Seconds, not decades, has kept you from freaking out. Perhaps someone else might term it denial. Perhaps your therapist would. Then, again, one of your past therapists said that a little denial is good, necessary to get through life. You, right now, balance between the two interpretations.

The online conference went well. Your performance came in at just under the alotted 15 minutes, your pace calm but energetic, your ability to look into the camera enhanced by having the paper on the screen just below the camera’s eye. The Famed Ivy-League Historian also brought up your work repeatedly in his paper, reminding you how generous he is, but also making you feel intelligent, influential, as if your work had shifted someone else’s point of view on the topic.

You had a brief moment of embarrassment when, in lieu of Q&A, the chair of the panel asked your panel to comment generally. You ended up like a deer in the headlights and bumbled your way toward something beyond sounding like a fool. Then, almost no one but that Famed Ivy-League Historian, mentioned your paper again, all praising one another. Not until one of your co-panelists, himself an important scholar, wrote to you to say that you had changed his thinking with your paper did the thought occur to you that all of these guys (and, with one exception, they were guys) worked within the framework of the same ideas. They had similar conversations and debates and built upon one another’s work.

You, on the other hand, walked in as the token woman’s rights representative (bookending the conference panels with the other female participant who did not talk about woman’s rights), and discussed politics and political engagement in entirely different terms, challenging a given narrative that they all generally accepted as an add-on to the story, not an integral part. Your newness, meant that they would have to think awhile, integrated what you said (or ignore it, whatever). In any case, you felt more confident about what you do as the scrappy Cinderella-story from the off-brand degree program at the school no one has heard of. You felt buoyed.

So, you spent two days working on your book. No, you spent two days torn between avoidance of grading, which piled up, and desire to work on the book. You enjoy working on the book, so you feel guilty when you do work on it, especially during the school year when the grading and course preparation and e-mails pile up and you so desperately resent all of that, moreso when getting paid less for more work (as the college trumpets record enrollment!) and ignores the work that you have always done, privileging shiny new or job training, preferably both. Ultimately, you settled on the book because that would mean the weekend would not become a total loss.

This book is supposed to be a biography, but the nature of the subject means that it cannot follow the rules of a traditional biography. Whereas the last book started with your biographical subject, and built out from there, this one has an absence where the subject and many of the formative figures around her should be. Like you always said about the mother of your previous subject, “there is a her-shaped hole in the narrative,” you want to get a better sense of the shape of its shape and contents. You end up world building, which brings you back to your original study of history in grad school, or even back in the Bicentennial when you were a child visiting Williamsburg. Only now, the awfulness of that harassing and mean-spirited advisor, the sociopath liaisons, the insecurities of that period of time, have become gremlins, weak and chained and near-death but for the memory of them. The joy and curiosity of a world so different from now that captured you initially carries you forward, only now you understand and revel in the complexity and ambiguity.

What makes you sad, then? The news, for one — that’s a whole other, rage-filled series of posts that may require the pronoun “I.” For this, this semi-private, professional, personal milieu, you look at the time. When you turned 40 — no, earlier than that, around 37 or 38, but definitely 40 — you began to feel time getting shorter. Some people probably feel that for children, but you felt it for doing things that you wanted to do in life. Since then, you have done many of those things. Life improved since 40, markedly! Then, you had a shift again, you felt that shortening time, after your father died, and you now in your fifties. You did not want to waste energy or time on things that did not matter. You haven’t gotten over that feeling, nor been fully able to integrate it into your life. (No, be fair to yourself, you began.) Now this, the feeling that the world will end shortly, that the republic will end, that your job will end, that — as you heard put so succinctly — we are all in an extinction crisis has put you back in that place.

Time isn’t just short. It is damn near over.

You would rather spend it doing the things that make you feel good, and appreciated, and happy, and well right now. Writing a book seems like an act of hope, creating something for the future. That’s not the reason you find joy in it. You enjoy it because it is, essentially, an escape and creative. The puzzle of research is fun. Now. So, when you have to turn down other research projects — two, now — because you can barely manage the one contracted one because of the damn teaching. You feel sad. You damn the teaching because you get so little intrinsic joy out of it, what little joy there was has been all but eliminated, and it seems to have no purpose in the absence of any sense of future or appreciation from either students or administrators. Only the paycheck and the schedule that does allow for some time to research.

So, you shirk the grading and preparation to do the research because the rest seems not to matter except to keep other people — happy is not quite the word, — to meet other people’s unhappy requirements.

You just had a thought: you should invent one of those internet-social-media games: based on your behavior now, who would you be in the Great Plague? You would like to be one of the story-tellers in the Decameron.