What Five Years Took

 This "blog" has been dormant for 5 years because lol, who writes blogs anymore. But with the 5th anniversary of the Covid-19 outbreak landing in the US, I've been reflecting on the things I've lost over 5 years.

Five years ago, I turned my apartment upside down looking for one cloth face mask I'd bought in Taiwan years earlier as a souvenir. I wanted a facial covering. Though I also worried how it'd look to everyone else in Indiana who'd never seen a cloth mask before.

Five years later, I get cute N95s twice a year from a company that has had at least 6 "going out of business" sales. I've fallen for the lie 3 times. My go-to is the Scotch plaid, although the neon colors look nice, too.

Five years ago, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Indianapolis. My home "office" was just a wall. And I worked wedged between my desk and dining table. 

Over the last five years, I've moved 3 times and had to spend countless hours figuring out how to assemble office furniture myself. But have also been saved countless times by friends who pop up at just the right time. Being single and living by myself in Indy was never easy. The pandemic isolations made it especially hard. But as much as I was alone (so very alone), I was also seen and I was known by my friends.

 

Five years later, I have moved back to Boston. A city I left in 2011. It's been a weird time but a good time getting re-acquainted with Boston and its people. Mostly, I just go on old people rants about how much the neighborhood has changed and how cheap eggs were back in my day.

Five years ago, I was in the midst of data collection for my first study on the health experiences of gender diverse (trans and non-binary) adults. We had to pivot from in-person interviews to phone interviews in March. In that study, we highlighted the need for primary care access for gender diverse patients.

Over the last five years, I have written more papers and grants in this area (heh, never as much as I'd like. grants are hard!). Together with my colleagues, we've been trying to build a research agenda toward testing interventions to improve how clinicians treat patients. At the same time, with better data, we've also been exploring the healthcare patterns of subgroups of gender diverse adults. 

 

Five years later, the future of all this research is uncertain. There's the global freeze on NIH funding for research. Beyond that, research on LGBTQ health is being specifically targeted. Gender identity and sexual orientation data has been removed from public data sets. There are near daily updates on banned words, funding cuts, staff layoffs that disrupt our ability to work.