Two days later, I give my virtual presentation to the lab in Melbourne. Tegan introduces me, and I get some interesting questions from the rest of the group, and before I finish the call, I get invited to an official job interview. As I exit the meeting, I already know I’ll cancel it.
I don’t want to move to Australia. Despite what I told Karo, I don’t want this to be the only way.
It’s midnight when the call ends, and I begin pacing around in my office, limbs tense and brain swirling with indecision. A postdoc in Rosanna’s lab with Lewis’s money or moving all the way to Melbourne on my own terms.
None of the options feel right. In the past, whenever I reached the end of a contract, I usually had the next opportunity lined up; a new open position at a lab or a successful grant project. The thought of moving halfway across the world wouldn’t have even made me blink, whereas now it overwhelms me with a fresh burst of anxiety.
I know I need to make a decision soon.
Unsure how else to tackle my problem, I stop in front of my whiteboard, which is scribbled dark with crossed-out revision points from my last paper. I wipe it clean.
For about half of my life, I’ve been trained to look objectively at my experiments. Consider all questions and biases, shift my perspective, and let the data drive me. So, it’s no surprise that after taking stock of my current life, I realize that something needs to change.
I thought I’d done the right thing after breaking up with Jacob five years ago. When my heart felt like one giant bruise, I pushed back all the way. I decided I’d work tirelessly and pour everything into reaching my goal.
Get tenure and make a difference with my research. No matter what.
But I’ve run out of breath in my blind sprint toward that goal, and it’s gotten pretty lonely here, too. I’ve lost track of myself, again, except this time I only have myself to blame. I’ve pushed people away and put everything else—happiness, stability, whatever else I wanted—on the back burner, convinced it would pay off when I finally reached the finish line. My self-worth is so dependent on work that any major setback—a grant rejection, learning how much better Jacob did for himself—felt like a demonstration of what an absolute failure I was, and pushed me to lose control.
After scribbling all of this onto my board, I’m still not closer to finding a solution for what to do next. But there’ssomeone, I remember, who might provide me with a sense of direction. Someone who’s arrived at a point in her career she seems happy with, someone who offered that we could talk.
Despite the late hour here, it’s early evening on the East Coast, so I hunt for the Sawyer’s program on my messy desk and find Vivienne’s number on the last page.
“Frances,” she greets me happily when I tell her who’s on the line. “So nice of you to call.”
I only manage a little bit of small talk before the reason I’m actually calling tumbles out of me. “What did you mean when you said you didn’t change your mind? Back on that last day of the Sawyer’s? We were talking about ambition, and…”
“… how hard it can be to balance that. Yes, I remember.”
“Which is something I’ve been failing at, big-time. So, it resonated, and it stuck. And confused me, because, um, I mean…” I search for a way to say it politely. “Jacob is your fiancéandyour boss, isn’t he?”
On the other end, Vivienne makes a little noise of disbelief. “He’s not—though I can certainly see how it would seem that way because he handles all the politics and leadership nonsense. But no, he’s not my boss and has never been,” she continues, which I’m grateful for. I don’t know what to say. “It wasn’t an option for either of us. Even if that meant staying long distance until we finally got funding together at the beginning of this year. You know, we applied for a joint grant two years in a row, and they got turned down. He absolutely would’ve had the resources to hire me on money he got for another project, but we both didn’t want that for our relationship. So we tried again, and this time it worked. Now he runs the lab and manages the people, but I steer the research because that’s my specialty and… Well, it works for both of us.”
I cringe inwardly, ashamed that I made assumptions about her that would make me furious if I were in her shoes. All thistime I was worried about Jacob treating her how he’d treated me, when he seems to have learned from our relationship, like Vivienne said he had.
Maybe it’s time for me to learn from it, too.
“What would you have done if your application wouldn’t have been successful?” I ask.
“Honestly? I would’ve probably stayed in Paris, and tried for funding some other way,” Vivienne muses. “Even if long distance is horrible and it seemed silly to put ourselves through that any longer when I could’ve just worked for Jacob.”
She’s silent for a beat, and I wonder how things would’ve played out if I’d drawn such a clear line five years ago. Karo showed me that boundaries are for keeping people in your life, not to push them out. Maybe, if I’d said something earlier—if I’d given Jacob the opportunity to back off when he took over the wheel—our relationship would’ve taken a different course. I’ll never know, but Idoknow I don’t need to repeat my mistakes.
“I get it,” I say.
“I thought you would,” Vivienne replies and I can hear the smile in her voice. “Look, it wasn’t an easy decision and for a while I felt like I couldn’t find a way to make everything work that I wanted. But in the end, it’s the same as running an experiment. So often, it feels like they’re not working out—that we went wrong somewhere, made a mistake. But if you really think about it, we always get an answer. No matter how confusing the results, how unexpected, we get an answer to the question we were asking at that moment. And especially when they’re unclear, they tell us, we need to take a step back and reevaluate. It’s like shining a flashlight into the dark. If there’s nothing in our cone of light, we know not to shine there again, but move elsewhere.” After a moment of silence, she adds, “Or maybe we just need a different flashlight. A new perspective.”
I let her words sink in. Maybe it’s time for me, too, to throw out my old flashlight and try a new one.
At the Q and A event, after receiving the news about my last rejected grant, I’d told the students to put their eggs in many baskets, to find connection, and grow outside of work, because that’s how you manage the setbacks. Maybe the time has come for me to heed my own advice and learn how to look out for myself.
Therapy has helped with that. Opening up in my first two sessions was hard, but I’ve realized I don’t want to pack down so much of myself anymore, especially not for a goal I’m not sure I’ll ever reach.
What I want is to put down roots, to hammer nails into the walls of my living room and hang up pictures rich with memories, to make friends I can cook dinner with, people whose lives I can see change right in front of my eyes and not through biannual updates in nondescript conference venues. I want a life that’s hard to pack up, one that is full and grounding and confusing and messy, and very much not only about work.
I still want to make a difference, but theno matter whatneeds to go if I want to last.
Maybe I can put up boundaries. Not only for Lewis, if he’ll still have me, or for me and Karo, but for my own sake, too, so I get to have the life I want, with a career that works for me. It’s something my new therapist hinted at in our last session, but I only grasp it now. Maybe I’m not stuck with the two options I drew out on my whiteboard.
