Thawing

First sunrise of 2022, Primrose Hill, London

[The Lion’s Share Substack is a continuation of the TinyLetter blog by the same name, which features writings and reflections from 2015-2018. Those subscribed to the TinyLetter will automatically receive Substack posts. This shift to Substack is part of an effort to do more writing.]

The two weeks between the start of the new year and my birthday tend to be heavy days, not in a particularly morose way, but pregnant with the contemplation that sandwiches itself between the end of one chapter and the beginning of a new one.

Perhaps this fortnight feels exceptionally heavy; I did not get to practice my reflective rituals last year and must squash in two years’ worth of stock-taking. A year ago, England was staggering under the weight of mounting cases of Alpha and I spent most of my waking hours at work. This time around, I have some time for mental clarity. We are, of course, seeing breathtaking numbers of Omicron cases on the daily, but the vaccination rollout has changed things tremendously. Now, when it comes to new variants, an epidemiologist’s workload spikes, peaks, simmers down ahead of the epidemic curves. By the end of December 2021, we had already produced estimates of vaccine effectiveness, severity, and transmissibility.

This is not meant to be a piece about epidemiology, at least not intentionally. Two years of working on the pandemic, however, have made it the easiest thing for me to talk about.

I’ve been lying awake often the past few days, reflecting, kept awake by the worry that I may not have made the most of the opportunities afforded to me, that I set up for myself only stepping stones where others around me fashioned launchpads. Then, of course, comes the guilty squirming – what kind of person worries about a career built on the foundation of widespread global misery? After all, aren’t the fields of medicine and public health and international development meant to be a means to their own end, to a(n idealistic) world without ill-health and inequity?

And yet, even in my nascent career, I’ve learned that excessive worrying and planning gets one nowhere. In 2015, I had plans to stay in the States after graduation, but a job offering invaluable experience took me back to Karachi, opening doors for other experiences all over the world. None of that was planned, and some of those developments were painful when they happened. Did I know what I was getting into, when in early 2020 I responded to a call for volunteers to help assist with the response stood up to deal with a novel coronavirus? I did not.

There are other things that keep me awake, the dark things, anxieties and struggles, the things I was able to shelve in the freezer of my mind, pushed aside while I dived headfirst into work. Are they thawing? Am I ready? We will find out sooner or later.   

M & I caught up this weekend after many months. We spoke about many things, particularly about a specific kind of privilege that I think of as temporal privilege, a privilege that contours our lives as strongly as any other. Had we graduated college just a few years before we did, we would have been ejected into a job market still reeling from the 2008 market crash. A little later would have seen college/grad school disrupted by a global pandemic. So much of what we achieve is attributable to the conditions surrounding our births.

We talked about how our 18-year old selves (we were 18 when we met in our first semester of college) would they feel if they met us, their 28-year old future selves. I like to think my past self would be proud of me.

At the end of the day, making him proud is perhaps what is most important to me.