Being a university professor is usually a privileged position. However, the social norms of academic life have their own set of tensions. The “Publish or Perish” injunction creates a frenetic pace from which it is difficult to escape. When the pandemic of COVID-19 was announced by the WHO in 2020 and a lockdown was decided in March of the same year by the Quebec government (Canada), work intruded into the private lives of many people, exacerbating certain professional and family inequalities. What posture to adopt when a social crisis has strong individual impacts? Based on a family and professional experience and written from an autobiographical perspective, this story revisits a vulnerable episode of the pandemic from another angle. Drawing on Arlie Hochschild’s notion of emotional labor, I will attempt to deconstruct the lack of place given to my career in my family life, and to highlight the strategies I’ve put in place in order to keep on going in spite of everything, in spite of my difficulties in naming the emotions I experienced, and in spite of my difficulties in recognizing the surrounding vulnerabilities that usually have little room to exist in the academic world.