navigate the potential job market afterwards as a result of the science blog community. I'd like to throw some nonspecific thanks out into the universe to the dozens (hundreds?) of bloggers from whom I gleaned wisdom and advice. Thank you!

While blogging during grad school, I accidentally discovered the identities of a few bloggers I followed, and a few people discovered me (one person anonymously and mysteriously tried to "out" me). I made real life friends because of this blog, and it was a way to re-connect with a handful of trusted people that I invited to read it. A few of you are still reading. Thanks for following my sometimes vague and pseudonymized adventures!

I watched, always with sadness, when other bloggers decided to call it quits for one reason or another. More often, they didn't have closure and just stopped writing, or I just stopped reading. Probably kind of like this—I stopped writing so often. In part I blame the declining popularity of RSS and therefore the declining options for good feed readers. Somewhere along the migration from one feed reader to another, I lost track. It has been a long time since I regularly read other people's blogs, so my blogging is overwhelmingly an introspective exercise.

It would probably be fitting, after a decade of blogging as an "aspiring ecologist", to declare this the end. But I imagine I'll still want to blog occasionally, and I'm frankly not motivated enough to set up another blog, so I'll stick with what I've got. Those of you who are friends in real life know where to find me, and if you've been reading this for years and still don't know who I am but want to be friends in real life, drop me a note.

I'm excited about the next 10 years. I've got big ideas that have been simmering for a while now. With the right combination of preparation and luck (there's always luck), it could be awesome. Or, more likely, I'll end up doing something 10 years from now that I can't even imagine at present. Let's see where the next decade goes!

Student help or DIY?

I'm in the awkward situation this fall of long-distance supervising/mentoring a student who is doing some work for me. I haven't met her in person, only via Skype. Sam connected us and is technically (but only technically) in charge, as he's the one giving the grade. Now she's emailing him because she's concerned about being able to finish everything this term, he doesn't really know what's going on (though he and I talked about it 2 weeks ago), and I am trying to figure out how to get the best outcome for her and for me.

I admit kind of messed up, because I wasn't checking her work as closely and as critically as I should have at the beginning (even after blogging about checking other students' work...ugh). This was exacerbated since I never see her in person. Basically she took a bunch of photos that are worthless, and they are going to have to be re-done (but probably not by her). On the one hand, I should have looked more closely, but on the other hand, she should be able to assess the quality of a photo, too. It turns out that her setup (which I of course have not seen in person) is less than adequate, so now things have been hung up while she waits for better equipment that I am having shipped to her. And now I might be sending her to buy more stuff at Target just so she can keep working since the other crap hasn't arrived from China.

Part of me feels like I should have never outsourced this project and just done it myself. On the other hand, it's relatively low priority and relatively low stakes, so I suppose it's better I re-learn this lesson now than later. I think this is the last time I'll try to long-distance supervise a project like this. I also need to make a mental note that I need to spend A. LOT. of my time (like, maybe all of it) closely training and supervising students at the beginning of a project.

(This reminds me that Psychgirl wrote a post about how she feels like it would be easier to do research herself because students take forever to pay off.)