November 2020
I think I began to realize I had a problem when I saw the meeting request hit my calendar for us to plan for a possible 3rd hurricane evacuation protocol in as many weeks, and I started to laugh. Hurricane Delta, a category 4 storm, was heading straight for my city, and I could not come up with a better response than to laugh?
Yeah. I had a problem.
I knew 2020 was going to be tough a year ago. It was to be my last full-year of coursework and I knew I wanted to take my evals in early ’21, so I had to find a way to wrap up my core courses and sneak in an extra class to stay on track. Besides the coursework I love, I am also Director of Campus Living & Learning at A&M’s branch campus in Galveston—and I love that job too. I am also a partner to a wonderful spouse who has given me two beautiful children, and I am pretty fond of them as well. I had the problem of three things I love and no idea how I was going to meet my obligations to any of them. I was relying on faith more than evidence that I could keep my plates spinning. I imagine we all have our own stories about how that is working out.
Here in Galveston, we are good in a crisis. Dodging hurricanes is kind of what we do. The tricky thing with a hurricane is that you have to live in the liminal. You have to simultaneously be where you are in the moment, and also ready to get to high ground. We build our lives around the knowledge that a storm can hit at any time. Our homes have foundations and incredible roofs, and we build our walls to give way to flood waters lest the whole house be sacrificed. We lean with the winds and build again when it is all over. We get good at finding the silver lining in the clouds of every storm; our survival depends on that.
When the pandemic hit, we may not have known what we were facing or what path this particular “storm” was going to take, but we DID know we could figure it all out one step at a time, for a little while at least.
It’s been over 8 months. And it hasn’t been just a pandemic affecting us. We have witnessed the cycle of oppression and response in our streets. We have weathered over 26 named storms, 10 hurricanes and 4 major hurricanes. Forest Fires. Earthquakes. A ridiculous election season.
Murder hornets, people.
Through it all, we have worked hard. I have always been able to “hard work” my way out every problem, and that is a special sort of privilege I enjoy. We don’t know what else to do, so we work hard. We push. We grind. I know that in my life, I have never worked so hard, been anywhere near this productive, nor accomplished as much as I have this year. The plates are still spinning.
So why do I feel like I have so little to show for it?
How do I find myself in a position where I am laughing at a storm? How can I be proud of myself when the sum best of what anyone can do is limiting disaster? How do you gauge success when your work merely kept a problem from becoming an incident, or an incident from becoming a disaster, or a disaster from becoming a fiasco?
I do not know the cure for that sort of frustration, but I can tell you what has helped me. I have a cohort. They listen to me and let me vent and scream and sometimes even ask me to use words. They know me. They accept and welcome my 25% effort when all I have is 30% in the tank. I have a job that still has meaning for me. There are students for whom—as dangerous as the world is right now—our campus is still the safest place they can be. They need us. I have leadership in Galveston who make me feel included and who challenge every person to advocate for the wellbeing of our students and each other. They reward those who seek out the marginalized; especially my boss. We have faculty who see me as a person and treat me like a colleague, and who have the courage to be vulnerable with me so that I may feel a little less alone. I have staff whose hard work to model love and care for our students inspires me.
We have the best, most amazing students in the world. They (we) have been robbed of milestones and forced to reorient their entire lives around zoom screens and facemasks. And still, they persist with grit that leaves me in awe. Even the boomers are impressed.
I have a wonderful spouse who teaches me every day that love is an action, and that teaching our children how to figure things out by trying to figure things out together is an end worthy of praise in and of itself. I have two little girls who, no matter how little I might feel I have to give, make that little bit seem like the world. There is a lesson in that.
Maybe the silver lining in the clouds of this storm is that we will adjust our idea of what a goal is for. We are told that we need goals to push towards, a north star to keep us reaching. That makes a lot of sense. But when the storm surge comes, and the flood waters rise, you really begin to appreciate your high ground, the solid roof you built, and the foundation that shelters you, even when the walls snap away. There’s a beauty in the aftermath of a storm. Destruction can become opportunity.
It’s a good thing we are builders. No one is laughing at that.
- Neil Golemo
Neil is a doctoral student in the Department of Education Administration and Human Resource Development.
Yeah. I had a problem.
I knew 2020 was going to be tough a year ago. It was to be my last full-year of coursework and I knew I wanted to take my evals in early ’21, so I had to find a way to wrap up my core courses and sneak in an extra class to stay on track. Besides the coursework I love, I am also Director of Campus Living & Learning at A&M’s branch campus in Galveston—and I love that job too. I am also a partner to a wonderful spouse who has given me two beautiful children, and I am pretty fond of them as well. I had the problem of three things I love and no idea how I was going to meet my obligations to any of them. I was relying on faith more than evidence that I could keep my plates spinning. I imagine we all have our own stories about how that is working out.
Here in Galveston, we are good in a crisis. Dodging hurricanes is kind of what we do. The tricky thing with a hurricane is that you have to live in the liminal. You have to simultaneously be where you are in the moment, and also ready to get to high ground. We build our lives around the knowledge that a storm can hit at any time. Our homes have foundations and incredible roofs, and we build our walls to give way to flood waters lest the whole house be sacrificed. We lean with the winds and build again when it is all over. We get good at finding the silver lining in the clouds of every storm; our survival depends on that.
When the pandemic hit, we may not have known what we were facing or what path this particular “storm” was going to take, but we DID know we could figure it all out one step at a time, for a little while at least.
It’s been over 8 months. And it hasn’t been just a pandemic affecting us. We have witnessed the cycle of oppression and response in our streets. We have weathered over 26 named storms, 10 hurricanes and 4 major hurricanes. Forest Fires. Earthquakes. A ridiculous election season.
Murder hornets, people.
Through it all, we have worked hard. I have always been able to “hard work” my way out every problem, and that is a special sort of privilege I enjoy. We don’t know what else to do, so we work hard. We push. We grind. I know that in my life, I have never worked so hard, been anywhere near this productive, nor accomplished as much as I have this year. The plates are still spinning.
So why do I feel like I have so little to show for it?
How do I find myself in a position where I am laughing at a storm? How can I be proud of myself when the sum best of what anyone can do is limiting disaster? How do you gauge success when your work merely kept a problem from becoming an incident, or an incident from becoming a disaster, or a disaster from becoming a fiasco?
I do not know the cure for that sort of frustration, but I can tell you what has helped me. I have a cohort. They listen to me and let me vent and scream and sometimes even ask me to use words. They know me. They accept and welcome my 25% effort when all I have is 30% in the tank. I have a job that still has meaning for me. There are students for whom—as dangerous as the world is right now—our campus is still the safest place they can be. They need us. I have leadership in Galveston who make me feel included and who challenge every person to advocate for the wellbeing of our students and each other. They reward those who seek out the marginalized; especially my boss. We have faculty who see me as a person and treat me like a colleague, and who have the courage to be vulnerable with me so that I may feel a little less alone. I have staff whose hard work to model love and care for our students inspires me.
We have the best, most amazing students in the world. They (we) have been robbed of milestones and forced to reorient their entire lives around zoom screens and facemasks. And still, they persist with grit that leaves me in awe. Even the boomers are impressed.
I have a wonderful spouse who teaches me every day that love is an action, and that teaching our children how to figure things out by trying to figure things out together is an end worthy of praise in and of itself. I have two little girls who, no matter how little I might feel I have to give, make that little bit seem like the world. There is a lesson in that.
Maybe the silver lining in the clouds of this storm is that we will adjust our idea of what a goal is for. We are told that we need goals to push towards, a north star to keep us reaching. That makes a lot of sense. But when the storm surge comes, and the flood waters rise, you really begin to appreciate your high ground, the solid roof you built, and the foundation that shelters you, even when the walls snap away. There’s a beauty in the aftermath of a storm. Destruction can become opportunity.
It’s a good thing we are builders. No one is laughing at that.
- Neil Golemo
Neil is a doctoral student in the Department of Education Administration and Human Resource Development.