The Good
admin March 4th, 2007
At one point during my grad career, about two years in when I was watching everyone around me belch up publications while I was desperately trying to get someone to believe in my work enough to let me do it, when co-workers were hinting that I wasn’t working up to par, when one in particular told me I was only there because I was a woman (jokingly, but..), I hit bottom.
Now, I am normally a very confident, very positive person. If worrying doesn’t help, don’t do it. Quit whining. FIX THE PROBLEM.
But this time was different. It snuck up on me. It was as if each morning someone placed another pebble on my shoulder, until one day they combined to crush me. I would have moments of joy, but they become more fleeting. I would pick fights with my husband, blaming him for my bad moods. I was constantly exhausted. I felt like crying but didn’t have the energy. I couldn’t do anything. It was an effort just to hoist myself out of my chair long enough to walk to the bathroom to pee. I remember being hungry but not being able to find the energy to make something to eat. At home I would just sit for hours staring. I looked up depression online and began recognizing more and more symptoms. When it got really bad I tried to make an appointment with the counseling center but they told me I had to walk over there to get an appointment. What kind of place makes depressed people WALK A MILE to make an appointment?! A place with a serious priority problem, that’s where. But I digress… The point is I was spending hours and hours a day doing nothing but sitting in my chair in front of my computer, trying hard to look like I was working.
And what was I doing while I was sitting there in my chair in front of my computer screen? I was reading. I was reading anecdotes of woman engineers, and woman mothers. I was reading about the state of women in the pipeline. I was reading about job satisfaction of these young academics. I was reading statistics about academic women and children. I was reading about the funding situation, and about stress in academia. And you know what? The picture was dismal. The internet tells me that in general academia is a sorry state of affairs, but women in particular might as well just go ahead and start chopping off fingers. It told me: Women can’t make it or don’t want to, and if they do, they can’t have kids, and if they have kids they will never get what they want and they will make less money. The internet was telling me to throw in the towel, that there was no light at the end of the tunnel, that I would work and strive and sacrifice and make less money and have less fun and achieve less than everyone else. I would work my ass off to be unhappy. It would never get better. Every day was near to living in hell. This is what the internet told me.
And then one day I was sitting in my car with my husband, and I looked out into a deep ravine, and I said, “You know, I could just push my foot down and we would go into that ravine. But then I would hurt you. I’ll have to do it after you get out of the car.” And he looked at me with such hurt and concern, that I knew I had to do something about this problem. And the next day my adviser sat me down, told me what he expected, and sketched out a plan of how we were going to do this. (WHY hadn’t we done this two years ago??) And then things got better. Slowly, it got better.
I still have my off days now, but I can recognize it when it comes, and most of the time I can run the other direction. But I have noticed that every time, I go back to the internet, looking for some good news, looking for some happy anecdotes, looking for those happy stories in which it is all worthwhile, and I’m telling you that they are out there but they are VERY HARD TO FIND. It makes sense really. We can vent here when we can’t vent to anyone else. We write it down to get it of our heads. When things are good you don’t feel like telling everyone. No one wants to brag. No one wants to rock a happy boat. But those days when I am sitting at my chair, unable to finish the work I am supposed to be doing, searching for hours to find one ounce of positive feedback, just a bit of anonymous encouragement, I understand exactly why so many women leave academia before they even get started. You can only work so long before you have to see the light at the end of the tunnel. You can only search so long without finding gold.
So please, all you young academics out there, going through the motions, having families, getting tenure, raising students, tell us about the good. Tell us why you haven’t left to open a bar in Tahiti. Tell us why you don’t use your equipment to start a meth emporium. Tell us why you don’t read palms over the phone. Tell us why you love being a scientist. Tell us about that moment of discovery, the paper that got published, those students that you reached. Tell us about how much you enjoy your children, how they are doing well despite your continued ambitions, how it can be helpful to be able to explain the phases of the moon, or why the crickets are chirping. Tell us about how you travel and attend conferences and meet cool people, about how when you walk around campus there are people speaking five different languages, and some with T-shirts that make references to sex with integrals, and some with pink hair. Tell us when the birds sing, and the flowers bloom, and you get a pat on the back. Because these are the things we need to hear. We need the good as well as the bad. We need to know why we should do this. Please, for the sake of those people sitting in their chairs wondering why the hell they are there, print the good.