anxiety, depression, graduate school, and the new year

When I was a senior in high school, my graduating class voted me Most Likely to Succeed.

This is one of many things I've been thinking of lately.

They didn't vote me in as Tallest, and probably should have. I know I was taller than the girl who won, but if it had come down to the measuring tape, it's not impossible that there might have been a girl who edged me out.

No, they voted me Most Likely to Succeed. I posed with our future valedictorian out in the courtyard where some students sometimes ate lunch, on and around a statue that no one really understood. I can't remember if I'd known they were going to take my picture that day, but the shot itself suggests that either I didn't know or it slipped my mind, because there I am in a pair of tatty jeans and a huge orange hooded sweatshirt that says - if I recall correctly, and I've still got it here with me in Boston - "I LOVE SUNSET BEACH." Or maybe it's "SUNSET BEACH: I LOVE IT."

Most Likely to Succeed.

2015 was a year of failure - or at least that was the way it seemed to me. I was beaten down by our move and subsequent scramble for anything that would help us graduate, so far from our home institution. In many ways, it seems like 2014 should have been the Year of Last Straws rather than 2015, but I still had something left in the tank.

Not much, though. It's hard to retain reserves to run on when you move in the middle of your graduate degree, find your advisor credited on everyone's acknowledgements slides, and realize that he's been advising students that aren't his at the expense of his own.

Then we floated around blindly, having footed the bill to move to Boston after he made his pleas to us ("I want to do whatever I can to convince you to come with me" almost immediately turned into "I understand, now, why other advisors left their graduate students", which seems to be the advisor's paraphrase of "Now I know why tigers eat their young" and, I assure you, made our blood run cold on that sunny day in front of Starbucks).

We didn't have projects or we couldn't work on them, lacking the funding to make the necessary progress. We were relegated to work on other people's projects. Ben found computational work that he loved while he was working for other people in order to stay paid. I was making molecules around a hit for a target that was someone else's project. Where could I have gone? Even had I gotten excited about something, I probably couldn't have worked on it in any official capacity because of intellectual property conflicts between my home institution and my current half-home here.

We lost time to this move: how do you quantify lost time? I don't know, but I know we lost it. I know that some of us - maybe most of us - found ways to keep on keepin' on.

I didn't.

This added fuel to the fire growing inside me, convincing me that I was worthless, that I was unmotivated, that I didn't deserve to be a graduate student, that I was an utter failure. It burned me out.

The thing is, I knew what I wanted when I started out. I knew what I needed. I articulated it. I was reassured that it would happen. So when it didn't, can you blame me for slowly losing steam? There's some blame, surely, for my avoidant behavior, for my lack of self-motivation, but it's all tied up in everything else. I can't see any way this would have worked out well for me.

At first when I started giving up, I told myself I didn't care. I was still getting paid. I tried to tell myself it was a game, this waiting for him to notice that I wasn't making progress, that I was so clearly struggling. When he didn't notice over longer and longer periods of time, I began the slow realization that I would never be fired. I would have to quit or graduate.

I gave a poster on mostly old results, almost all of which I'd presented at past group meetings. He stopped by my poster, nodded, told me it was good. I wanted to scream it then: there's nothing new here. There's no real progress. The only good data is questionable. How can you not see it?

I didn't make any progress on that project from June to the present day. Sure, I set up a few experiments and ran them, and then I looked dispiritedly at the data and despaired. Why didn't I get help?

What help would he have been? We'd been trying to get him to weigh in on it for ages.

I learned my way around the mass spec, thinking maybe this was my ticket. I still think that maybe it's my ticket.

In late August or early September, I was getting coffee with Clark and we were walking back to the building when I heard myself saying "I think I'm having a nervous breakdown."

He said, "Oh. Do you want to walk?"

That was the beginning of admitting to myself, out loud, how unhappy I was. Over the next few months, my resolve rose and fell several times. I talked to Steph about mental health resources. I dreaded going home for Thanksgiving because it meant I had to come back, and coming back after time away was so very difficult.

The three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas were the hardest three weeks of my life to date. I cried at my desk regularly. I left for hours in the middle of the day to walk by the Charles River. I admitted to some of my coworkers that I was very seriously considering leaving the program. They, to their credit, were calm and supportive. They seemed sad but not surprised, offering quiet suggestions for how I might still find my way through.

It was well-meaning, but I have been here for long enough that I know that things are not going to change. A tiger cannot change his stripes. I cannot expect change where there has been none and where there is no potential for it. I no longer have any interest in driving a project forward entirely of my own volition.

Hyperbole and a Half wrote a pair of well-known posts about depression a few years ago. It was startling to come back to them and see myself so clearly in them. The self-loathing, the negative self-talk, the eventual deadening of feeling. Things that I used to enjoy held no interest for me. I couldn't read, I couldn't watch more than about 15 minutes of television without being distracted, I couldn't color in coloring books, I didn't want to play video games or cook, I didn't want to see movies, I definitely didn't want to leave the house. I didn't even want to leave my bed. Many times, the best I could do was to get myself up and to my desk, and that was all I had the energy to do.

My fish were dead.

The trouble with depression is that it's hard to explain, especially to people who haven't struggled with it. I was living with the constant certainty that I had irreversibly destroyed my entire life with 4 years of unproductive graduate school. I, at 26 years old, had written off my entire life's trajectory. It ruined my birthday; I distinctly remember crying on the day because I didn't think it was fair. I felt trapped, I felt alone, I felt like I couldn't talk to anyone about what I was feeling because I didn't want anyone to urge me to Just-Do-It or to tell me I was obviously so close, why not just keep sticking it out. Admitting that I was struggling was admitting to unacceptable weakness.

It's not part of the culture, not this culture, to admit that you're struggling. Badges of honor here are things like "I worked 90 hours last week" and "I'm not getting enough sleep" and "I hate science" while you feverishly plug ahead, undaunted. I certainly don't have that in me, but I take some comfort in the fact that anyone who is able to get even an inch of distance from it looks at it with well-deserved horror.

Does the system, therefore, self-select? Of course it does, but I'm not sure that the qualities that it selects for are honorable. There's a reason why suicides in graduate school are common. I think that when graduate students are mistreated and they survive despite it, they start to believe that it was what propelled them to greatness and they perpetuate the abuse. I think that the system is broken.

I've been lost in a system that doesn't care one whit about me for probably three years now. And I can't even get a meeting with my advisor to tell him that I am not interested in being part of this machine anymore. It's almost comical.

I realized, one night as I lay listlessly in bed before 8pm, trying not to think about how miserable I was, that this was utterly unsustainable and I had to do something about it. My self-loathing was so intense that when Dad told me that he was proud of me, I had to swallow the lump in my throat, convinced that if he knew what was happening to me, he wouldn't be proud anymore. I had progressed to the point where I had convinced myself that no one would be able to love me anymore if I gave up on this, but I knew that couldn't keep going.

Agony.

Most Likely to Succeed. How ya like me now, classmates?

How do you define success?

I told myself that when I went home for the holidays, I would talk about it. I went to our group lunch - the first time I'd been in the same room as my advisor in probably two months - and could barely eat because I was so terrified that he would meet my eyes across the room and know that I was a failure, would call me out on it in front of everyone.

Of course he didn't.

I made it home and I couldn't get the words to cross my lips. I couldn't admit to what was happening to me until I received an email from my advisor asking for a summary of data on the project (that had made one tiny, fumbling step in the past year), because he was going to think over break about how best to get me to graduation. This was finally enough to break me because it sent me into a panic spiral complete with shortness of breath and cold sweat. I talked to Mom, I made it through Christmas - not without feeling very sad even on that day, which made sense because once it was over, the next big benchmark was returning to work - and then I talked to everyone else. I never responded to the email.

He never did follow up on it, which, I think, tells you everything you need to know, if I hadn't already presented enough evidence here.

The days are short and dark and cold, but my resolve to do something about my situation lets me believe that there might be light around the corner.

2015: The Year of Giving Up.

2016: The Year of Getting Out? The Year of Restoration?

All I can say for certain: The Year that Something is Finally Going to Change.