S3:E2: coronasomnia to kasamas
Thursday, October 14, 2021
-------
Have you taken our listener survey yet? We’d love to hear from you. Your advice and feedback will help us with everything from creating future episodes to talking to potential sponsors. Find the link on our website.
-----
Episode description: How do you sleep when so much of life is uncertain? In this memoir-based episode, Laura Joyce Davis talks about her own coronasomnia, gets some tips from sleep experts, and finds a way forward through building a new creative community.
-----
Coronasomnia for a More Contented Life
---
Laura: Last night, I couldn’t sleep.
There’ve been a lot of sleepless nights in the past year and a half. After cramming as much work as I can into my waking hours, pouncing on my kids to make sure they’ve gotten enough hugs, and—on a good day—exercising, I finally climb into bed exhausted. But no sooner do I settle down and relax, than the hamster wheels of my brain start spinning. Soon my pulse is racing, and I’m thinking about what I need to accomplish tomorrow, and how I still didn’t do that thing that’s been on my to do list for weeks, and oh crap, I totally forgot that person’s birthday because yesterday was so busy that I didn’t even look at my calendar.
This isn’t the first time in my life when I’ve experienced insomnia. When I was a collegiate track athlete, I used to spend hours staring at the ceiling, visualizing my race so convincingly that I felt sick to my stomach. With all 3 of my kids, my first sign that I was pregnant was that I couldn’t sleep.
But the insomnia I experience now feels different. I can point to the exact date when it began: March 16, 2020.
It turns out I’m not alone. Stress-related insomnia due to the pandemic is so common that there’s even a name for it: coronasomnia.
Dr. Abinav Singh, the Medical Director of the Indiana Sleep Center, calls coronosomnia a “tandemic,” that is, an epidemic that is caused, made worse by, or running in tandem with the pandemic. According to the Sleep Foundation, even before the pandemic, over a third of Americans weren’t getting enough sleep. Sleep problems are so common that the CDC has called it a “public health epidemic.”
Coronosomnia isn’t just about being afraid of the virus either. It stems from the latent anxiety that for many of us, has been a byproduct of the continual changes our world has experienced because of the virus.
As the months have become years, we’ve made adjustments, some of them for the better, but still there’s that lurking question: Is this really how life is supposed to be?
It’s the question that has been there in every single episode of Shelter in Place, long before I knew that this podcast would forever change the course of my own journey.
In season 3, which we’re calling “In Search of Home,” we’re asking that question outright. We’ve known from the beginning that the old way wasn’t working. The new normal isn’t what we’re after either. How do we find our way to a better normal, one that makes this world a good home for all of us? A place where maybe we can finally get some sleep?
Dr. Singh says that most of us are in one way or another FED UP. That’s not just an expression. It’s Dr. Singh’s mnemonic device to summarize the things that keep us up at night:
Financial stress,
Emotional stress,
Distance from others,
Unpredictability, and
Professional concerns. FED UP.
My family and I have checked all the boxes:
Financial stress: the pandemic began for us with my husband Nate getting laid off from his job.
Emotional stress: Suddenly our 3 kids were home from school, and I was whipping myself up into a frenzy trying to become a homeschooling homesteader (while also starting a new business).
Distance from others: Our extended family across the country never felt so far away as when we had to cancel our plans to see them. Overnight, the friends and neighbors who had filled that gap through babysitting co-ops and neighborhood happy hours disappeared behind closed doors.
Unpredictability: the common thread of every day, week, and month.
And finally, professional concerns,” which seems a bit light in describing the complete overhaul that both Nate and I have been through as we’ve reshifted our focus to the work we’re doing now with Shelter in Place.
Through all of those exhausting days and sleepless nights of being FED UP, that persistent question has remained: is this really the best we can do?
The low point of my coronosomnia came late in 2020 at a moment when I had a long list of reasons to feel hopeful.
We were halfway through season 2, which we titled “Pandemic Odyssey,” because the narrative of that season was our family’s migration to Massachusetts, where Nate’s mom had heroically agreed to take our kids every school day and homeschool them so we could work. Our son, who had been behind in every subject and had hated going to school, was now an avid reader who was proud of his math skills. We didn’t know when we’d return to California, but we’d made the decision to stay in Massachusetts through the school year.
The podcast had grown into what it has become now: a weekly arts and wellness show about redefining life as we know it through creativity and community. I’d leveled up my audio editing skills, dialed in my writing, and the imposter syndrome that had plagued me all my life was finally gone. I’d never felt so proud of anything I’d created.
There were so many reasons to be grateful—and I was—but I was also deeply discouraged.
We had a core of devoted listeners who had been with us since the beginning of season 1, people who had listened to every episode and had left five-star reviews on iTunes. I still treasure every review, text message, email, and voice memo from our listeners. But those interactions were infrequent. It’s hard to find enduring satisfaction when download analytics are usually the only indication that someone’s listening.
I loved the work we were doing, but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t just want to create. I wanted to know that those creations were making a difference.
Earlier that month, a podcaster friend had suggested that I get connected with an apprenticeship organization that pairs female college students with organizations that need some extra help in exchange for a membership fee. We’d just started working with our first two apprentices, and it was going okay, but I was having flashbacks of my own college experiences. Internships looked nice on my resume, but even the paying ones didn’t teach me much. I didn’t want to repeat history. I wanted to give these women an experience they couldn’t get anywhere else, the kind of mentorship I wished someone had given me.
The next morning, the sky was dark and the weather was frigid. But I had an idea that felt like a tiny ray of sunshine.
That Christmas, we covered every surface of our apartment walls with notes for an audio storytelling curriculum, a carefully curated and distilled version of everything we’d learned from my MFA program, Nate’s advertising portfolio school, my Fulbright scholarship, my dozen years of coaching, our combined 40 years of working as creatives, and lots and lots of therapy and creative soul-searching. We included resume coaching and practice job interviews, lessons we’d learned from business owners and portfolio school teachers. We spent as much time talking about cultivating creative habits and a healthy work culture as we did on the elements of audio storytelling.
At the heart of every lesson was the question we’d been wrestling with ourselves all along: why create? What’s our main goal in doing this? To make money? To connect with others? To learn something? To find joy?
I knew I was at my best when I wasn’t just teaching skills, but inviting others into the creative process with me. Nate was at his best when he was guiding ideas and creative habits that sparked joy. All of the most important things I had learned about podcasting I’d learned through creating them.
We decided we’d keep making the podcast, but instead of fixating on download numbers or chasing sponsors, we’d use the podcast as a real-life classroom to teach and coach every step of the process, from idea to scriptwriting, to audio editing, to mixing to post-production and promotion. If we did our job well, our trainees would come away with a distilled version of everything we’d learned, broadcast-quality production credits that they could put on their resume, and a creative community that would actively support and encourage them for life.
In January of 2021, we launched our first cohort, adding five women to those original two, of what we were then calling our podcast apprenticeship program. We were up front with our applicants: we told them we were running a beta version of the program, and we knew there would be some growing pains along the way. We knew our approach was a little unconventional. Nate and I are big ideas people. Our methods tend to be less structured and more organic. We knew we’d have to develop more structures and systems to make the program work. We still had a lot to learn, but we also knew that if we waited to have the perfect setup, the perfect systems, the perfect organization, the perfect funding, we’d never act. We had lost so much in this pandemic year, but we still had a lot to offer.
Every week had a different focus, and we customized the experience around each individual’s professional and creative goals. Everyone learned how to create episodes, but some of them also focused on business development and project management, branding or social media. We brought in guest speakers to help our trainees network and to fill the gaps in our own education. Every week asked the same questions: what’s been life-giving to you this week? What’s been draining? Who else on this team would you like to affirm?
Week after week, we shifted responsibilities so that people could spend more time doing the work they loved, and less time on the work that they found draining. Those weekly affirmations, combined with the process of creating something together, brought our team shockingly close in a very short amount of time.
The episodes took a lot longer to make this way. Nate and I were putting in a lot of hours to complete them, sometimes to fix mistakes that had happened in the learning process. But it was worth it to see that creative spark ignite in each of our trainees, to watch them begin to understand how stories and sound can create something magical. We’d never worked so hard--or had so much fun doing it.
By June of 2021, eleven women had graduated from our program, and in that time many of them had been hired as Associate Producers at places like Stitcher, Headspace, the ACLU, and Center for Urban Development. Some of them had gotten those jobs despite having no prior audio experience before their time at Shelter in Place.
We’ve stayed in touch with all of them through a monthly alumni writing group, where our graduates can get feedback on the projects they’re working on now, or just catch up. Two of them are making a podcast together. This past weekend, one of them traveled from Virginia to New York and met our New York graduates in person for the very first time. It’s a rare week when I don’t get at least a few voice memos from our graduates, telling me about some new project they’re working on or sharing exciting news, or asking for career advice or just saying hello.
We ask each of our graduates to provide an audio testimonial about their experience, so others can hear what it’s like to be a part of this team. When I’m having a hard day, it’s those testimonials that keep me going. You can hear them on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.org.
But last June, in the final days before we left Massachusetts for California, my coronosomnia was back.
We were clearer than ever on our mission and vision than ever before, but we also knew that we wouldn’t be able to do this work for long if we couldn’t figure out how to make a living doing it.
We hadn’t been charging for the program during those first two cohorts, because we wanted it to be available to people from all kinds of backgrounds. We knew that some of our graduates couldn’t have done the program if they’d had to pay for it. But we also knew that to make this work sustainable, we had to have money coming in. Living in Massachusetts where our rent was cheap and my in-laws were providing free childcare meant that our overhead was low. We’d paid our bills through freelance work we’d been doing on the side, and while we loved mentoring and coaching our graduates, there was no financial return on that investment. Now that we were heading back to overpriced California, we’d have our work cut out for us to stay afloat.
The conversation came to a head the second week in June, when we met our New York graduates for the first time in person and we all sat around chatting over a picnic at a park in Queens.
“I was a different person before Shelter in Place,” Melissa Lent told us. “I used to be shy at work. Now I have confidence in myself. I know that I deserve to be here, that I have something important to say.”
Melissa told her story in a beautiful episode called Hyphenated Identity, where she learned to reclaim the Chinese part of her Dominican-Chinese-American identity in the wake of Asian hate crimes.
“You need to stop calling it an apprenticeship and start calling it what it is: a training program.”
This came from Alana Herlands, whose idea for an episode on vaccine hesitancy spawned a 3-part series that took a deep dive into misinformation, the Pfizer clinical trials, and the problematic history of vaccines and people of color. Those episodes were some of the most ambitious we’d ever created, and also some of the ones we were proudest of.
“Also, you need to change the name,” Clara Smith added. Clara’s story of channeling her cyclist road rage and pandemic isolation into a grassroots effort to reimagine New York City’s streets had come together in a hilarious, poignant episode called Rage Road.
A week later, Elen Tekle left me a voice memo to the same effect. Elen’s story about cooking Eritrean food over the phone with her mom during the pandemic became an episode called “Symbolic Starter,” a love letter about the ways that food connects us to our families and cultures, and one of my all-time favorite Shelter in Place episodes. “I would have happily paid for what you gave us,” Elen said in her message. “You need to start charging.”
As we traveled across the country last summer, most of my coronasomnia centered around this discussion. I couldn’t disagree with our graduates that we needed to change the name, or that we probably did need to be charging for what we were offering. We knew we were spending many more hours teaching and training than the 10 hours a week that our graduates contributed with their work on episodes. Many of those 10 hours were me coaching them through each step of the production process. We weren’t making any more money than we had been back in December, and our download numbers hadn’t changed either.
But we knew we were making a difference in the lives of our graduates. And that, we realized, mattered a lot more to us than any of those other external markers of success.
We finally arrived at a compromise we could live with: beginning with our fall 2021 cohort, we’d charge for the program--but we’d also offer as many scholarships as we could. We filed for non-profit status, applied for grants, and in the meantime funded the scholarships ourselves.
The name change was harder. One of the first rules of brainstorming is that you entertain every possibility--even the ridiculous ones. So we made giant lists of names, everything we could think of. Some of the more comical options included Pinpoint, Propel, Boost, Bounce, Liberate, Flaunt, Sparkle, Shine, Burst, and Blanket Greenhouse. Obviously.
Then in August Alana Herlands, one of those New York graduates who had picnicked with us in Queens, came to visit us while she was on a work trip to Oakland.
“You need a name that captures this creative community,” she said. “Something that gets at the level of personalized mentorship you’ve given each one of us. Something that gets at the heart of why this program is so special.”
Alana mentioned that one of the biggest things she got from this program was the community and that somewhere in the name needed to comment on how this is a permanent community.
We thought a lot about that, about why we were excited enough about this program to lose sleep over it. How it was only through losing almost everything that was certain about our pre-pandemic life that we found our way to the most meaningful work we’d ever done. None of this would have happened if we hadn’t had that longing to move away from isolation and toward connection.
And then on the last day of Alana’s visit, Nate came up with a name that felt right.
“That’s it,” I said when he told me.
“It’s perfect,” Alana agreed.
Back in 2010, when Nate and I moved to Manila for a year after I got a Fulbright scholarship, we encountered a word that would change us forever.
During those early weeks in Manila, Nate and I would often venture off alone—to the palengke, the open-air market, to our Tagalog classes, to Samaritana, a Filipino organization helping sex trafficking survivors reclaim and rebuild their lives. We spent most of our days volunteering at Samaritana, and each time one of us tried to go somewhere alone, one of the women would say, “Ate Laura, Kuya Nate, where is your kasama?”
Kasama means “companion,” and it comes from the Tagalog verb “to be together,” but it’s also a cultural concept. At first we just thought that traveling with a kasama was about safety, and it’s true that traveling with a companion is generally safer than traveling alone. But it’s also bigger than that. It’s the idea that wherever you are going, life is better with a companion.
I remember asking one of the leaders at Samaritana if she ever went anywhere alone. She paused to think about it, and then frowned. “Once in a while I do. But it’s so sad not to have a kasama!”
That one word—kasama—has shaped the way that Nate and I have lived for the past 10 years. It’s given us a vision of the good life as a village, not a castle. A place where we need each other, rather than a place where we can survive alone. We live in a neighborhood of mostly-small houses where in pre-pandemic times, almost every week we’d be invited over for an impromptu dinner with neighbors, where neighborhood kids wander down our driveway unannounced to jump on our trampoline—and we love it.
The name that Nate suggested--that finally feels right--is the Kasama Collective. It’s also shaped our vision for this training program, where every aspect of the work we do here happens with a companion.
It’s a foundational value that you can find in every episode, too. We say a lot here at Shelter in Place that transforming communities begins with transforming ourselves--but we need each other to do that in the first place. From faith to creativity to systemic racism to vaccines, our episodes have grown out of the conversations where we’ve wrestled with these topics, sometimes for months at a time, before coming to a more nuanced understanding that we can offer to listeners even if their politics disagree.
There’s also an implicit equality in the word Kasama, an understanding that one person is not above the other. A companion is someone who makes the journey with you. There might be times when your kasama is keeping you going, or teaching you something new, or leading you to a place you’ve never been. But you’re on the journey together, and the exchange of information and companionship goes both ways.
Even as we’re teaching and training our trainees--our kasamas--we’re continually learning from them, too. We’ve changed the way we do project management because of the passion that Melissa Lent, Shweta Watwe, Samantha Skinner, and Elen Tekle brought to that process. We’ve made the production process more structured because Alana Herlands had a vision for it that could help everyone work better. Isobel Obrecht came up with the idea to share what she’d learned about scriptwriting in a free webinar, and when over 200 people signed up and Isobel got a job interview out of it, we found a new way to serve the larger audio community while showcasing our trainees as experts.
Last night as I stared at the ceiling, I reminded myself to be grateful. Because these days my coronasomnia is proof that the challenges of the past year and a half haven’t snuffed out my spark.
There was one other time when I can remember feeling exactly the same way that I did last night: the night before I launched the very first episode of Shelter in Place, on March 17, 2020. Listening back to that first episode, which was just 6 minutes long, it’s clear I had no idea what was coming. I genuinely thought that life would go back to normal in a matter of days or weeks, and that my little podcast would vanish with it.
That excitement I felt on the eve of Shelter in Place season 1, episode 1, came at a time when I felt trapped in my life, when it felt like I was spinning my wheels creatively while personally packing too much in. I was tired all the time, on edge as I rushed my kids out the door, barking orders at them to pack their lunches and not forget their shoes and remember their homework. Since my husband commuted 45 minutes to work, most of the daily parenting responsibilities fell to me, which meant my days were punctuated with school pickups and dropoffs, and parent-teacher conferences. When I was finally alone, I’d shut myself off from the world and write as fast as I could, always feeling like I was running out of time. It took a pandemic and my husband losing his job to force me to embrace a form of creativity that would get me more connected.
In each of those daily episodes of season 1, I was reaching out, trying to identify all of the things that hadn’t been working about the old life. I didn’t want to go back to the old normal of frenzied living, and I didn’t like the new normal either. I wanted a better normal, one where interconnectedness was prized above independence, where life didn’t feel so exhausting.
UPenn sleep medicine physician Dr. Ilene Rosen says that the best way to deal with coronasomnia is to provide regular rhythms in our lives, like consistent bedtime routines, bright lights first thing in the morning, and unplugging from the news and technology well before bed.
She suggests setting aside what she calls “worry time” earlier in the day, and journaling about your anxieties. And if you still can’t sleep? Sleep medicine psychologist Michelle Drerup says to get up and do something calming, like yoga or knitting.
My regular rhythms have changed a lot in the past year. I still go for a run or bike ride, but often my rhythms include other creators. If I’m worried about something, I find it helps to talk about it with someone who understands.
On any given day, I go for walks and listen to our graduates talk about the challenges they are overcoming in their current jobs, the dance of work life balance they’re still learning. When I hit an audio editing snag, I reach out to a podcaster friend who knows more than me, and less than 24 hours later we’re on a Zoom call and I’m learning a new skill. My worry time has become one of the most life-giving parts of each day, that moment when I remember I’m not alone.
I still have coronosomnia. I still have days when I’m worried about finances or it feels like I don’t have enough time. I still feel nervous when an episode doesn’t come together the way I wish it would. I still lie awake at night obsessing over how to solve some snag in our workflow, or to crack the idea of an episode open. But mostly, my coronosomnia looks more like it did that night on the eve of Shelter in Place season 1, or in those in-between days leading up to our launch of the Kasama Collective.
I can’t sleep because I’m excited, because even though I’m tired, the work I’m doing has meaning and purpose. I love the people I’m getting to know through this work. I love knowing that something I’m doing is making a difference, even if that difference is a small thing.
This weekend, I’m traveling by airplane for the first time since before the pandemic, to speak at She Podcasts Life, a podcasting conference put on by one of the many incredible organizations that serves women like our training program graduates. I’m going to get to meet some of the kasamas in this industry who have kept me going and encouraged me.
Because our friends in the Philippines were right. Life is better with a kasama.
As always, if you listen to the very end of this episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, our gift to you for sticking around beyond the credits. But first, I want to thank by name some of the kasamas who have made this journey possible.
If these names are unfamiliar to you, I encourage you to get to know them. I’ve included links to each and every one of them in our show notes.
Elsie Escobar and Jesss Kupferman, the founders of She Podcasts, who have created a vibrant and supportive community to help female podcasters thrive.
Arielle Nissenblatt, who has single-handedly changed my feelings about Twitter and offers up daily encouragements and helpful advice to help us work together better.
Alexandra Cohl, whose work on the Pod Broads and Poddraland is helping listeners find female podcasters.
Bethany Hawkins, who has built her own company of women podcasters and produced an award-winning podcast, but still wanted to learn more and lend her skills to our training program.
Katie Semro, who has been a friend to Shelter in Place from the very beginning, and has found ways to support each other through our episodes.
Lauren Passell, who does so much to promote podcasters that I sometimes wonder if she sleeps, and does it all with enthusiasm and love.
Lauren Popish, who founded The Wave, an incredible company serving women in podcasting. Allina Serebreyany, Jeremy Enns, Steph Fuccio, Elaine Grant, Meg Lindholm, Justin McRoberts, Janette Woods, Mila Atmos, Megan Tan, Naomi Mellor and so many others who have offered advice or encouragement, thank you
And most of all, the women and non-binary creators who make up the three cohorts of the Kasama Collective: Sarai Waters, Winnie Shi, Melissa Lent, Eve Bishop, Isobel Obrecht, Alana Herlands, Shweta Watwe, Elen Tekle, Samantha Skinner, Michele O’Brien, Clara Smith, Zahra C, Nathan Wizard, Meridian Watters, Hannah Fowler, Nikki Shaffer, and Bethany Hawkins. Life is better with you as kasamas.
Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 3 Kasama Collective trainees are Bethany Hawkins, Hannah Fowler, Meridian Watters, Nathan Wizard, Nikki Schaffer, and Zahra C.
Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
And now if you’re still listening, here’s a little outtake.