Ever on & on

Our lives are full of actions – our own and others. Tangible, observable, definable actions. The things we do. Get up. Get coffee. Go to work. Schedule an appointment. Talk to colleagues. Send emails. Read articles…

Typically those actions are mundane. Sometimes those actions are consequential.

Many actions pass without notice. And then for some actions, there are reactions. But these reactions do not obey Newton’s third law of motion. These reactions are far more complex and varied. They’re more commonly referred to as emotions. Feelings.

Emotions are peculiar. They are quiet and bombastic. Wonderful and terrible. Elevating and exhausting. And all points in between. They are elusive, unmeasurable, and sometimes difficult to define.

Across the vast population of humanity, reactions are not standardized. They don’t fall into tight, tidy distributions, outside of which anything is abnormal. They simply are. And they are not the same for everyone.

And yet…

There are times we behave as if there are standard operating procedures for emotional reactions to defined actions. If x, then y (for time t at magnitude c). Sometimes these restrictions come from within ourselves. “I really shouldn’t be feeling _____.” Sometimes they are external. “You should be feeling _____.”

Sometimes we demand that ourselves or others react a specific way, with particular emotions.

This is something I’ve struggled with. For a long time. Far longer than I’d ever care to admit. Amidst dealing with difficult actions and reactions this year, with the help of a professional therapist, incredible friends, and other support, I learned something important.

I get to feel what I’m feeling. When it comes to emotions, there is no “should”. There are no switches to flip, no timer running to indicate that it’s time to stop feeling [blah] and start feeling [bleh]. There is just what I’m feeling now. It doesn’t have to be one emotion or a subset of emotions, and sometimes there even seems to be contradiction. Whatever they are, though, I get experience them, even though at times, in the moment, it’s the last thing I want to do. I can be gentle with myself, let the emotions come.

This says nothing of actions though.  There are things that still have to get done. I can feel completely unmotivated, depressed even, and still get up, go to work, eat… Sometimes action is required to respond to another action (or reaction). Sometimes there are standards of action. Sometimes I need to act immediately. Sometimes I must process my reaction before I take further action. Actions are not necessarily a mirror of reactions, but sometimes they do carry the imprints of reactions.

But regardless of actions – their immediacy, their urgency, their weight – I still get to feel what I’m feeling. I get to process that in my own time. For me, the real work happens when I sit quietly. When I reflect upon the actions that brought this reaction. I try to listen and learn. As I continue through the process, I might share it with a few others I trust deeply. I work through my reactions. Then, if I feel it’s necessary or important or desired, I will share it more widely.

Letting myself feel what I’m feeling – rather than conforming to an ideal manufactured by myself or others – is an important part of healing, growing, and moving forward. The same holds true for others. They get to feel what they’re feeling. They get to process it in their own time, and the length and form of their process takes may differ substantially from my own. The principles that apply to me should carry over to others. And perhaps, as I am patient and gentle with others, I will learn to be more patient and gentle with myself.

It doesn’t take long in science to hear the questions. Why are women in science leaving academia? Why are they leaking out of the pipeline?

Periodically there’s something that makes me think about the language we use. The more it comes up, the more I think about it, the more I feel like we need to change how we talk about women in science and where we land.

https://twitter.com/biochembelle/status/372075546559008768

This simple pondering seemed to resonate with many people. So what’s the problem with how we’re framing the situation?

The pipeline metaphor contributes to the perception that, regardless of claims to the contrary, there is one respectable endpoint for scientists – tenure track research. Never mind that it’s utter bullshit. That it’s utterly unreasonable. That only 1 in 6 PhDs will reach that point. Discussions of the leaky pipeline almost invariably focus on the lack of women in tenure track positions.

When a woman doesn’t pursuit the tenure track, she “leaked out” of the pipeline. Consider that terminology for a moment and the connotations it carries. When you have a leak in a pipe in your house, you have to fix it. If you don’t fix it, that leak can cause all sorts of problems – water damage to sheet rock, wood rot, mold. When we say that women leak out of the pipeline, it can sound as if we’re saying that they are making the wrong decisions, ones that are harmful to science. It’s almost as if we want women to feel guilty about leaving the academic track.

Many women internalize the mentality. One postdoc commented she wasn’t sure “whether to stay in the game or leak from the pipe[line]”. Regardless of whether the academic research track is what we want, regardless of whether we can imagine finding career happiness elsewhere, regardless of how often we try to remind ourselves (and one another) that there is exciting and worthwhile science-related work outside the tenure track, we can still oft find ourselves fighting the feeling that, if we walk away from academia, we’re giving up on science, failing the establishment.

Many scientists, men and women both, experience this sense of guilt and failure when considering or pursuing careers outside academia and especially outside research. But I think that there might be an added weight for women. There’s such a tremendous focus on women “dropping out” on the way up the academic ladder, and we observe the resultant reality every day. Success on the tenure-track (or lack thereof) becomes a women’s issue. And if we choose a different path, we become another number for the statistics. Another leak, another drip. Not only do are we a failure to the scientific establishment, we’re a failure to women.

Admittedly this might be a hyperbolic response. It’s certainly not a necessarily a weight that we (consciously) carry with us every day. But I suspect that, for many of us, a similar idea is there, percolating under the surface. We’ve experienced or heard stories of PIs expressing disappointment because a female trainee chose another path over academia, because she chose family over career, because she had the talent but lacked the confidence to stay in the pipeline. All the while the focus is on women leaving.

Maybe it’s time we started reframing the conversation.

Maybe we should start taking more time to talk about women are going. Women who leave the path of academic research don’t simply disappear. They’re not drips absorbed by the walls or the soil. They go places. They do things – cool, interesting, exciting, valuable things! Let’s talk about those things. Let’s celebrate those paths and discuss how and why they chose them.

This is not to say that we should stop working toward parity in academia. It’s an important issue, but I think the conversation can inadvertently take the tone of “What’s wrong with the women?”. I think there needs to be more consideration of institutional practices, implicit biases, and departmental environments. But as we have these discussions about women in academia, we need to take care that we don’t devalue women’s desires to pursue other careers as well.

It’s time to acknowledge that the pipeline isn’t linear. It’s divergent. The branches are numerous. The women who choose another path aren’t leaking out. They’re choosing other adventures.

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You can check out other Twitter responses to the “leaky pipeline” metaphor here.

Change is a process.

I suppose sometimes change happens, and we react, adjust, roll with it.

But internal change is a process. It takes time and proceeds in stages, by fits & starts. The first is becoming aware of a need and/or desire for change. Identify the problem. It required introspection & honesty, which can be very difficult.

What I find more painful is the next stage. I know what I’m doing “wrong”. I can see myself doing it, returning to an old habit that I’ve found damaging or isolating. But all I can do is watch. I don’t know how to stop it.

Yet.

I have hope I will learn. And in the meantime, I will try to be lenient with myself. It takes time to replace old habits built & reinforced over years, to learn new ways.

Change is a process. I’ll will find my way through it. But it will take time.

I have a problem. I have a bit of a fixation on finishing what I start, of sticking through to the bitter end (whatever that endpoint is in my head).

This “problem”, as I label it, seems as if it should be a good thing. After all, this is how shit gets done.

But situations change, people grow up (or don’t), and some directions are intractable. Here is where my problem becomes manifest. I gravitate toward challenging questions. I have a particular vision for how something is supposed to progress, that if I pound on something long enough, eventually something useful or informative will fall out. But that’s just not how science – or life – works.

I don’t think I’m totally beyond help or hope. My instincts aren’t terrible. I tend to see the promise, not the pitfalls, at the start. But I’m not blinded to the problems along the way. I can see when something is approaching an impasse.

And this is when and where the internal conflict begins, a battle between perseverance and pragmatism. Let me try one more thing … OK, but how long do I keep making “one last attempt”? … Maybe I’m just overreacting to a setback … This problem can’t be solved right now. Typically I debate, I worry, I wonder while I carry on. And then eventually – weeks, months, maybe even years later – I arrive at the same conclusion – this thing just isn’t going to work as planned, at least at the moment.

I sometimes wonder if this is just an inherent personality trait at work or whether we – in science or, perhaps, society at large – overemphasize “stick-to-itiveness”. Keep it up. You’ll figure it out! If you just stick with it, you can make it. Just keep up the hard work. You’ll get it eventually.

I also wonder whether it’s just fear. Fear of being wrong. Fear that I lack of commitment, that I’m not smart enough. Fear that I’m giving up & conceding defeat rather than making a strategically sound move. But maybe above all, it’s fear of change.

Change can be exhilarating but also terrifying. It means moving away from what I know, what I’ve invested in. It means tackling something new. And it means a whole new round of uncertainties. Even if the other thing wasn’t working, I knew it wasn’t working. The old thing might have been broken, and I might not have known how to fix it, but I knew where I stood. Now I have take the risk, take the plunge all over again.

Patience and determination make a difference – in this career and this life. But taken too far, dedication can be damaging. I’m learning which things I should put away to pull out again later and which things I should just let go of entirely. It’s not always easy to distinguish. There have been mistakes, and there will be more. But I’m growing, and I hope I’ll learn to better balance these two parts of my mind – the one that wants to finish what she started and the one that understands not all things can be carried through to the end envisioned.