This week, we bring you two stories about the struggle to find balance during the COVID-19 pandemic, whether it’s as a scientist, a mother, or all of the above.
Part 1: Psychiatrist Xiaosi Gu studies COVID-19’s impact on mental health, just as her own begins to deteriorate.
Dr. Xiaosi Gu is one of the foremost researchers in the area of computational psychiatry. Her research examines the neural and computational mechanisms underlying human beliefs, decision making, and social interaction in both health and disease, through a synthesis of neuroscience, cognitive science, and behavioral economics approaches. After receiving a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Economics from Peking University in Beijing, Dr. Gu moved to New York City to pursue a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Gu then completed her postdoctoral training in computational psychiatry at Virginia Tech and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London (UCL). During her time in London, she founded the world’s first computational psychiatry course at UCL. Before re-joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Gu held faculty positions at the University of Texas, Dallas and UT Southwestern Medical Center. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and a Principal Investigator at the Friedman Brain Institute and the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai.
Part 2: Stacey Bader Curry’s family and career are thriving — until the pandemic throws it all into chaos.
Stacey Bader Curry is a writer and storyteller who lives in Maine. She is an 8-time Moth Slam winner, including a Grand Slam, and has performed on PBS' Stories From the Stage, and many podcasts.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Xiaosi Gu
So I work at Mount Sinai, so it's just a regular day. I was walking back from the office, was passing the OR building on Madison Avenue and instead of seeing just like ambulances like, I saw this massive amounts of news trucks. And I was just wondering like, what's going on here, right? Something is off, I feel like there's this chilling sensation crawling on my back. But I couldn't tell. I went home, had regular dinner, but then quickly found out the next day that that was the first ever COVID patient that was actually, taken to the E.R. at Mount Sinai. So things went down south really quickly from there, because before I realized it, my four year old at the time had to stop going to school because the daycare was shut down. So we had a whole week of just trying to home school. Nobody knows what's going on, right? And I remember clearly, March 20th, 2020 this particular date, because it was the date that New York state actually issued the official lockdown offer. Sorry not to offer - an order - to offer that nobody wants, but I remember so clearly because it was actually my daughter's birthday. So yes, everyone has had at least one birthday during lockdown already, but she was among the earliest was so that sucked, right? You know, I had so much guilt because we had to cancel everything.
Of course, we had this huge party we had planned and we're quickly brainstorming,what can we do to make it up for her? So on the day of her birthday, she woke up and walked into the living room and she couldn't believe her eyes. There is this Christmas level amount of presents everywhere in the living room. It's a tiny living room, but still can't hold a lot of presents. Right? All the things that she requested, no problem, but with extras. Sexy Barbie dolls in nurse uniforms. Why not? Also, I've always been curious about the sexy scientist idea, and I really wanted to try it on her and I bought some sexy scientist dolls. She responded very well to that because actually, she's a very girly girl and she loved all the gender stereotype toys success. It wasn't a disaster, after all, for her, but for us, you know, all the people that were working, the parents or the professionals…
Of course, this initial, you know, sort of inconvenience really quickly turned into real panic and depression. I don't know if you remember, but I remember very clearly. Only a few days after that, we were told to stop going to the office and very quickly to shut down our labs and all the research. That was really, really devastating for everyone, right, especially for those who consider their work to be part of their identity.
I was trying to cheer my team members up by having daily Zoom checking. Remember the early days people were having like coffee times on Zoom? Zoom was still such a novelty. But we we did that. But then it didn't really help because I can tell everyone was just sinking right? But what else can I do? I was out of ideas because I was in the same boat with them sinking. And there was this very sort of, you know, moment of reckoning of who I was, so what I was at that moment.
This one day was again just a few days after after the lockdown order. I was, I think, like brushing my teeth and I just looked up in the mirror and I saw this woman that I no longer recognize. She had crazy hair, I mean, short hair, you can't sort of get by a little bit, but you can still look pretty crazy. I wasn't wearing makeup at all. And I was mostly wearing PJ, and I quickly lost a lot of weight. Believe it or not, I can still lose 10-20 pounds in a few days or weeks, so I couldn't recognize the person and that was me. So at the moment, I just all of a sudden had this thought I must do something.
I can't just wait. I can just sink together with everybody else. So what is that magic? I have as a scientist? Well, the only magic I have, I think, is to be able to do science. So my day job before COVID and also now is actually to do biological research on mental disorders and specifically the brain basis of mental disorders. So of course, because all the in-person research was shut down, we couldn't do anything right in person. We can't use MRIs to scan people's brains. We can't really look into your brain with any other technique. So I thought that it will be a brilliant idea if we had just launched a online study to track people's mental health conditions across the entire nation. And no one really approved my idea, but anyway, I went ahead and did it. It was self funded, meaning that it was not coming out of any grants, any federal grants that we have, not from my personal savings account, I can assure you that it was from other funding sources that I had access to. So we decided to launch the study to track over a thousand Americans across the entire nation geographically, racially, very diverse. And we're going to measure their sort of mental health symptoms every week for a total of two months. Ok, why two month? Because we thought for sure this thing is going to end within two months.
And we launched the study, so that was like late Marchish. We quickly launched the study. Like that was the fastest I've ever been, right? We launched the starting early April and the end date was supposed to be June 20 20. So anyway, that really that project, right really held people together because all of a sudden people find a thing right? They can hold on to again. You know, it's they have a team back, they have their identity back. And I'm one of them. I felt exactly the same way as my team members. So as I was working nonstop, launching this project, collecting data, doing actually a very large scale study on mental health and the impact of COVID, I was also taking care of my four year old at the time. And. So it was already double the workload, and of course, as any kind of married working mom, I totally ignored my husband. Right. During this process, I was like, Where's that dude? And but again, I felt so just stay very guilty because he suddenly started to have sickness symptoms. He started to cough and muscle aches lost his taste and smell. Ok. Check, check, check everything right. So I tried to when I realized that I tried to get him to the hospital and to get a COVID test, but we were so early in the process.
If you remember early Aprilish, there was no test available. Basically, you have to be so sick enough to be end up in the O.R. in order to get a test. So we couldn't do that. He was. It was still manageable. We couldn't really separate, of course, and we didn't really know what it was. For sure, that was the most confusing part. But of course, months later, we tested him for antibodies and he did have COVID. Quickly, fast forward until June 20, 20. By this time, we completed the study. It was a success. We had very high retention rates, so most of the subjects actually completed the study over the course of two months. And I'm actually very glad to tell you that we had some very interesting findings that just got published earlier this year. Yeah, so Aaron said no learning materials, but I think the findings are probably not going to be too surprising for you. I'll tell you just a few sort of quick take-home messages. So one is that we found COVID had different impacts on people based on their identity, of course. And guess what? It's really kind of the usual suspects. One is gender. Women had it harder, OK? Somebody doesn't believe that? At a national level, women reported more severe symptoms of depression and anxiety during those two months.
We also found out that people who were single had more mental health symptoms. Surprise! And those who were, you know, have a racial minority or have lower income were also impacted more. So this, I think, really just proves what we already know about mental health and our socioeconomic status and demographic variables in general. But at a group level, what was the most convincing message and was a finding I was so happy to see was that across time, regardless of all of our individual differences, we actually showed a very good level of resilience, meaning that, you know, most people manage to adapt to the COVID situation. So our anxiety and depression levels were the highest at the beginning of April and actually started to decline as a group, you know, by end of June. Despite the fact that COVID was actually becoming worse, there were more waves, stronger waves that we've experienced so far. So, the moral of the story is that I think I felt like I was truly a participant of my own study because. My feelings were really, really consistent with what we found in this particular study. And I think there’s so much we can tell about humanity right from the story. But there's a reason that why humans still exist, that's our resilience. Thank you.
Part 2: Stacey Bader Curry
It's February 2020 when my phone rings with a number I don't recognize and I answer it. I always answer my phone. I'm a real estate broker and 99% of the time these phone calls are, “Hi, it's Amanda from the warranty department,” for a car I don't even own.
But I hold out hope for what that 1% of the calls are going to be and this time I think it might be it. It's a man. He says he's from Saudi Arabia and he's an architect. He's entrusted his son to purchase a pied-a-terre for him. And now that he's finally come and stayed there, he's not very impressed with this multi-million dollar apartment. So he's wondering if I could help him sell it and find a new larger place with a better view.
And what makes me really skeptical about this call is why is he calling me? Why isn't he calling one of those million-dollar brokers on TV? I am a small potatoes broker. I am like the fingerling of brokers. But I do some research and the property records and his website, it all seems to check out, so I go to meet him.
He opens the door and I am flooded with relief. He's definitely an architect. I could tell by his eyeglasses. He's lovely and I am super well prepared, and by the end of the week I have a signed exclusive agreement to sell his apartment and a hint of a promise to help him buy a new one.
That night, my husband congratulates me and he leans over to kiss me in bed and I ruin the mood by dropping those four little words, “We need to talk.”
You see my husband and I, we had been going back and forth with this big decision. Should we get our apartment ready for the spring market to sell and move to Maine, which is where he was working and reverse commuting. And there were a lot of reasons why we should move to Maine. Cost of living and we had a seven-year-old daughter at the time and she's very athletic and outdoorsy and Maine would be a really healthy place for her to grow up.
And really, my husband had struggled so much in his career I wanted this for him. He had struggled for health reasons. He had an autoimmune disease and he had to be hospitalized several times. And each time he was hospitalized for a long-term stay, he was let go from a job and he would pivot.
He has two graduate degrees from Ivy League institutions and he would find new jobs. Finally he found this great job with a small company in New York in the alternative energy sector, but then his health took a precarious turn for the worse and he needed an emergency organ transplant. When he was hospitalized with that, he was let go. And through a tremendous amount of grit and luck, he had landed this new job developing utility-scale solar projects, but in Maine.
But I had a career too and I too had struggled. I had really struggled to balance motherhood with career. I had been married before and I had always worked. I started working when I was 13 and I worked at two different restaurants to pay for college. A few years out of school I had a great job with an international investment bank on the trading floor. And we were taking companies like E-Trade and Amazon public and it was really exciting.
When I was 27, I got pregnant. This was in 1998. We didn't have Sheryl Sandberg telling women to lean in. I had my judgmental, conservative mother-in-law and lactation consultant scaring me. Logistically, I didn't even know how I could work. I was working 14-hour days in my job and we would need live-in help. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment. I didn't even know where the baby would fit.
So I quit my job and I would go on to have three children by the time I was 30. I always really wanted to get back to work but I couldn't figure out how to do it. So when my youngest child started kindergarten, I applied to grad school.
I got in and I went my first semester and I did really well, but the rigors of the coursework put such a strain on my marriage that I quit. And I waited a few years and I found a less competitive program and I got in. This time I lasted two semesters. When the rigors of my coursework put such a strain on my marriage I filed for divorce, and then I had to work.
Real estate is a really good career for women looking to transition back into the workforce because all you have to do is pass a test and then you could start selling. So for ten years I had worked on building this real estate career and taking care of my children and my own self. Finally by 2020, I felt like I was running at full steam. My business was thriving. Now with the architect’s business, I was going to have the best year ever of my career.
My children were all accepted into the college of their choice and thriving and I felt like I had it all. And my husband agreed that I had too much going on for me in New York. He could continue to reverse commute for his job and we would stay. That was in February of 2020.
Then in March our entire world changed as did everyone else's. My husband immediately set up a home office in my oldest child's bedroom, who was still away at college. I brought my laptop out to the kitchen table and started looking up art projects for my seven-year-old to do and cooking all our meals. Because of my husband's health status, we could not allow anyone else in our home to help us.
So really it's not like my husband said, “You woman, you cook and clean.” It's just that he was developing ten solar projects and he was on Zoom calls from eight in the morning till eight at night and we needed to eat. We needed our bathrooms cleaned. We needed laundry done. I had a son in high school, a senior in high school who was depressed and didn't want to log on to his classes.
I had my daughters calling me from college trying to navigate how to live with roommates during COVID and I just had to pivot to being a full-time mom. It's not like I even had any business to tend to. Real estate market in New York was dead. Real estate brokers were prohibited from showing apartments in person. And slowly, one by one, all of my clients decided to take their apartments off the market or they didn't want to buy in New York City now. They wanted to look at the suburbs. Even the architect decided to take his apartment off the market.
By June, New York City was a really tough place for us to live. We live in a very old building on the edge of East Harlem and our building was being repainted. It had started before COVID. So it was covered in scaffolding and black netting and we had workers outside our window with little mini jackhammers drilling away.
We also lived very close to a hospital so we had ambulances punctuating our days and nights. And we are close to Central Park but they put up COVID tents right at the entrance to the park on our block. And going to the park itself felt like this high-stakes game of frogger. It felt impossible to keep six feet away from people.
So by the middle of June, I decided I needed to end the longest relationship of my life with New York City. In the greatest real estate feat of my career, I figured out a way to swap our old dark apartment in New York for a little farmhouse by the sea in Southern Maine. So in September first, we moved.
I didn't want to completely let go of my real estate career. I had spent too long building this business and reputation and I had one client left. She figured now was as good a time as any, maybe her only chance to buy in New York. And she was buying a one-bedroom apartment on the upper west side.
I did this whole transaction remotely. I viewed apartments with her over Facetime and spent many hours on the phone with her. Finally, the walkthrough was scheduled for October and I knew I owed it to her to be there in person for that. There were no longer any flights from Portland to New York so I decided I would drive.
I rented a car because we only had one. And when I showed up at the rental desk at the airport, there was absolutely no one there. It was a total dystopian scene. The guy at the counter took pity on me and he upgraded my little budget rental car to an Escalade.
It felt pretty good to be driving back to the city in this big tank of a car, but then when I got there it was really hard to go from a place with a population density of 41 people per square mile to 27,000 people. I just rushed to my meeting, the walkthrough, and everything was fine with the apartment. It took about 20 minutes.
Then on my walk back to the car, I just— you know, I love New York and there was so much I wanted to see and do and eat but it just didn't feel safe. So I got back in the Escalade and started driving home.
And there it had started raining. There was a ton of traffic and it took me three hours to get to the first rest stop in Connecticut. By that time, I really needed gas and I really needed to go to the bathroom. There was nowhere to park so I got the gas first. And I don't know if you've ever tried to line up an Escalade with a gas pump but it's very challenging. So I had to stretch the hose out really far and when I went to pull it out of the gas tank, I got sprayed with gasoline. Great.
So I go and I park the car and I put on my mask and I'm about to go into the rest stop when a man walks past my car. He is coughing, he's hacking and he's not wearing a mask, so I just stay in my car. And I watch all the people going in and out of this rest stop and about one out of every ten people are not wearing a mask. There's very few cases of COVID in Maine. I don't want to be the person who had to go pee at a rest stop in Connecticut and infected Mainers with COVID.
So when life gives you an Escalade, you should just go pee in that roomy third seat. I had my empty Starbucks cup and so I climbed back there, I took off my pants completely and I started to pee in the cup. I completely underestimated the size of my bladder in relation to that cup and I could tell it was about to overflow. I looked around for something to mop up the urine with so it wouldn't get on the leather seats of the Escalade and all I could find were my pants. And so I used that to catch the overflow.
When I was done, I had a full Starbucks cup of pee, a pair of wet pants and I was covered in urine and gasoline. That's how I had a drive home.
The last thing I did before I left the rest stop was hook up my phone so I could listen to the vice presidential debate. I just had to listen to it. I couldn't see it. I couldn't see the fly. And what it sounded like to me was Kamala Harris just kept getting interrupted. That just felt really relatable. For the past year in COVID, all I have felt is that I am interrupted. There has been no flow to my days. It's just constant interruptions to tend to my children, to my husband, to our home.
I know this has been the brunt for a lot of women, women who have to work full-time and care for children and care for their homes. I honestly I don't know how they're doing it. I am so grateful my three older kids are the age they are right now because I don't know how I would do it with multiple younger children.
Now I am here in Maine, a state with no industry, very little jobs. I know I'm not going to be able to commute back and forth and be a remote real estate broker in New York. I'm going to have to give up this career and figure, be another one of these women who leaves the workforce. You know, I have the LSAT book sitting on my desk. Maybe the third time is the charm for grad school for me.
This interruption hasn't ended, though, yet and I don't know when it will. Thank you.