Storytime: Every End is a New Beginning

*Warning: This post is blatantly sentimental.  A total cheese-fest.  In order to explain the inception of this blog, I felt it was necessary to get a little bit personal.  I promise to tone down the schmaltz once I get down to the actual business of this website- writing about science!

Recently I’ve been having the same dream, over and over, night after night.  I’m standing on the edge of a canyon (possibly the Grand One; it featured prominently in the last vacation I took before having kids).  The sun is low in the sky but I can’t tell whether it’s rising or setting.  I feel anxious about something but it’s unclear what exactly is the cause of my unease.  Every time I look down into the abyss below me my stomach lurches.  I am frozen on the edge, unable to make a movement.  But when I look up and out, I am awestruck by the beauty laid out before me.  The feeling of worry lifts and for a moment I am hopeful.  I stand there that way, at turns afraid and buoyant, for what feels like hours.  The strange, dichotomous feelings stick with me long into my waking day, lingering like ghosts as I work.  I don’t need a dream interpreter to explain why I am having this dream; in a little over a week, my time in the lab will be coming to an end, and it is both exciting and terrifying. 

Like many before me, and many others that will follow, I am leaving academia for parts unknown.  I am the “trailing spouse”, leaving my postdoc to follow my husband on his next big adventure.  But my decision to leave the bench encompasses so much more than that.  I am suffering from “bench burnout”, tired of the roller coaster highs and lows of a career in research, and worn down by feelings of inadequacy when I compare myself to my seemingly much more accomplished colleagues.  As a full-time, working mother, I regularly feel like I am doing a poor job juggling both spheres of my life.  Even after three and a half years, I still cry all the way to work if one of my kids has a bad drop-off at daycare in the morning.  I carry the stress of a failed experiment home, bristling through dinner and baths, wearing the mantle of “Stressed Out Mommy”, as my children unfortunately know me sometimes.  And because of the constraints of my husbands career, all 'sick days' fall to me which results in canceled experiments.  I have tried to "have it all", but what I "have" just feels like chaos.  When my husband starts his new job I will have the incredible privilege to take some time off at home with my kids, and I am really looking forward to it.  But at the same time, I love science and it was not an easy decision to leave a career path that has defined the last decade of my life.

I fell in love with research as an undergraduate.  To me, a life spent in the lab seemed idyllic, and somehow I managed to remain blissfully ignorant of any of the potential drawbacks of my choice.  I went off to graduate school, bright-eyed and naïve, probably a little annoyingly over-eager, and anxious to learn.  I was enamored by the idea of doing good science.  Being a good scientist requires the creative flair of an artist, along with an intense mastery of a massive set of technical skills.  And this kind of study appealed to me- the honing of a craft, the practice of a discipline.  It seemed high-minded and meaningful.  But unfortunately, creativity and mastery do not automatically equal success in academia.  Good scientists must also be able to handle failure and rejection, again and again and again, to take a hit from a review committee and get back up to resubmit their grant/ paper/ tenure packet over and over, ad nauseam.  And this tenacity, this persistence, this drive, is not optional.  You either embrace this as part of the lifestyle or you won’t survive.  And sometimes you embrace it and you still don’t survive.  Doing science for a living is a hard road to choose, and ultimately I realized I just wasn’t destined to lead my own lab.  Could I make the jump to industry?  Easier said than done.  Could I go work for the government?  Maybe if I wasn’t geographically restricted.  How about doing a second postdoc in our new city?  For a multitude of reasons I won't get into right now, no thanks.  Ultimately, with our upcoming move, I just decided to walk away from the bench altogether.

So what then?  What do you do when you find yourself leaving the lab but you realize you’ve only been trained to do one thing?  Well, for starters, you scrap the notion that your PhD training has only prepared you for one thing.  The last decade of my life has been filled with pipetting reagents, passaging cells, running Western/ Southern/ Northern blots, countless PCRs, fixing and staining slides for microscopy, etc.  Tasks that have become familiar, a part of “my story”, the only things I believe myself qualified to do.  But buried beneath the technical mastery of experiments, are many other “soft” skills that were acquired almost without my noticing.  Over the last several years, my writing has been critiqued and reworked and returned to me, bleeding and defeated, only to be resurrected and reworked some more, and polished and made to shine.  My seminars have been scrutinized and appraised, and I have endured the sting of being asked the brutal but essential question, “Why should we care?” in front of a whole roomful of people.  While it was humiliating at the time, it forced me to really think about what I was saying, the story I was telling, and it made me a better communicator*.  And despite these sometimes painful experiences, I have come out on the other side, still keen on practicing the fine art of communication.

It occurs to me that, “why should we care (about science)?” has become the refrain of the ordinary taxpayer.  “Why should we give you more of our hard-earned money?  What is the point of studying fruit flies and worms?  What will be the return on our investment?” they ask, with varying degrees of skepticism.  And all of these are valid questions, ones that deserve good answers, delivered without condescension.  The answers may seem obvious to those of us sitting up in the Ivory Tower, but we have to put ourselves in the shoes of those that don't live and breathe science, or those who maybe didn't get a solid scientific education in school.  Our research is only as powerful as our ability to convey its importance to the people it is intended to help.  It is so key that we as a global community become more science-minded.  And perhaps that is where I find my next purpose.  I have always been a high-minded idealist.  I have always loved learning about the science of our world and sharing what I’ve learned with others.  And so The SciMinded Idealist has been created as a place for me to write about research that grabs my attention (during naptimes and stolen moments while raising science-literate little ones, of course).  I hope you’ll check in from time to time to read my thoughts, and share my stories with friends.

So now, as I sit down to write, my fingers itch and my brain whirs to life.  In my dream, the sun is rising, and the feelings of fear and uncertainty burn off in its warm rays.  I’m leaving the lab but I’m not leaving science.  Just shifting my focus to take in a broader view.  And the view from the top is beautiful.

At the Grand Canyon, circa 2012

* Thanks Barb!