Warning: long unhappy post, but not that much existential ennui

Today I spent some time huddled in the restroom while waiting for the last 200mg of motrin to kick in. It's gotten worse recently. 600mg and I was still in enough pain that I could not effectively function in lab -- a lingering, unnecessary reminder that I've been going through one of the rougher patches in life. That and the fact that it was actually the wrong day for Shark Week, which would make the upcoming Peru trip -- yes the one that's I'd mentioned last year, with the tickets for everything ordered and paid for months ago-- very interesting. (I was considering canceling, last month, but my mother persuaded me not to. Since February this year she's taken a more "as few regrets as possible" approach to life, which she's trying to extend to me, whenever possible. With dubious results.) It's perhaps telling that I have had enough experiences to know what happened and how long it'll take my body to recover. Human bodies are complicated and full of regulatory mechanisms, most of which, thankfully, I do NOT have to know off of the top of my head. (Read: committee meetings. Ugh.)


And so, after a hiatus, I am back on blogger --my online sort-of diary that I have kept with varying degrees of regularity since high school.

Additional side effect of July this year is a) now I am a year older and b) I am reconsidering my priorities in life. By which I mean most of you have heard, at some point, of my plans of doing a post-doc abroad. I had been very excited at the prospect and the future I'm walking towards, but the past month had brought to my attention that I have not given due consideration to what I'm walking AWAY from, as well. For instance, it's given that bad things sometimes happen in life, and the longer you stay at a place, the higher the chances are that bad things will happen when you are at that place. Graduate school in Europe is highly popular even to students in US because a doctorate only takes 3 years to complete, as opposed to the 5-6 years in US. (In fact I have heard complains that it's hard to find a decent project for the students because in biology / neuroscience -- well what project can you start and wrap up in 3 years? And so we get post-docs who graduate from Europe who's never written their own paper before, whereas in my program if you don't have your first author paper, you don't graduate.) However, the role for a post-doc seems to be more similar, and while the contract is year by year basis, there's an expectation that in my field at least, you'll publish a paper at the end of your post-doc training. So...that's around 5 years, more or less.

The point, dear readers, is that my remaining grandparents are in their 80s and not in the best state of health. The point is that I have realized how little guarantee there is of avoiding any catastrophe over a span of 5 years. The point is the country that was my top choice has a significant lower percentage of Asian population than I'm used to, that with the exception of 1 graduate student, I realized all the people who's recommended the experience to me are Caucasians and a friend of mine reminded me, fairly recently, that even with my brushes with racism here and now, California USA is actually a lot more tolerant / open toward immigrants than the country I was considering. THE POINT, in summary, is that I am considering the potential ramifications of walking away from the only support network I have, the only one I trust, the one that's taken me painstaking numbers of years to build.

And when my friends stepped up the past month to offer their support and help, I realized, for the first time, the ...enormity, if you will, of what I could potentially be leaving behind.

Think about it. Post-docs are not any less busy than graduate students. Trans-Atlantic tickets and international traveling are expensive. The odds are I will be in US at most once a year which meant that I will NOT be able to see everyone that I want to, every year. I have no idea how I can split the time behind US and China. 6 hours drive would pale in comparison to this new distance. I'd potentially be going around the globe in BOTH DIRECTIONS. It'd be great if I'm actively trying to distance myself, if I'm trying to run away but I must ask myself, what I'm running from, why, and do I still want to? What am I trying to accomplish? What am I trying to prove? What do I want to do the most in my life?

I asked myself these questions while falling asleep, wondering what my subconscious would make of it. In return I got a series of separate dreams where I was spending one-on-one time with friends and family members that I care about, and I was ...happy. Enough that waking up brought a pang of pain.

In that sense, I suppose, my subconscious is very clear.

So many second thoughts, dear reader, SO MANY. (AND I DON'T LIKE IT. I WANT TO BE DONE.) Complicated by the fact that all my original reasons for wanting the experience abroad are still valid, my rapidly declining interest in academia, and that my to-do list is going to get dubbed "the nightmare list" fairly soon.

First post back, and it's a long one, filled with confusion but less angst than I'd imagined and very little existential ennui, all things considered. I am doing fairly well for where I am in life, compared to the people around me. This is only comforting around 50% of the time.