On Appreciation

This Thanksgiving, social media lit up with a wide variety of gratitude posts. Our celebrations here took a slightly different angle though, focusing on appreciation instead of gratitude.

On Wednesday, Marc came home with a bouquet of flowers to show that he appreciates me. That night, we made an effort to acknowledge each others’ efforts in our relationship and reflect on what we could improve on. It was lovely to feel seen and heard.

In academia, we often must work alongside other academics for periods of time, be they through the long years of the PhD program as your committee members become the gatekeepers of your entire career, or through shorter collaborative research projects. These are all professional relationships, but when you throw something as personal as a chronic illness in the mix, it’s hard to find where the boundaries are.

Clearly, I want to communicate with my supervisors and collaborators that any delays or changes of plans are not due to a personal failing, but are because of an illness I am still trying to grapple with. However, I also acknowledge that they don’t need to be privy to the whirlwind of doctor appointments, new medications and their attending side effects, days of fatigue where even getting out of bed feels like too much, or even days when I have the energy to do work OR to come to work, but not both.

I don’t know that I feel comfortable expressing gratitude to the academic people in my life because of their understanding and patience when it comes to my illness. I mean, should I really be grateful that they are willing to work with me for not being a perfectly healthy human being all the time? Do people experience deep gratitude when they are laid up with the flu and have to delay some things or adapt to do others? Or do they just expect that the other people will be understanding?

So instead of gratitude I want to show appreciation to my collaborators and supervisors who have worked with me in changing things around because of fibromyalgia. It still takes the form of a “thank you” but it changes me from viewing fibro as something that is getting in everyone’s way, to something that gets in my way sometimes but which can be worked with.

I appreciate my academic colleagues for working with me, I appreciate my supervisors for their flexibility, and I appreciate my collaborators for their trust that I will not let them down, even if I have to work in an unorthodox way (such as by taking advantage of insomnia.)