Life filters

As a naturally social person, its been very hard enduring the abandonment and ostracism of the last two years. I’ve gone from a very confident social individual to the women in lab meetings so scared to say anything that I would pinch my lips together holding back.

Now, after working with my Dept. head to carefully get myself finished up and out of the current lab with out risk to my project, publication and NIH fellowship (essentially I fired my PI and am finishing my work in another lab and writing my paper and dissertation), I feel that I’m starting to come back.

I remember why friends are so important....they are critical distractors to the daily bullshit. Real friends can and will be brutally honest with you and more importantly, they help us find a way to laugh and stop taking it out on my poor husband. Friends are our filters of life. Without them, life becomes very contaminated and stinky (yes, I'm a dork!).

Let’s be real. How many of the people who really care about me gives a fuck that I was cheated out of proper authorship? How many people will ever read my paper? Well, professionally that matters and hopefully when I search my name in PubMed I will see lots of other papers cite mine....but that will never replace the need to be apart of something. To share how excited I am that an experiment WORKED after 3 months of trouble shooting. If alone, who do I tell about Ms. Brown N’s latest antics? Or about Dr. Ass Hole’s insistence that I don’t understand how restrictions enzymes work because I proposed doing a digest, DNA hybridization technique to look for genomic alterations....only to read about it done by another lab later....asshole....

Ha, in the grad scheme of things, I think I’m pretty good at what I do and what I can do. I have ideas and read about similar approaches and results later. This has only helped me build my mental confidence.

If I could only act this way in person, at the right moment, at the time its happening......

I’m working on it.