My first newsletter was written on the premise that leaving my job in biotech for the great unknown would be the perfect ending to the cautionary tale that I’ve been writing. I had convinced myself that this — diving straight into the icy sea of uncertainty— was the only honorable ending to my tortuous tale. It certainly would be— if my story was a nice, neat work of unlivable fiction. As soon as I started living it, I realized it might make for a dramatic conclusion, but a shitty actual life.
Standing on the edge, I poured over my journals (250,000+ words) in an honest attempt to understand the choices I’ve been making since my transition from academia to biotech. I found that being honest about what I want wasn’t the problem: it was seeing that what I wanted was fiction. I thought I was writing a memoir, and the truth is I was writing a fairy tale.
I found that my training as a scientist, writing objective and procedural statements, contrasts sharply with my disposition. The critiques on my grants and journal articles were often that my language was “too flowery”. I had to restrain myself throughout my career to write myriad technical procedures, objective critiques, discussions, code, and documentation, but honestly, I’ve wanted to write the “flowery” things all along.
I always had a romanticized view of myself as an academic. I imagined myself wandering around campus, energizing students & colleagues, grazing on reciprocal energy, acquiring and sharing new knowledge every single day. In college, I was certain I wanted to be a professor, and I might be able to get there if I went to grad school. In grad school, I saw that research and grants were the scaffolding on which the dream was built. So, I abandoned the campus bookstores and lecture halls for lab benches and solitary grant writing. I slowly realized that my dream wasn’t ever founded in the reality of an academic career. It might have been a sliver of the truth, but an academic career was full of fast-paced sprints in a long marathon - there really wasn’t much wandering or romance at all.
College helped me create my MacGuffin: if I could just acquire enough training, I’d rise up to take my place in the flower-covered Ivory Tower. Academics didn’t belong on the ground, so there had to be a safe niche in the clouds. Professors probably holed themselves up there with papers and ideas, comfortably insulated from the harsh, idea-killing world. Certainly, my fellow scientists and academics needed to be around like-minded refugees to birth knowledge in a safe environment, free from bias or malice. I looked up imagining collaboration for the sake of human progress, all Locke and no Hobbes! Mentors looked to be naturally available and since money isn’t the object, they would be free from partiality or appetite. Tenure seemed a perfect mechanism to protect those who bravely go against the grain, and winning that prize granted job security for the rest of your career. I wrote The Tower as a creative altrusitic mecca, free from the rigamarole of the ground.
In grad school, my story read like a technical manual for how to make a treacherous ascent. Nobody just rose up with ease. We all clawed and some stole their way into the tower. We had to get there, because we’d convinced ourselves that we had no place on the ground amongst the common folk. The rarefied air of The Tower wasn’t available to just anyone, you had to fight for your position. You had create a niche as a foothold for the climb and defend it, because scavengers would "scoop" your data and knock you off. Mentors weren’t the heros I’d written in my mind, free from the need for power or status. Exploitation isn’t always about money; notoriety is a currency. They’d pull viable students and post-docs up the tower, making marks and building up their own corner of the tower. There wasn’t much effort to help ones that couldn’t carve their own niche because to stay in the tower, academics must build strong armies to defend and grow their legacies. Tenure isn’t an impenetrable fortress, and there are things worse than being flung from The Tower. Grad students and post-docs are discouraged from putting roots down for at least a decade, and even then job security was for the fittest or those with the best footholds and resources. The Ivory Tower might have been flowery, but you had to scale the vines and thorns for the slight possibility that you might reach the top and get your chance to build those technical manuals as your legacy.
The critique of my ‘flowery’ language is evidence of the palpable disdain for aesthetics within academic science. We strive for accuracy and precision in our language, but even the word ‘flowery’ is an example of how we might be able to use unconventional language to convey a message. A utilitarian appearance was essential to be taken seriously, although academics would hate to admit aesthetics mean anything at all. However, they might admit that anyone who looked too cute was certainly more concerned with selling over creating knowledge. Time spent blowdrying your hair or winging eyeliner was wasted time that could have been spent focused on your experiments or writing. What’s more, anyone who looked too attractive certainly achieved their success because of it. There’s evidence to support this, so it must be true. Some would enact their own form of punitive justice to make up for all the privileges beautiful people surely had. We were taught to ignore salespeople or anyone who “wasted” time with small talk or “getting to know you” type conversations and no data. They were inevitably trying to schmooze you for their benefit. Appearances matter in the Ivory Tower, but in exactly the opposite way that they matter on the ground.
This fairy tale isn’t about beautiful princesses, but there is a hero’s quest for pure knowledge. Practical application of knowledge was enough to breach the fourth wall. We didn’t worry too much about our theories and manuals holding up outside of the cradle of The Tower — the goal was building a mountain of knowledge in The Tower. We were discouraged from thinking too much about translational or interdisciplinary science as there was an infinite amount of work to do within our niches. Yet we used words like translational in grant applications as tactics to sell our science to outside funding agencies. Opposing camps argued about whether “The research should sell itself” or “You have to sell your research”, but both camps hated sales outside of The Tower. If we had to sell, it was a necessary evil to continue funding our life in The Tower. Anything outside was exploitation of pure knowledge, and therefore perverse. The once flower-covered Ivory Tower looked more and more stark the closer I got to the top.
Seeing The Tower up close, I let go rather suddenly. By then, my identity as a climbing academic was underneath new, heavy layers like wife and mother. I had been coaxed to keep climbing with the idea that “The cream will rise to the top”, and since I didn’t rise up, I deduced that I must be the chaff and not the wheat. Surely, I lost my footing because I carried too much emphasis on beauty, relationships, and practicality in the dogged pursuit of raw knowledge.
Academics aren’t immune to heuristics or plot devices. In fact, they might be more likely to fall victim to the power of mental shortcuts and narratives than those on the ground. In their haste, they depend heavily on ‘quick and dirty’ narratives to describe the world around them, keeping the focus on climbing. They know that taking shortcuts in their experimental footholds is a sure-fire way to lose ground, yet they’re willing to take shortcuts on what they carry with them up the tower. Some will cut loose the baggage of dealing with mental health, dating, marriage, children, home-buying, and hobbies to lighten their load. Academics may have access to a great deal of knowledge from The Tower itself, but most of that access is squandered in the direct, focused pursuit of a prescribed path up the Tower. The idea that the university itself is the best environment for knowledge creation is itself an assumption that few academics explore. Upon reaching the top of The Tower, many academics have lost the very clothes on their backs, and are left naked with only their expertise.
I knew I needed to let go, but falling from The Tower didn’t leave me unscathed. My inner narrator punished the protagonist for leaving the Righteous Path. Our hero had abandoned the noble pursuit of basic knowledge creation, falling back into a cushy job, flowery with aesthetic pleasure, soft skills, and time-wasting relationships in the Land of Practical Applications. It seemed fitting that she should at least be condemned to look back and see The Tower the way it existed before her climb. For years, I fought off the illusion, wounding myself with things I’d been told on the climb. The narrator loved to jab me when things were going well,
Is this what you really want: a “cushy job”? I thought you wanted a noble career.
and use the tough times as fuel to convince me that I should abandon this shameful lavish life.
This is a waste of your time. No one respects a sell-out.
The money I made was a Red Herring, and the narrator knew it was an easy way to throw me off. I battled my own guilt in Switzerland, France, Mexico, Hawaii, Alaska, Montana, Boston, Florida, Texas, California — everywhere. I wrestled with my own guilt at every turn, stepping over beautiful things that I’d been learning and creating all along.
The Tower was behind me, but on this long journey, it seemed to rebuild itself over and over in my mind. What if I’d climbed up this way? What if we rebuilt The Tower? Could the ground be a better place to build knowledge? What is it about the Tower that I really wanted? I was both Neo and Morpheus, Red-Pilling myself, questioning my reality.
Like all good stories, it isn’t until the hero is on the edge, that they find the strength to overcome. I reached my limit and was about to resign from my post. The narrator was winning, but I paused to rest instead of quitting just yet.
We all need a nice patch of certainty to rest our minds on our journey. The only patch of certainty I have found is in the present moment. The past is fictional storage subject to corruption, and the future is even less certain. All I can rely on is this moment. At this moment, I have a career where I wander around campuses, energizing academics and clinicians, grazing on reciprocal energy, acquiring and sharing new knowledge every single day. At this moment, the certainty that I’ve found is that I have always been an academic. The Tower isn’t what makes an academic - it’s The Climb.
Once I stopped wrestling with my guilt and the past, I realized that I had never stopped climbing.
I knew that The Tower never existed the way I imagined it… Towers have a funny way of crashing down like that.
I thought giving up my career would be a perfectly poignant ending to my story, but on the second draft, I’ve decided to rewrite the finale. I’m keeping the career, changing it up a bit, but mostly reframing my own perceptions. I’ll still battle the narrator on a daily basis. I’m not free from responsibility or tedium, but I wouldn’t be if I quit this career or stayed in The Tower. The Climb is kind of ugly when you compare it to The Tower from my imagination, but then again The Tower, in reality, is just as ugly. No matter where I go, I have to remember I am predisposed to the flowery. The Climb doesn’t end here but this IS the happiest possible ending.
My story is neither fairy tale nor technical manual, but a beautiful life that I’m lucky to live.
I came up in the arts rather than the sciences, but they hate floweriness in the arts too, perhaps all the more because they know the sciences are constantly accusing them of it. My style of thinking relies heavily on finding analogies, connecting everything to everything else, colouring outside the lines, looking for Big Ideas rather than 100% Accurate Ones - basically what Nietzsche called the "gay science" - and that's always going to be smacked down as gibberish or word salad in the college context. (Foucault's lack of rigour seems to be fine for some reason.) Very politically constricted too, obviously. I believe good work is still being done in the liberal arts, but I can't stomach doing any of it myself.
Great, well-written post. I left academia five years ago because I felt I'd never be able to express myself there, and I'm still struggling to find my niche now. Of course there's no objective or eternal right or wrong in these situations, only what's right or wrong for the individual from moment to moment. Sounds like you're doing the right thing for yourself in this moment.