Friends and readers of the blog will have noticed that, three months later, the summer hiatus is yet to be brought to an end. This is not a procurement-related post and the hiatus on content on EU/UK economic and digital law will go on for longer. As of now, I am not sure how much longer, but probably well into 2026, or even beyond. In this rather personal post, I just offload/share the reasons for this extended, and for now indefinite, pause. I am doing this because I think we do not speak about the sort of challenges I am facing often enough. Maybe reading this will be helpful to someone else. Maybe not.
This was the hardest summer of my life. My mother was admitted to hospital at the end of July with an acute, systemic health crisis derived from her alcoholism. Things looked very bad, then slightly better, then worse. She was referred across four hospitals and received levels of treatment that were to me mindboggling, and scores of nurses and doctors deserve recognition and praise for all they did for her. Unfortunately, she reached a point were nothing else could be done. After a short stay in a palliative care facility, she passed away just over six weeks ago. Just like that, she was gone. The long, harrowing process that led to her departure did not make it feel less sudden or devastating. The way her wake and funeral evidenced how broken my extended family is, and how uprooted I am from the place and people I once called home, did not provide any solace either.
I did my best to be by her side and support her through it, despite the very mixed emotions this stirred up in me. I’ll spare the details, but that complex mix of emotions kept evolving and has now further combined with grief, which is in itself a much more amorphous, sneaky and destabilising emotion than I ever imagined. When someone asks me how I am doing, I am genuinely at a loss for what to say. ‘I am ok’ feels both right and wrong.
Living in a different country and having a young family made my unplanned, frequent trips back to Spain quite hard, both logistically and emotionally, for all of us. I thought I usually have to juggle a few things (work/life balance …), but this required an altogether different level of juggling commitments and responsibilities, for months. I constantly felt bad because I was never in the right place, as I was constantly letting someone down, and because wherever I was and whatever I was doing, someone else was picking up a lot of care work — whether my mum’s or my children’s. I also felt bad about all the cancelled plans and about my difficulties being present for those that weren’t.
I was lucky to have the sort of job that provides flexibility and, by pure chance, to have almost no teaching this fall term—which made it easier to physically be intermittently away from work. I did my best to keep the work commitments I thought I could complete (and I hope I managed to do so professionally), rejected many interesting opportunities and new projects, and delayed or cancelled more research collaborations than I ever thought I could. I received nothing but compassion, understanding and support from colleagues and contacts I was clearly letting down or disappointing. Although I knew these reactions to be genuine and that pairing work back to the bare minimum was the only realistic option, I felt bad about this, and also worried about the longer term impact some of the foregone opportunities may have on my professional development and career.
All of this has left me exhausted and struggling for meaning and motivation, mostly at work. Maybe I just need some time to process, mourn, grieve and get used to the new normal of such an absence in my life. Maybe this is just the ‘identity crisis’ side of the grief process. But I have the hunch that this may not be the whole story. My personal circumstances have piled on top of very bad trends and circumstances in academia, especially in the UK, where things have been looking grim for way too long now. Somehow I find myself wondering what is the purpose or many of the things I do or aspire to do, what can I achieve with my professional interactions, and whether that is worth the effort. I keep asking myself ‘why’ and ‘so what’, and drawing a blank. Until I find good answers to that, I will probably just keep doing what needs to be done and no more, as self-motivation was a driver of most of my work. And maybe this is ok. Or at least ok for now.