Disclaimer: this is a fairly personal/honest entry and some of the thoughts and behaviours I discuss in this are not exactly healthy, but I am working on it.
If you came here looking for scandalous confessions of the effervescent parties I attended in university, well unfortunately you’ve come to the wrong place (but if you really care to imagine it, just picture 30 drunk, quirky physics students cramped in my apartment, going nuts over a light-up Newton’s cradle or arguing over topological properties of pants). In actuality, the “hangover” I refer to is merely a metaphor for the confusion and strange emptiness I’ve been feeling the past few months since I graduated. Not to worry – I don’t feel as though this is permanent, and it certainly isn’t unexpected. Perhaps in a world without a pandemic I wouldn’t have struggled with this at all. I just hope that in sharing this I may be able to relate to others who are feeling the same right now, or perhaps outline it for students in competitive programs who are graduating in the near future and may be worried about leaving academia. Anyway, let’s dive in. A big revelation occurred to me earlier this week when my coworker said this:
“I don’t care what you do at your job, I only care about what you do outside of your job. I care about what makes you a real person”
When he said this, I believe his intentions were to be kind and relatable. However, it actually made me feel a huge sense of dread. In summary: I don’t want to live in a reality where my job isn’t a fundamental part of who I am. I don’t even think I would know how to separate myself from it.
For the past 5 years at school, there was no life outside of my “job”. My “job” as a student was to care about physics, and it was largely the only thing I did – being a student was what made me a person. Every single facet of my life took a backseat to being a student. I had to schedule (and reschedule) family-time, sleep, grocery shopping, everything. Every “hole” in my schedule was not free-time or a lack of things to do, it was study time. It was school. A 2-hour window on a Sunday afternoon between grocery shopping and before going to my aunt’s house meant 2 more hours to work on a problem that I spent the entire week trying to solve – it was critical. Some days I’d wake up at 5am to go work as a barista at Starbucks until my shift ended at 11 – which meant 17 hours left in the day until it was 4am to finish my physics lab. I’d be lying to you if I said that I spent every single hour doing physics work every day (I didn’t) but the mentality was that every hour was meant for physics work – so every hour I took as a break brought along an extreme sense of guilt. To make matters more extreme, all of my friends in Toronto were in the same program as me with the same goals and ambitions. I love them to death and I could have never done any of this without them – but my biggest support system was made up of people who struggled with the exact same issues that I did. It got suffocating. It was hard, it was unhealthy – but it made me feel important. This life gave me a sense of purpose. Who was I as a person? I was a student. I learned things. There was little life outside of this.
To be clear, I did have a personality outside of being a student. I like knitting and videogames. I love learning about the Lord of the Rings universe and writing songs. But all of this took a backseat to being a student. In my final year I actually scheduled 3 hours on Saturday nights from 7-10pm to do these things. I remember being so excited to finally graduate because I could do all of these things without guilt, anytime I wanted after work. Life would be fun again! In reality, it hasn’t been such a smooth transition.
Let me preface this next part by asserting that I love my job and I am so excited for the future. I would not have taken this job and left academia if I ever thought that it was not the right decision for me, and I spent 8 months thinking about this decision. I am confident that this is the best possible place for me to be right now, but with that being said – there is a lot that I need to get used to.
Most of my frustrations stem from this: work ends at the end of the day. There is a time when I’m expected to be at work and engaged in work, but there’s also a time where I’m expected to go home and work is over. I’m not used to that, I don’t like it. My coworkers have whole other worlds that they live in outside of work – families, projects, passions. I’m in this frustrating place where I feel like my job should be my whole life because that’s what I’m used to, and it’s not. What’s even worse is that I want it to be my whole life and I want it to be the thing that gives me purpose; I want my job to be my passion and all-encompassing, nonstop, and difficult. Though in reality, I’m expected to go home to what is supposed to be my “real life” and do the things outside of work that my coworker says “make me a real person”. It’s complicated to articulate exactly how this makes me feel – I suppose frustrated and misunderstood would be two good ways of putting it. I feel like a distressed teenager listening to My Chemical Romance telling their mom that she “wouldn’t get it”.
Right now when I picture the rest of my life and who I’ll be – I don’t think of having a family, travelling, or what I want my house to look like. I only think of my job. I want to be a battery scientist, I want to be an engineering physicist, I want to be so many cool things – but it’s all career related. Perhaps it’s because I’m young and don’t have anything else to really “picture” yet. I think a lot of people, my coworker included, would view this as “weird”, “unhealthy”, or something that will change – perhaps it is all of these things, but I kinda don’t want it to change. I always want my job to be the most important part of my life alongside family. My job is my identity and who I am, so why shouldn’t it be the most important? Is this truly what university taught me? I don’t know. In highschool I was able to go home and be happy playing videogames or watching movies – but now I stay late at work trying to learn as much as I can before going home where I wait for work to start again. I feel like this “university hangover” is confusing and a lot less freeing than I anticipated. Is this what university was supposed to prepare me for? Is it normal for me to feel like some kind of work-robot? Who knows. Ultimately, I’m worried that these other “things” won’t ever make me feel a sense of purpose like work/school does. Now I’m supposed to just stop work at the end of the day and it kinda feels like I stop having purpose.
All that being said, I know as I establish myself in this new town and job that my life will change and perhaps my job won’t be all that I am. “Things” outside of work will make me feel like a “real person”. Perhaps they will also give me purpose. I also hope to come to terms a with this and learn how to be happy with a reality where my job isn’t my whole life, because I don’t think I’m quite there yet. For now, I’ll put all this energy I have towards my job and learning as much as I can, and hope for the best!
(July 27th, 2020)
astronomine 