A note on being nice to myself
It’s about time
In the spirit of New Year Resolutions being conjured and broadcasted in abundance, I would like to announce that I, too, have a New Year Resolution, which is:
Be nice to myself.
To my old friends back at home in Vietnam who knew the old me (read: a bona fide workaholics): it’s not what you are thinking. If what you’re thinking is: “Finally, she’ll stop working so hard and make all of us look like lazy bums. Praise all the gods!”, I am (not) sorry, it is not what I mean by “being nice to myself.”
That is because, I already stopped working so hard. Do you recall that skinny girl who worked non-stop in all the projects that could possibly existed; who slept 4 hours a day and still found that alright; who commuted around and out of town and worked on her commute, too; who, finding that her schedule was not adequately packed, filled it up with volunteering, learning Spanish, and dancing? Well, good news, she’s not here. Right now, her day starts at 1 PM and consists of mostly internet browsing and leisure reading. Her major physical activity is playing with her cat in sessions, during which she stands still and waves a string around for the cat to chase.
Are you surprised? I am. I am amazed to see the once self-motivated me deteriorates into this whinny person living in a mental rut. I didn’t turn lazy overnight: the process was so gradual that I was surprised seeing the difference between the input me and the output me. What could possibly make such a change?
Let’s consider me in the past. She worked hard, and she willingly chose to do so. No one made her take on projects. No one asked her to cajole her team(s). No one told her to study on the side to apply for some scholarship some day. No one demanded that she must take Spanish, dance, or volunteer work. She did all of these because she wanted to. That desire made most things possible. She found the projects/hobbies important enough to fit into her schedule. She found her progress fulfilling enough to keep take more steps. There was no deadline, so there was no procrastination. There was no boss telling her what to do. Everything she did, it was entirely her choice.
It started to change when I started my graduate study in the U.S. I was still that hardworking, self-driven youngster at first. I remembered working in the lab until midnight on a regular basis. Sometimes, my labmates came up to the lab on a Sunday evening — they saw that the lights were on and thought someone forgot to turn them off — and found me working there. I went to dance classes almost every night. I had a volunteer project. I took drawing classes. I spent time with friends, either in a bar or on skype, every week. My academic classes went well, too. I got 3 A’s and a B for the first semester — not bad. I didn’t feel off balance, not even a little bit.
Then the research project started to go off track. Later, I learned that it was not the right project for me, and that the boss was putting the responsibility on my “lack of maturity”, as he phrased it. But I only realized that after I had left that lab. Before that, though, I did all I could to make it work. I tried working harder. I tried cutting off time for other parts of my life: fun, hobbies, friends. Meanwhile, my motivation to work and to enjoy working started to go downhill.
Needless to say, I didn’t hold that job for much longer. I changed lab, but — behold, big mistake — not to one I would actually want to work in. My priority at the time was to stay in graduate school and to finish this PhD degree. I had put so much time and work into this, I hated seeing it go to waste. Besides, I hadn’t realized what I really wanted to do, so anything would do. I shut my eyes, covered my ears, and held my breath. I dived into another not-for-me project.
A thing about PhD projects: they are long, hard, life-sucking beasts. They are not the sort of things you could wrestle for five to eight years without good reasons. They are often not even the paying gig — many/most graduate students have to teach for their tuition and stipend. Your coworkers are present to mostly make you feel guilty for not working as hard as they do. And no one, other than yourself, tracks your progress in a meaningful way. “Progress meetings” mostly scare you into faking up some progress, or scare you away from the graduate program altogether. You are likely to be sole person who can make it work, this PhD project thing. It requires enormous self motivation and discipline. You ought to be able to tolerate and approve your project, at least partly. Or, you ought to believe that you want/need this PhD enough to hold your nose and plow through a project you don’t even like.
I had neither. I got really tired with studying (what I considered) trivial subjects that simply popped out during previous experiments and therefore were the next logical things to do. They were usually a couple light years from being applicable, yet, in grant proposals, they were advertised as if they were the first cousin with a cure for all cancers or world hunger. I got fed up with the “feed the world” cliché slogan that all plant scientists used without blinking their eyes. And while my heart was sulking at the grim reality because she didn’t get to do what she was into, my brain helped by constantly asking “Do I really need this PhD? If not, what am I doing this for? To fancify my existence by becoming Dr. Ngo? To prove that I, being such an excellent individual, of course, can do it?” Eventually, the heart and the mind unionized and got me out of the miserable PhD project.
Meanwhile, my motivation to work and to enjoy working kept going downhill.
At this point, I had grown distant from my friends. I had stopped having hobbies. I made a couple of feeble attempts to get back to dancing, but they didn’t last long. Then depression hit. When I came out of it, I looked at my mind and felt like this:
Wiped out.
I’m slowly building myself back up. I’m now working on a project that I deem worthy, and it’s not even for a PhD — it’s for an Master’s, or a token of acknowledgement that I have been working here. I have an adviser who cares about me (she’s retired, and she doesn’t have a grant committee she must please with pompous promises.) My dear husband keeps a keen eye on me. I’m getting back in touch with my friends and making a point of spending time with them. I start looking into dance classes.
Do you know that after a knee replacement surgery, the patient usually do physical rehab to slowly restore the leg’s normal movement? I probably just had a mind surgery, and I’m doing rehab to slowly restore my normal self.
But don’t worry, this doesn’t mean I will work my ass off and sleep 4 hours a day AND enjoy that kind of life again. I only want to find the joy to work, or to have hobbies, or to be in touch with the people whom I care about. I want to relearn how to enjoy it. I want to enjoy my life. And that, my friend, is what I mean by this:
Be nice to myself
To elaborate: If I work, that is because I enjoy working, not because I am forced to do so and I have no choice. If I do something else, that is because I enjoy that particular activity, it being reading or dancing or writing or texting a friend, not because I am procrastinating on something else that I find unpleasant (read: work.) I don’t want to be overwhelmed by that sense of guilt and obligation anymore. I want to feel joy in every thing I do, because it is me who chooses to do it.
What do you choose to enjoy this year?
Thanks for reading! Do you like it? If you do, would you hit the green heart below?
