Editor’s note: We would like to thank Dr. Brandy Lyn G. Brown, Director of the Leadership Communication Skills Center at Marine Corps University, Quantico (Virginia), for providing this piece. To contact the author, please email Dr. Brandy Lyn G. Brown. If you would like to share your writing center’s experience during COVID-19, please submit via WLN.

Dr. Brandy Lyn G. Brown

In the midst of this crisis, Dr. Brené Brown launched her podcast, Unlocking Us. In the first episode of the podcast Dr. Brown provided us all practical wisdom by making a clear link between her research and the suddenly worsening pandemic. The first episode dissected how difficult doing anything for the first time can be, and provided a strategy for living through it. The first thing Brown says is that we have to recognize that we are in a first-time moment. We have to stop and name it; Brown called it an FFT for “f#*&ing first time”. Naming it is essential because it allows us to then normalize it, put it in perspective, and reality check expectations (“Brené on FFTs”). Of course in this podcast episode released on March 20th, Dr. Brown very clearly identifies that trying to adapt and live through a pandemic is a first time experience for us all.

For me, as for many others, the most difficult part of this spring was that the pandemic was not the only FFT we were living through. In a somewhat unusual move, I left my previous institution mid-year to accept a position as the director of the Leadership Communication Skills Center at the Marine Corps University. Given my lack of experience with military culture, I’d considered myself a long shot when I applied in July 2019.  I hoped to get a campus interview, so I could visit Quantico. The thought that I could actually end up working there never occurred to me.

Consequently, when I pulled up to the gate about thirty minutes before the suggested arrival time on January 6th, 2020 only to sit in line long enough to be two and half hours late to my orientation, I’d already jumped into the deep-end of FFTs. While this is certainly not my first writing center job, it is my first job in professional military education (PME); it is my first job leading professional colleagues; it is my first job in the federal government; it is the first time I have taken an oath as a part of the duties of my job; it is my first time moving somewhere completely new all by myself. I expected my delay at the gate to be the funny story I would tell about my first year on the job. By March, I was coasting into learning the spring semester daily routine. When, suddenly, I’d decided (about a week before the entire university went online) to shift our center to online only status and let the other instructors, who already had telework agreements on file, to work fully from home.

As I walked my dog through our neighborhood, listening to Unlocking Us, the way this giant pandemic FFT disrupted what was already a pretty huge FFT for me became clear. The constant unease in the pit of my stomach; the constant struggle to focus for any length of time; they were the natural anxiety of an FFT wrapped in an FFT. Naming my anxieties – the health related, job related, family related – normalized my responses and made it possible for me to be kind to myself about them. Normalizing my responses and being kind to myself, enabled me to try to do both for my team as well and helped us all keep our perspectives in check. When Dr. Brown describes the importance of normalizing our expectations during an FFT, she says it is important because it allows us to recognize that “This is going to suck … for a while” (“Brené on FFTs”).  Normalizing and being kind to ourselves we could accept that while student service is always our first priority, this spring maintaining student service would be our only priority.  If other projects were completed (and they were), great; but, on the days when the only thing we completed were reviews of papers, that was okay. That was enough.

The people we are, the centers we lead, the universities we work for, the country we live in will not come out of this pandemic the same as they were. When we recognize that, really feel that, we can let go of the expectation that our services have to be the same as before. Instead, we can start to ask ourselves, what a caring, responsive, ethical, interpersonal writing center look like at our institutions during a pandemic.

“Brené on FFTs.” Unlocking Us, Brené Brown, 20 March 2020, https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-on-ffts/.