I don’t know if I’m going to make it. I don’t know if I will go on to become a person of power in academia. And as you get older in the academic system, you’re either a person wielding quite some power over others and in the system, or you’re simply not in the system. I’m in the academic system, and I’d like to tell you how I got here, and where I think I might go from here.
I was born in a large, still developing country and raised in various parts of the country by parents who migrated wherever their jobs took them. I am quite fortunate in a lot of ways. I come from a highly educated family with quite liberal views for a middle-class family. I was encouraged to read a lot, learn new languages everywhere I went, and given the freedom to decide my career path and to follow it no matter where it took me geographically. And the one thing I was told repeatedly was to always, always dream big. Even though I was a girl. That’s an upbringing not many women from my background are privy to. Including my mother, just one generation up, who had to enter an arranged marriage with my father (that’s just how things were back then, and are even now, for many people), and eventually give up her dream of being an academic researcher after completing a postdoc, because my father, through societal norms, automatically had priority to move wherever he wanted to for his job, which happened to be a place which back then didn’t have good academic opportunities to offer my mother. And so she gave up on her dream of lifelong research and became a teacher instead, a job which she eventually also wound up finding incredibly meaningful. But this example stayed with me throughout my childhood and never really left my being. She had to give up what she dreamed of doing, and for a man she didn’t really want to be with either. Over the years, this caused a lot of bitterness and lots of fights between my parents, to the point where teenage me would desperately hope and pray everyday that they would just get a divorce. But societal norms didn’t allow for that either, so they just stayed together even though they disliked, maybe even hated each other, so intensely. Cutting a long story short, the physiological effects of being so angry and bitter for such a long time must have eventually caught up with my mother, as she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder when I was 16. Within six months of diagnosis, she died.
There is no doubt that the early influence my mother had on me, combined with my own interests and a naive view on ‘having a stable paycheck’ led me to choose a path in science. Over the years, I tried to ‘excel’ as much as I could. But that came at a cost. It’s funny, my European friends talk about all the vacations they took with their families and how much they look forward to their next vacation and seeing their families. I couldn’t relate to any of it since I never took any vacation since I started college. This no-vacation, no-break phase went on for a period of over 7 years. One, because I didn’t have the money for it (neither did my father at that point, who was paying for my education, by the way, which was very important to me and once again I am fortunate and grateful for his support), and two, because in my search for excellence, I was spreading myself out so thin, that I would apply for internships every single chance I got. If I finished my semester exams today, I would leave the next day free to pack, and the day after that I would be on my way somewhere else to a different institute in a different city and state, or country, if possible, all thousands of kilometres away, to gain research experience, only to similarly return with a 1-day gap for the next semester. Or the next degree. Or the next research fellowship when I finished my master’s. All in an effort to be excellent, whatever that meant. And unlike other people, I didn’t look forward to seeing my family. Because the most important person in my family who understood and supported and motivated me was gone. I went home to see the rest of my family for a maximum of a week once every 2-3 years.
I dug myself a little science hole of isolation which got deeper and deeper, and I thought the more I pushed myself to excel, the better my life would be, the fewer problems I would have. But it didn’t really go that way. It got to a point where I couldn’t push myself anymore. Simple things seemed so difficult. My mental health was at an all-time low. I didn’t seem to be excellent no matter how much I tried. But that was on the list of prerequisites to join the programme I am currently in too. The eligbility criteria said, “we are looking for excellent candidates who …”. There were always other people who were smarter than me, more articulate than me, and even more motivated than me. Even though I eventually made it through the selection, that feeling of not being good enough, intelligent enough, hardworking enough, polite enough, assertive enough, professional enough, friendly enough also persists today. I do my best, I work as hard as I can push myself, and I try to be a good employee and friend to those around me. But my mind is so tired all the time. I can barely keep up with the most essential things, and I prioritise my work over everything else including my family and my partner. It has caused me severe physiological and health-related problems over the years. But in spite of it all, I am highly functional. People who know me from a distance probably even think I’m doing great and am actually good at what I do. But I never feel good enough. I feel like a zombie inside. I spend all my waking hours thinking about work, wondering how I could improve, what secrets of nature I could uncover which I haven’t yet; it’s just extreme obsession. I manage to get all the urgent work-related things done in just about time, but I fall back on things like laundry, or apartment maintenance, or calls and messages from my family and friends. I fall out of touch with these people I want to keep in touch with for periods of months and years, just briefly reappearing in the few moments a year I feel normal. And I haven’t even got to the more difficult parts of this job, like getting the data through very difficult experiments, having progress report meetings all the time, working with other people and handling conflicts, dealing with all the bureaucracy which allows you to stay in this place, not being white in a very right-wing dominated white society, much of which assumes I must be a freeloader on the mighty German system because of how I look. Yeah, it’s a long list.
What do I have to do to be good enough for this machine which will probably chew me up and eventually spit me out one day? I do still enjoy the day-to-day life of science like doing experiments and analysing data. But I am crumbling under the pressure to perform. What hope do I even have of making it to a position of power and making meaningful change someday? Even if I were excellent, there simply aren’t enough positions for all the excellent people. What do they do? Where do they go? How do they find meaning in what they end up doing as their permanent jobs in the end, if they do find one? How did you get through it when your future was still uncertain? Let’s start a dialogue between the people in power and the people like me, whose future for now remains completely uncertain.