Lifelines: reaching out in a pandemic

Please note that there is a discussion of suicidal ideation in this article. Take care with reading this if you are feeling vulnerable. If you need support, please contact a helpline (like Lifeline) or a healthcare professional.

I was finally getting my work on an even keel when the pandemic hit. Last year had been difficult across my work and personal life, serving as a reminder that these two realms are, for many Aboriginal people in the academy, intrinsically connected (Fredericks et al, 2019). I work at the University of the Sunshine Coast as an Associate Professor in Creative Industries, and at the beginning of the year I stepped down from a leadership position to temporarily move into a research and teaching role across 2020. This move - and my more than 10 years of working from home in a previous academic role leading a research centre - should have primed me for being able to hit the ground running in a work-from-home model. Instead, when the Government released the low-contact measures, I struggled. In this article I will frame the challenges, as well as the describe the ‘lifelines’ that helped me move from feeling trapped into a functional space.