Being a postdoc faced me to experiences challenging with my mental health.
The postdoc status places you in a temporary position where you feel a lot of pressure and see that this career step is very crucial. It is for a limited period of time and you need to show that you can be “productive”, meaning producing “interesting results”, publish papers and these are not always proportional to the work you have done. I want my work to be done rigorously and collaboratively with my colleagues. When I started in the lab, I put a lot of energy into implementing a better organization in a more collaborative environment. But after some time I realized that these efforts were not recognized and were something considered as granted by my colleagues and my boss and that individualistic behavior, short-term planning was a better strategy to navigate in the lab. In my everyday life in the lab I feel very isolated by this individualistic environment. I can spend an entire day in front of my computer and not interact with my colleagues who seem very busy or very stressed. I am also convinced that in the long term teamwork, collaborations are very important in research. Research is a hard environment where we need to help each other to succeed and also to grow as researchers. But I feel that this spirit is not rewarded. When I do an experiment project I am happy to help and not primarily think of the authorship I could gain from this. From my experiences this is not a good strategy. Some of my colleagues excel in appropriating others’ work overmine their contributions in the projects and fight for authorship ranks. Good for them but their attitude instilates in the lab a very heavy atmosphere, giving the feeling that there are in the lab a first class of members put in the spotlight, and the second class of members are transparent that their work don’t seem to be rewarded or producing interesting results. This situation exarcebates my lack of self-confidence and the imposteur syndrome : am I good enough ? Am I not working hard enough ?
As a woman, another struggle I experienced in academia is the choice of starting a family. I heard a lot around me that having kids is not compatible with academia or that women should wait after their postdoc to have kids so they can start their family in their late thirties. I see around me that it is the choice that many women are making and I am very happy for all of them where this plan works. In my case I learnt when I was 30 that this option would not work for me, we had fertility issues and the only way to have kids would be to do IVF preferably in my early 30s. This journey is very time-consuming and very stressful with many uncertainties, failures that accumulate with the postdoc status and work and short-term contracts. I never found a safe space to talk about it. This topic is still very taboo in society and I feel it is even worse in academia, where the majority of female postdocs have not started their family yet. I don’t want to stress them out, I really wish them to not have to struggle like me, maybe I am the unlucky one but what if others are facing this ordeal?