We are barely nine days into our summer of research, and this blog has already been rewritten three times.
On the one hand, it could be said that I have the easier of tasks; my surname, comfortably close to the beginning of the alphabet, grants me the grace of needing to reflect on just a week and a half of my research experience, instead of having to metabolise six weeks or seven or, god forbid, all three months of this uncommonly restless summer.
Pick a point of friction. Think about it. Write about it. Unreliable Scottish weather be my witness; I have tried.
Three times.
And each adjoining day has shifted my mind so far off my original mark that I have had to scrap the lot of them.
So, in the interest of not feeling misrepresented by my own writing immediately after it is preserved for eternity on a public platform, I have given up and have decided instead to pay attention to those two constants: stress and change.
Those, at least, have, since the end of April, been ever-present.
Externally, with the student body dispersing and the weather cooling and independent study turning into full-time research. Internally, as complex procedures and molecular mechanisms pocked with terminology – genes, proteins, neural pathways, what have you – become something that is performed and spoken on with greater ease. The shifting dartboard of difficulties:‘How do I coordinate my work around midweek Laidlaw sessions?’ ‘Will I contaminate this plasmid?’ ‘Is making a fool of myself at all avoidable?’ ‘How do I read a sentence that is only 50 percent the English language?’
And ever since I have started paying closer attention to the change that has been haunting my attitude (and making me rewrite the first three drafts of my blog post), I have noticed that, far from being driven by day-to-day differences in tasks and responsibilities, everything that bothers me appears much more related to fundamental aspects of…well. Myself.
The slow-moving research, the endless trawling through papers, the mental and social workload, these are all things that can be compensated for by curiosity. The true challenge of this programme – of anything that makes you confront the limits of what you believe you can achieve – seems to me to lie in where it forces a confrontation between two distinct but necessarily overlapping sides of yourself.
The first: the vision of who you want to be.
The second: the caricature of who you are.
I will give you an example. The draft that preceded this one focused on the difficulties that I experience communicating information to a general audience. The idea for it grew from the anxiety I felt preparing for a presentation for my supervisor’s research team’s journal club. Lo and behold, what happened? Upon the trial run that I and the other summer student devised (so that if we were to fall on our faces, it would be then), she and I both presented our respective sections clearly and coherently, and that was that.
Or, in a similar, but opposite, vein: lab techniques. Practicing sterile technique, I confess, awakens nothing in me but a naïve, unhelpful calm that I have to actively dispel by reminding myself of the high (cough, monetary, cough) stakes. This is despite the fact that, in recent years, I have made significantly more mistakes in these technically and attentionally challenging environments than in public speaking.
And there it is, isn’t it? Therein hides the seed of distortion.
When we are pressed, some part of us, the wariest side that holds the oldest memories, looks back to what it remembers as the most fundamental version of "Me" and uses that person as a meter for damage control. I have never been admonished for my fine motor skills. Conversely, I am not passable at public speaking because I possess a natural affinity for it, but because I have trained myself to be so.
Learning new skills and swerving around figurative potholes during the actual research is only half the struggle.
Changing your own mind about who you are (and distributing stress hormones in a way that does not make you your own worst enemy) appears, at least in my case, to make up the rest.