Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
William Shakespeare
Five months ago, life struck me with a series of events. I had a very difficult time dealing with the synergistic effect, but after I dried my tears, I marked my calendar and told myself this would be the beginning of a new stage of my life — I am going to rise from the ashes like a phoenix. Since then, I have been constantly asking myself what kind of person I want to become and actively trying to meet that ideal, even though at that time I was struggling with almost every aspect of my life. I have been thinking about this even more after the sunrise hike at Mission Peak, perhaps because it made me think of the first time I went there in January, or because sunrise just gives me lots of energy and inspiration in general.
Although I felt very refreshed after coming down from Mission Peak, life did not seem to become any easier for me. A week ago, life dumped a lot of things on me all at once — work, family, personal — just like what it did five months ago. If all these things had happened at different time points, I could probably have dealt with them a lot better. Again, the synergy was the most difficult part. I finally had a major break down on Friday night, right before the day I had to throw a beach party for my lab. When I skyped home that night, I could not stop crying; when I woke up on Saturday morning, I almost thought I couldn’t make it to Manresa, and the only thing that motivated me to get out of bed was my responsibility to set up the beach party. Surprisingly enough, I was able to hold myself together pretty well the entire time — maybe because all my tears from the previous night washed away most of my emotions. When I escaped from the crowd for a little bit and stood in the water looking into where the ocean meets the sky, I thought of what happened back in late March, how I dealt with it, all the things that have happened since then, the goals I have set for myself, decisions I have made to meet my goals, roadblocks I have overcome, and things I have learned in the past five months. All of a sudden I wanted to write again. It’s not the time yet for another 3000-word article, but I do want to write down five of the most important decisions I made in the past five months. This way if I am ever lost in the future, or if I wonder which way to take at a crossroads, I can come back to read and remind myself of the promises I made.
1. Be professional
I think now I am old enough to draw the line between friends and colleagues. This is a thought that I have been slowly developing since I was a CA at Northwestern, and now I am making it official. During my entire first year as a CA, in my mind, I pretty much treated everyone on my staff as coworkers. For example, as much as I love working and spending time with Will, I have only considered him as an awesome and supportive colleague. It wasn’t until the second year when we were split up into two different buildings and both started to apply to graduate schools did I start looking at him as a “friend.” I got a lot of inspiration from Tiffany and Ben, and they were mentors that I really looked up to, but again, my heart didn’t open up to them as friends until the end of my senior year. Same with Mike and Tori, who I have a lot of respect for. My fellow staff members knew about my passion for chemistry, my involvement with various things on campus, my aspirations for my future, and of course, my work style, but I didn’t start sharing my personal life and things that are not related to school until our relationship as coworkers almost ended. I have considered them to be my coworkers for almost two years, and I realized that when I maintain a more professional relationship with them, it was a lot easier to work together, solve problems, and make confrontation (although this didn’t happen often). After we graduated, the five of them have been living in my heart as some of my dearest friends from Northwestern.
While in college, the line between friends and colleagues was a little more blurry because at a younger age, it was naturally more difficult to differentiate the two when we spent so much time together (and even lived in the same building). The dynamic in graduate school is very different — it is still called “school,” but in my mind, it is more like a workplace. My labmates (and perhaps many of my classmates, too) are my coworkers, and just like what Nat told me three months ago, being professional with coworkers is very important. This doesn’t mean that I am going to isolate myself from my coworkers or be mean to them. In fact, as part of professionalism, I am still trying to be friendly, supportive, reliable, and helpful when they need me, and not to cause troubles for anyone. However, I am making a conscious effort to keep my personal life out of my lab. After all, I don’t know what situations I will be dealing with in the future, and it will just be a lot easier for everyone if I can keep everything professional. (I recently noticed how small my department is and how fast things go around. I just cannot bear the thought of everyone knowing things about my personal life, and how things might be used against me one day.) This is the attitude I hope to have when I enter the professional world, so I should be practicing it now.
2. Be grateful
I have always considered myself as a lucky girl, and I thank life for everything it has given me. I was not born with the most talents and gifts, but enough to get me to where I am at right now. My family is not too well-off and we’ve gone through some very hard times, but growing up, I never felt that I lack anything. Most importantly, my parents and brother are wisest, kindest, and the most supportive people I could ever ask for. Further, life has sent me angels at various points — when I am doing well, there will be people there to remind me to stay humble and that I can always do better; when I am struggling hard, there will be people who encourage me, inspire me, and pull me out of the mud. Some of them are still with me, most of them are not, but what they have brought into my life have stayed. Life doesn’t challenge me because it wants to be mean, but because it wants to give me the opportunity to grow stronger and more mature. In the past, it has proven itself multiple times that it knows what is the best for me, perhaps even better than I do, although sometimes I had a hard time telling it at the moment. It is even more difficult to appreciate life’s arrangements when it dumps many things on me all at once (just like last week), and I will need others (most of the time my mom) to remind me of the good situation that I am in, and how I should trust life’s judgement because it has proven itself right so many times. Now what I need to learn is to remind myself to still be grateful even when things are not in my favor, and think of how I can turn it into a positive situation.
3. Trust my gut
Before I left Northwestern, I told Dan Feld that I was worried whether I would survive outside of the “Northwestern bubble” because I felt like the Meade lab, as well as all my friends at Northwestern, had been sheltering me really well — I almost never met any “bad” person during all four years of college. There were people that I’d rather not have in my life, but I was able to avoid them enough for them to cause any serious harm. I was scared that once I left the kind people who have been protecting me, I might not be able to deal with whatever is out there.
“Just trust your gut.”
“But I don’t have one.”
“Yes you do. You are pretty good at surrounding yourself with good people. In fact, most of the time you are the person that is sheltering yourself. Not us.”
I didn’t quite believe Dan back then. I still thought I just happened to be really lucky and only met good, kind-hearted people. After I came to Stanford, there were a few times when my intuition strangely told me that I should avoid certain things and people. I use the word “strangely” because there really wasn’t any justification behind the instinct — it was just a feeling. I even tried to rationalize things and told myself that deep down people are born to be kind unless they are proven to be otherwise. It turned out that I should have trusted my gut feeling. This doesn’t come that naturally to me because I am used to being rational and practical, and thinking through everything logically before I make decisions. However, I have slowly come to the the realization that there are things in this world that simply cannot be explained by logic, and sometimes I really do have to trust my gut. This became clearer after I read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” In the past I have been relying very heavily on my “System 2,” and now I need to start learning how to use “System 1” as a complement. After a year into graduate school, I have noticed that many things that Dan Feld said to me, often casually, are the brutal truth. I wish I had realized this earlier, but it’s not too late to learn to trust my gut — if my gut says to stay away, I stay away.
4. Push myself out of my comfort zone (especially physically)
I have less trouble doing this intellectually — I enjoy trying to learn new things, getting involved in new activities, and taking on new responsibilities. However, I never tried really hard to push myself out of my comfort zone physically until this past year because I am scared of height, injury, blood, and I hate physical pain, even though I had to deal with a lot of it in the past. Growing up, I also know that I was born with a lot of physical limits, and I often struggled very hard and could not even make the average. I forgot when I first started to try pushing my physical limits — perhaps when I started to extend my running time and distance little by little. 10 years ago, I could barely finish running half a mile. When I went to Northwestern, I started to run a little more because it was an easy and convenient workout, and the trail along the lake was absolutely gorgeous (although sometimes super windy). I did not do it very systematically because it was too cold to run outside 6 months out of the year, and I was not a fan of treadmills. After four years of on-and-off, I had no problem doing 3-4k, and 5k on a good day. After I came to Stanford, I started to run more because it is nice outside all year round. Now I run 5 miles three times a week with ease, and it feels good to compare where I am at right now with where I was 10 years ago. Still, I cannot see myself doing a half Marathon or a Marathon because I don’t want to injure myself trying too hard to break the physical bottleneck, but I will continue to extend my running time and distance until I can’t go any further.
Surprisingly, I also picked up rock climbing at the beginning of the summer. Six months ago, if someone had asked me what new activity I would like to pick up, rock climbing would have been the last thing — I am extremely scared of height and falling, have no upper body strength, and don’t have the natural built for a good climber. Thankfully, Callisto gave me the first push and has been extremely kind and patient about teaching me how to climb (and dealing with me screaming on the wall about how I am going to fall and die. I still haven’t conquered my fear for height yet — every time I look down, my hands would often start shaking and that is detrimental to whether I could finish a route smoothly or not. Also, I still think being let down from the top after I finish a route is one of the most dreadful things in the world. However, I think I have slowly fallen in love with climbing — although I am still scared all the time and have very little strength, the excitement of reaching the top rock is beyond description. Further, after thinking about complicated chemistry all day, it feels good to focus intensively on a simple task such as grabbing the next rock. I still think climbing is very difficult and I don’t know how far I can go, but I have seen myself improved since my first day at the wall, and I hope I will continue with it.
When I am pushing myself harder physically, I also become more willing to push myself harder mentally and intellectually — I guess it is a development of character and lifestyle. Also, I noticed that the number of times that I fall sick has decreased significantly since I started graduate school. Most people are lucky enough to take their health for granted. For me, unfortunately, health is something that I have to work for, and I probably cherish it more than a lot of people. I am thankful that the work has become more systematic and enjoyable, and I hope I will be able to keep it up.
5. Give up the standard “social” life
This is very different from giving up my personal life. In fact, I am giving up the standard social life so that I will have enough time for my personal life. As a chemistry PhD student, I spend most of my time on research, and I dedicate the majority of my remaining time to StartX. Usually, after a long day of working on many different things, the only person I want to spend time with is myself — I need my personal time and space to recharge. At the beginning of July, Dan Feld had to remind me that I only have 24 hours a day, so I did a calculation on how I have been allocating all my time. It turns out that after taking out the time for work, sleep, and chores such as cooking, cleaning, and grocery shopping every week, I really don’t have that much time left. I am committing a certain amount of time to running, hiking, and climbing with my friends as well, so the rest of my “free” time becomes more precious.
I spend a good amount of it with myself reading or doing other things that I enjoy doing by myself, and I don’t really have that much extra time and energy to spare for other things or people. (That being said, if I am still trying to make time for you, that means I really do care about you. A lot.) That’s why I’m giving up the social life — I stopped going to social gatherings and hanging out with people that I don’t bond as strongly with. I am giving up my social life so that I can have a more enriched personal life, and to be honest, the prevalent form of “social” here is not really my style. I don’t need it, I don’t want it, and I am keeping my personal life away from it. (I started to count chemistry BBQs and social hours as part of my work life.) I think this is a part of growing up — we have less and less time, and we need to make decisions to make the best out of our limited time. The choice I made is to give up the standard social life and just maintain the fewer, deeper bonds I have with people — I am not anti-social, I am just selective.
If we do see each other again in the future, I hope we will both have made positive progress in life by that time; if we don’t, I hope we can eventually see each other shining like stars from afar.
I don’t know which case scenario will happen and when it will happen, but I am going to keep pushing myself forward so that either way, I will be able to keep my words — I don’t break promises.