Fostering a Reimagined Professional Stability: An Autoethnographic Exploration of How Our (Work) Group Found Hope and Healing During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Through a collaborative autoethnography, we tell the story of how our work group developed resilience and fostered a reimagined professional stability throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We invoke the idea of bricolage, as our manuscript is a mosaic of personal, professional, and personal-professional challenges, solutions, and ongoing threads that we weave together to illuminate the complexity of COVID-19. As bricoleurs, we understand stories to be initiated by writers; deepened by listeners, readers, and coauthors; and communally practiced. Our bricolage layers narratives throughout four specific and interrelated themes: Shape, Structure, and Stability; Sharing Grief and Finding Joy; Overlapping Pandemics; and Together Alone. Our bricolage (1) investigates the complexity of the COVID-19 pandemic, uncovering some of the invisible artifacts; (2) utilizes the five narrative goals mapped out by Sharf and Vanderford (2003) to show how our narratives contribute to a larger cluster of stories; (3) illustrates one avenue readers and academics might follow to build supportive communities; and (4) emphasizes the development of resilience through the integration of the personal and professional. It is our goal to share our collective vulnerability and reimagined stability with readers while also spreading joy and hope