| It's been a while since the last missive. I'm sorry. I've been buried in administration, and also I've been watching the Winter Olympics. I hope you've been watching the Olympics, too! There are so many great stories and happenings giving me some big time feels. I'm not enamored of the network coverage in its attempt to milk out as many possible teams from every narrative, but I think even the cynics and proto-nihilists who catch some stories and interviews can gain from them. What might have been impossible to miss is the infectious smile of Alysa Liu. What's so remarkable about her smile and the lightness with which she carries herself? This was before she took to the rink for skating. If you look at all the other skaters in this position, they're more likely to be pacing nervously, or sporting intense furrowed brows. And she was beaming with the pleasure of being there. She said that winning wasn't as important to her as was the opportunity to perform. While that's what everybody says, that's the standard cliché that athletes trot out in interviews, you can feel how she meant it. And it aligns with her backstory. In case you've been living in a media vacuum, that backstory is: four years ago, she decided she wasn't feeling the skating anymore and just dropped it. Tired of people starving her, controlling her, and all that, she said that she was choosing to live for herself for once. At the age of sixteen. A couple years later, right about the time she was becoming a legal adult in the US – not having skated whatsoever in the interim – she was having fun with friends out skiing, and realized how much she loved skating and decided to get back into training and competition. This time she it would be on her own terms, with respect to her schedule, diet, and how much free time she would allow herself. While I'm obviously in awe of her skating talent, I'm even more impressed by her reclamation of her own priorities, she was remarkable even before she took the ice. She wasn't excited to win, she was excited to go out there and just do her thing. You could see it in her face, and in the lightness and liberty in her flawless skating. I suppose there's a lesson that her top performance came (in part) from her choice to live a balanced and happy life in a community where such a philosophy seems to be unthinkable. I do hope that maybe all the other children and young adults in such situations are able to have access to more mental health because of Liu's accomplishments. The lesson that I'm taking from this episode is the reminder to find joy and fulfillment in the process. A reminder that I made so many life choices because they bring me (and a few others) to bring myself happiness, and why should I choose to deprive myself of this happiness by worrying about whether I'm the best in the world? Unlike Liu, I am not the best in the world at what I do, but I can be as joyful and fulfilled, if I make that choice. A parallel storyline was playing out in the downhill skiing. I don't follow this stuff but NBC kept saying that Mikaela Shiffrin was the best skier in the world, ever. (In the measurable sense that she has more World Cup wins than any other skier, that is the case, the only person to have won 100 competitions. Never heard of the woman until two weeks ago, but they're doing their best to make sure we know her story.) In these Olympics, the storyline about her was all about living up to being the best in the world. She underperformed her norm in all of the events, not medaling at all. Her final event was her speciality, the slalom. Before she started her run, she said that she was tired of the pressure and she was just going to go out there and have fun. (Same cliché? Yes. Was the delivery credible and heartfelt to me? Yes.) And then she took gold, with her margin of victory greater than all of her previous Olympic gold medals combined. So there's something to be said to be extremely serious about doing it for the fun of it. The other place have been taking inspiration is watching the curling. Lots of curling. Teams of curlers need to make hard and risky decisions while the clock is ticking. They're fully mic'd as they go about their deliberations and they're all the model of healthy collaborators. How can this be fun and chill and exciting at the same time, I don't know, but it is. I also reluctantly feel like i should mention the counter-narrative of another skater, who was also being called the greatest ever, and he had clearly internalized this praise and pressure. What happened for him was the inverse of what happened for Liu. He was literally referring to himself as a "god" but his story this Olympics was more like Icarus. I can only imagine what it's like to be called the bestest bestest ever who is capable of doing what no other person can, while following in the footsteps of one's parents, and not yet even having turned 21 years old. For myself, this story only serves to contextualize the extraordinary mental health and joy of Alysa Liu. Over the last month, I've also had a series of my own joys and victories tied to doing stuff just for the fun of it. Like most scientists with my level of experience, I have a bunch of projects that are 95% done but that last 5% is really hard. It can weigh you down. In the past month, I've become even more at peace with these than I have before. How have I manged this? Because I took up the task of that last 5% and got to work. And now I have a manuscript in revision, another that I can probably submit soon, and more I can pick up soon. What did it take? The choice to not worry about. That's all. I'm thinking back to when I was in grad school, as a postdoc, and coming up for tenure (twice). Was I an absolute stress beast wondering what my future would bring? I think so. But also when I was in grad school, was I absolutely loving life knowing that I had the luxury of doing exactly what I wanted to do? For sure, I remember that feeling. I'm glad I know how to reclaim that. | 
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