I haven’t let myself really get in my feelings in months, but something about October brings out the best in me. I promised myself I would return to my book about experimenting with absurdism, and the past few mornings, I’ve been reading the daily reflections I wrote almost 3 years ago when I was in the absolute hardest time of my adult life. I rewrote one yesterday and read it on TikTok (vulnerability is so cringe), but when I went to do the same today, I realized that a certain depth is missing from this book. You can’t really get a feel for why I’ve veered so far off my path with a few hundred words each day. This book wants to be a memoir, but it doesn’t know how to be.
So, I let my morning pages meander where they wanted and after, I started started thinking about how I could rework this book. I figured I’d share this with you, and you’ll understand why by the end.
Here’s the original daily devotion:
October 17
“Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.”
Mark Twain
When we fall, our first instinct is to assess damage followed closely by a need to save face. We assess physical damage or spills quickly, and pick up whatever mess we’ve made, but the social and emotional damage lingers beyond any physical reminders of our failure.
No matter how many mistakes we’ve made, we all fear making more. No one goes into an endeavor hoping to miss the mark they set for themselves, but most people miss the mark by failing to see exactly what marks they’ve hit.
Quick to dismiss bad judgement as failure, we sweep up potentially helpful insights and toss them. We rush to clean up our mess, as if that will erase the fall and just how embarrassing it is to be a living fallable being.
Dig into a failure you’ve been avoiding. Set the goal of understanding why you’ve been avoiding it. What mess did you make that you were so afraid of assessing? Pay close attention to what makes you wince. The emotional and social pain is often hidden. The deeper you go into discomfort the closer you come to gaining some sort of insight. That’s the spot where good judgement is hanging on, cleaning up what you overlooked.
Not bad. But I had more to say today:
Maybe bad judgment was thinking I'd get a book deal from this without having any experience in philosophy, and mostly abandoning my experience as a scientist. Looking back 3 years later, I see this book differently… as an experiment that needs to be reworked and repeated. When I was in the lab this happened often: I'd completely botch a brand-new technique (as one does), and the very last time I did this, I gave up. I’m not sad that I did, but I was sad at the time, and now, I have a chance to glean some good judgment from it.
I dug around in my archive of 500k+ words to find the story:
It was my very first DIY gravity perfusion system. I snapped pictures of the process and was, in general, quite pleased with myself. I hung 50 ml conicals from clips at the top of the fume hood and the tubing ran down to a needle. Last week, Casey showed me how to inject mice using one hand, grabbing them by tail and letting them stretch out to grab the wire cage. At which point you’d pinch the scruff of their neck flip them over and use your pinky finger to hold their legs down. I got this.
Two little black mice sniffed around their cage. I was terrified after having only ever worked with rats, who were much nicer, but I had to get used to this, I guess. I was about to flush his circulation with formaldehyde, replacing the blood and bathing the brain to preserve the tissue. I’d slice the brain into micrometer-thick slices and stain them - all new techniques and all this just to check the location of the needle track where I had I had injected a virus yesterday. This was one step of many that was critical to perfect before moving forward with my very ambitious plan. I worked for 2 weeks on this protocol.
Gathering my courage, I snatched one of the mice by the scruff and flipped it over into the palm of my hand successfully. I tried to use my pinky to hold its other leg in place, but it kicked forcefully, especially for a leg the thickness of a toothpick. Somehow, I managed to inject him with a lethal dose of ketamine. “Special K for you bud. Enjoy it while it lasts.” I put him back in with his partner, who knew something was up. He sniffed Subject One obsessively who meandered drowsily through the cage. He started to twitch and blink a lot. I watched through a furrowed brow, retrieving him when he was mostly still. I apologized before I crucified him to the lid of a styrofoam box with anatomical pins. He jerked, and I wanted to cry, but I had to finish. I placed three more pins and sliced open his abdomen, certain I was doing this wrong, but time was crucial. I had to finish before his heart stopped beating.
This is why I never did the official killing. The person who sharpens the blade of the executioner’s ax isn’t the same as the executioner, and the coroner is a totally different person, too. I was the coroner. My labmates would toss me the head and I’d peel the brain out like shrimp from a shell using rongeurs and a scoopula. I’d done probably over a thousand, but the one time I manned the guillotine was the last. I was always scolded for letting them breathe in too much isopentane so they’d die before being decapitated.
“The blood doesn’t come out if you let the heart rate slow too much!” my boss insisted.
I just couldn’t deal with the squirming. Their large headless bodies would flop around in your hand. The absurdity of our petite lab technician holding the jumbo rats with two hands over the funnel was just the beginning. Blood would gush and squirt from their warm bodies like something from a Tarantino flick. I dropped one once. It used its hind legs to push itself from my hand, or so I thought. I’m not sure how a body without a command center could do that, but I swear it happened. '
“It was just reflexes,” they assured me but not without a playful jab, “Natasha’s too squeamish for the guillotine.” At least we were all together when we did it. One manning the killing jar, one on the guillotine/blood funnel, and one or more of cracking skulls and plopping the brains in -15C isopropanol to freeze until it looked like the gum at the center of a Blow Pop. I didn’t mind this job. It was removed from the murder, and germane to our pursuit. So, it felt fine to crack jokes. In fact, this is how we bonded as a lab. It eased the revulsion of doing fucked up things with corpses, even in the name of science. “I’m starving” someone would inevitably about an hour or two into a half-day of sacrifices. Many hands made light work, in many ways. Now, I was alone: executioner, coroner, mad scientist. Ain’t shit funny when you’re alone, killing things.
Once he was pinned in place, beating heart exposed, I ran the butterfly needle into Subject One’s left ventricle and removed the hemostatic clamp from the tubing. I wasn’t sure it was working, but the mouse twitched and writhed until liquid flooded his thorax. It started to run clear and then his heart was as blanched as mine.
These guys were small enough that I could use scissors instead of a guillotine - it doesn’t sound better, but a small consolation. I dropped the brain into a vial of formaldehyde and repeated the procedure with Subject Two (who must have smelled the blood, because he was not as cooperative as One). I felt empty and not hungry at all, but it was Fisher Friday which meant a free consolatory Blue Star donut in the atrium.
I ate my donut alone at my lab cubicle and thought about how little time I could get away with spending in the lab over the weekend. It’d have to be at least an hour on Saturday and one on Sunday. I could bring Nova on Saturday, but on Sunday I’d have to pick colonies, and I couldn’t be watching her while I did it. Toddlers and biomedical labs don’t really mix.
Monday morning, I fixed the formaldehyde-marinated brain to the freezing microtome with a squirt of water, and started slicing. It was my first time using the machine and was nailing it. I sliced and sliced and sliced perfectly symmetrical slices, but as I approached the ventral hippocampus my chest tightened. The hippocampus of Subject One was … missing. What the fuck? I laughed out loud. Weeks of work ruined and I had no clue why. I missed Yathi, and wanted so badly to find him and drag him in the dark room just to say “Dude, where’s my hippocampus!?”. But there was no one to quell the impact of my failure. What was I doing here besides failing? Hours away from my kid for what? This shit wasn’t even fun. The void where support once lived started filling with self-criticism:
You’re horrible at the bench.
You don’t have the technical skills to make it through a post-doc.
You killed that mouse for nothing because you suck.
I snapped a picture and posted it to Facebook with the caption intended for Yathi. I recognized that my DIY perfusion system which I was so proud of quite literally blew his brains out. The gravity of the situation made his head explode, and I didn’t cut the atria like I should have to release the pressure. “I quit (smiley face)” I wrote beneath the Facebook comments. Facebook comments just didn’t hit the same as a laugh with Yathi, and my boss was an absolute dick. So, I turned to the voice in my head for advice:
This lab is a joke anyway.
You probably won’t get a faculty position out of this. You have no potential co-authors, you just won’t be able to crank out the data like you need to.
You’re barely making any money and you suck at this. Just go home. Pick up your baby. Try being a good mom for once.
Jesus was in the desert longer than you’ve been here, but gone quitter. Quit.
…and a little over 35 working days into my post-doc, I did.
Looking back on this failure I’ve realized that I’ve avoided finding the good judgment here because it was mixed with bad judgment. I listened to that shitty voice in my head, but it was just trying to protect me. It knew that I wasn’t happy, and I didn’t want to move again. It knew all the complexities of my life and how what I really wanted wasn’t going to be found in the lab. It was mean and nasty, but it probably had to be to pull me off the path I was so determined to take. I fell hard, let my career shatter, scooped the pieces up, and dumped them into a new pursuit, and all the while, I’ve been hurting.
I winced reading the terrible things I said to myself, but I now know that I can talk sweetly to myself like I would to a friend, laughing over the good judgment we’ve gained from having to play executioner. Maybe I wouldn’t have listened then, but I will now.
Girl, your ‘failures’ aren’t just failures. They’re stories, and all that was missing was your chance to share them.
Thanks for letting me share this with you.