When life moves your goalposts
At the beginning of March, I started my academic sabbatical with a plan. That came natural for me! I am a planner.
I had carefully mapped the months ahead: research papers to write, data to analyse, collaborations to develop, conferences at which to present, and perhaps even the beginnings of a book. A sabbatical is a rare gift in an academic career and I was determined not to waste it.
Four weeks later, my mother died unexpectedly. The plan remained neatly written down. My life did not.
I am now four months into my sabbatical and three months into life without my mother. For much of that time, I have carried an uncomfortable sense of failure. I look at what I intended to have completed by now and see the gaps. I notice the unfinished manuscripts, the slower-than-planned progress and the ideas that have not yet found their way onto the page.
And yet, by almost anyone else's standards, I have been productive. I have written blogs and LinkedIn articles, conducted research, presented at conferences and continued with my psychiatric practice. I have maintained a household, exercised, travelled, loved and cared for my little boy. I have also begun the painful, practical work of packing up my mother's life, opening cupboards, sorting through collections and making decisions about objects that carry far more than their physical weight.
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Packing up my mother's life will never appear on an academic output report but it may be some of the most demanding work I do this year.
What I have come to realised is that I have been measuring myself against goals that belonged to a life that no longer exists. The goalposts never moved on paper. Reality moved them for me.
The invisible work of grief
Grief is often imagined as an emotion through sadness, yearning, anger or tears. It is all these things, but it is also work. It requires attention, decision-making and adaptation. It arrives while forms still need to be completed, meals prepared, patients seen, children collected and deadlines met. It occupies cognitive and emotional bandwidth even when we remain outwardly competent.
This is one reason the phrase "getting back to normal" can be so unhelpful. There is no untouched normal waiting for us after a significant loss. There is only the gradual and uneven work of learning how to inhabit a changed life.
The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement, developed by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, offers a more humane account of this process. Rather than describing grief as a series of orderly stages, it proposes that people oscillate between two orientations.
In loss-oriented coping, we confront the absence: remembering, yearning, crying and engaging with what has been lost. Whilst in restoration-oriented coping, we attend to the life that continues by learning new roles, handling practical responsibilities, returning to routines and imagining a future that has been altered.
Fluctuating between these two orientations is not inconsistency. It is part of adaptation. I can deliver a keynote, laugh with my son or complete a piece of writing and still be grieving. I can spend a productive morning packing boxes and then be stopped by a handwritten note, a familiar piece of fabric or a blue-and-white bowl. One kind of day does not invalidate the other. Both are part of the same work.
The stress footprint we leave on ourselves
My theme this year has been the "stress footprint": the emotional and physiological imprint we leave in the people around us. I have written about clarity, time, tone, closure and the responsibility not to make our unmanaged urgency somebody else's emergency.
But there is also a stress footprint we leave on ourselves. We leave it through the standards we refuse to reconsider, the internal voice that discounts everything not listed on the original plan and the belief that compassion must be earned through sufficient productivity. We compare our present performance with the capacity of a person who existed before illness, loss or upheaval and then interpret the discrepancy as a moral failure.
My sabbatical goals were established by a woman whose mother was still alive. She could not have known what April would bring. To judge July exclusively against her plan is not accountability. It is a failure to incorporate reality.
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Self-compassion is not lowering the bar
For high-achieving people, self-compassion can sound suspiciously like excuse-making. We may fear that if we stop criticising ourselves, we will lose momentum. The evidence does not support that assumption.
Research shows that self-compassion involves responding to suffering or perceived inadequacy with self-kindness, a sense of common humanity and balanced awareness, rather than harsh judgement, isolation and overidentification. In four experimental studies, it was found that a self-compassionate response to mistakes or weaknesses increased motivation for self-improvement. Compassion did not remove responsibility; it made honest engagement with imperfection more possible.
This distinction matters. Grace is not pretending that every goal has been achieved. It is assessing progress without cruelty. It allows us to ask what remains important, what needs to be resized, what should be deferred, and what may need to be released.
A grief-adjusted account of progress
Perhaps a fairer mid-year reflection begins with different questions:
What did I intend to accomplish?
What changed that I could not reasonably have anticipated?
What visible and invisible work have I actually done?
Which goals still matter, and which belong to circumstances that no longer exist?
What would a humane and honest definition of progress look like in this season?
My answers do not erase the disappointment I sometimes feel. There are still things I want to write and complete. But they allow disappointment to become information rather than indictment.
I am learning that packing a box can be progress. Making space for a memory can be progress. Maintaining ordinary routines for a child while one's own world feels altered can be progress. Continuing to create, care and contribute, at a pace that acknowledges loss, can also be progress.
Perhaps grace is not abandoning the person I hoped to be. Perhaps it is refusing to punish the person I have had to become.
This is not the sabbatical I planned. It is the life I am living. And perhaps that is the point. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is recognise that the goalposts we are measuring ourselves against belong to a version of life that no longer exists.
Progress, then, should be measured not only by the distance travelled, but also by the weight being carried.