31 things I did, experienced or learned at 31

It has been three years since I last used the day before my birthday to reflect on the previous years. Those years have been challenging and sometimes heart breaking times. As I move forward I am trying to find solace in reflection. So here goes.

1. I saw Niagara Fall and it was worth it.
2. I wrote a dissertation, which is the single most miserable experience I have ever had.
3. I spent 3 days in the front cab of U-haul with my husband and daughter. These are the times that build family memories.
4. I wrote a physics curriculum from scratch for 4 different courses.
5. I got back on my bike. I am slower and I tire more easily, but it feels good to ride.
6. I took a stab at mountain biking and I have a lot of work to do if I want to go more regularly.
7. I started taking a boot camp class.
8. I submitted a non-physics paper for publication written with an incredibly talented co-author.
9. I accepted a post doc at Penn State.
10. I moved away from Kansas.
11. As a result of 10, I will always be grateful for anywhere I live because it is not Kansas.
12. My husband and I drove through a tornado.
13. I defended and the dissertation I wrote and felt weird afterwards.
14. I have come to have a deeper appreciation for the power of strong friendships and am grateful for the women who have stood by through move after move and for whom distance is no barrier for our relationship.
15. I gave talks at IUSB, Stamford, Berkeley and Yale.
16. I bought a pair of (used but still beautiful) Manolo Blahnik's, so I can cross that shallow goal off the list.
17. I saw the Golden Gate Bridge.
18. I saw the St. Louis Arch
19. I went to Lincoln, NE and saw some wonderful friends and rode my old bike paths.
20. I took Esther to visit her first national lab. (Fermilab)
21. I listened to Esther as she sang the songs she makes up.
22. I made a British Trifle
23. I watched some dreams die.
24. I acquired a single speed and then moved to a place with lots of hills.
25. I saw a quantum computing lab in Canada.
26. I joined LZ.
27. I had my hair dyed blonde and I love it.
28. I voted in an historical election.
29. I saw golden waves of grain, and it really is beautiful.
30. I am regularly reminded of how wonderful my husband Piper is to me.
31. I still do not have anything figured out.

So here I am. A little more travel weary as I emerge from the exhaustion of the past three years. I not quite sure where I am going but I am trying to move forward.

PTSD, The Diagnoses I Never Expected

This is my second post on mental health in less than a month. One of my goals this summer has been to recover mentally from past year and half of grueling intensity, self-doubt, and sacrifice. I was prepared to face these anxieties. I was not expecting what happened. I may be many things, but most people, myself included would generally describe my mental strength as being one of my distinctive qualities. The experience I am about to share left my self-perception shaken.

I learned some information and this information triggered a memory that I do not often bring to the forefront of my mind. An event that I had not processed. Moments of incredible cruelty I had unintentionally repressed. In the retrospect of the present I can see that the pictures tell the story I did not want to hear and am being forced to confront now. After this happened there is a period of time for which there are relatively few pictures taken of me where I am looking directly at the camera.

I was not able to find any pictures where I was looking at the camera.

Once brought forward, I was blindsided. Violent nightmares came. Horrendous flashbacks, followed by being completely zoned out and out of touch with reality. I felt confused and disoriented. Why was I struggling with something that had happened long ago? Why was I first making these connections now? Had I not healed already? My life was so different from the time of the events and the years that followed.

Taken years ago and around the time I first knew everything was going to be okay.

 Thankfully, I was already working with someone, who identified my experience and gave it a name. It was PTSD from a series of traumatic events. Event though I had recovered from many of the other negative experiences in my life, this one I had previously incorrectly identified and it had laid dormant and repressed. The reactions I was having were classic and sadly normal for someone recovering a deep pain. These words I never thought I would hear.

 I struggled with feeling mentally weak. I could not will the flashbacks away. I struggled to pull myself to be back in touch with reality. I was embarssed to be dealing with something so far back in my past. I was unable to make progress on my professional goals. Instead, I was mired in a battle with my mind and the memories in contained.

One of my favorite pictures my husband has taken of me. It's a little old now and I am presently working on getting back to that condition. I wish I felt this powerful all the time.

Finally, I conceded. I started to talk about what had happened to those who were close to me. My family was wonderful, loving, and supportive. I eschewed work in favor of taking walks and letting myself heal. I read books I enjoyed. I studied what recovery looks like. Eventually, I came back to reality and my focus returned. The nightmares faded and the flashbacks receded. It took two weeks.

I know that this may happen again, but next time it will not surprise me. I will be ready. If I am fortunate, this may be the only time.

I contemplated writing this piece as it is very personal. I decided to come forward for a few reasons. One, by talking about this, it loses its claim over me. I also lose the feelings of shame and weakness when I am honest about my struggles. Two, I want to shed light on another issue which is not often talked about. Three, this is part of my previous post in that I want to continue the discussion of how one manages a stressful career while balancing mental health. I do not believe that this experience that I have shared is a good example of what to do, only what I did to survive it.

On a further note, I am not ready to come publically forward with what happened. I am working on co-authoring a piece that will explain my experience in more detail as well as what can be done to prevent other stories like mine.

On the Bike Again

In the summer of 2014, I finally rode 1000 miles on my bike in a month. In late summer, I completed an ultra duathlon. In the fall, I added swimming to my weekly routine of cycling, running, and soccer. Then in November, everything changed. I was expecting my daughter. 

I had read about triathletes that trained through their pregnancy. I read the stories about women who ran till the ninth month. I read about how to ride a bike with a larger stomach. I was going to do this and continue my doctoral experiment. I was going to show that women can do it all. Then I didn't.

My blood pressure dropped early and I felt like the world was spinning. I had trouble concentrating. I did not feel safe on the narrow British roads that I cycled daily. Swim practice was at 9 pm and the only way to get there was by bike. Every evening, I was exhausted after a day of trying to concentrate on my studies. I tried to run and my body was so tired that I contracted infection after infection. Then the doctor told me to stop. I could only manage to do my studies and to carry my child. Even then, I did perceive that I did that very well either.

I withdrew with a sense of profound failure. Every question about why I could not continue biking hurt. I heard the stories again about all the women who were able to continue their normal life while pregnant. I wish I could have been one of them, but I wasn't.

Then my daughter arrived and she is wonderful. Then my dissertation deadline came around me like a stranglehold. Then the days of working, followed by writing. The lonely isolation of busyness. The madness of a graduate school. Still, I did not ride. Still, I did not run. My clothes grew tighter. It was all I could do to keep my head above water and the pressure of life threaten to drown my very essence. Finally, I finished and survived a somewhat brutal defense. It was a sloppy finish, but I dragged my bloated corpse of a body across the line. Then came my first gasps of air.

I rested. I started to lift weights. I ran when the weather allowed, slowed by my larger mass. Then the other day, I rode.

Cycling, which had brought me healing in the past came back. I pulled on the jersey which had once hung loosely around my frame, now clung to every curve. I put my old shorts, surprised that I was able to get them up to my waist. I brought out my freshly cleaned bike. I rode with a cycling friend for an hour. 

Once again, I heard the spinning wheels and felt the hot sun on my back. I breathed in the country air. I absorbed the peace that can be found while cycling. I came back with a light euphoria and renewed enthusiasm for living. I made plans for training through the fall. I started thinking of races in which to compete. I will take time before I obtain where I was, but I am now two rides closer.

Mental Health and Physics: A Personal Response

As I was browsing social media yesterday, I came across the following article for which I have included the link. The piece is about the mental health struggles of a particular student during her graduate studies.

My purpose in writing this blog post is to tell my own story and to further the dialogue in generating a better environment in which we train future scientist. Mental health issues among graduate students is a phenomenon that is well known, but I have encountered any sustainable solutions. This observation is purely anecdotal and not based on a survey of different programs. I know I am not alone in my struggles, but I do not want to compromise the privacy of anyone who has shared with me their own personal fight against depression and anxiety, so here is just my experience with some questions about what we can do to better train our future scientists.

I began my graduate studies in 2012 at Royal Holloway University of London. I was thrilled to be studying at my first choice program. I like the student, in the original article, have a history of depression and other mental health issues, mostly situational. My joy at starting my program gradually ebbed away and was replaced by suffocating anxiety.

So how did this manifest itself? On bad days, I felt a deep sadness and discouragement in depths of my personhood. I woke up each morning with a sense of dread and panic. My shoulders and jaw ached after a night of living through tension I could never escape. I test as an extrovert on any personality test, I have ever taken, yet I developed social anxiety and avoided people. This had a doubling sabotaging effect as extrovert, I need the social relationships.

On the worst days, I dreaded getting out of bed in the morning. I wanted to escape life itself. Yet I know I had to move forward. Everything depended on me. So I went to work anyways. I tried to brush away the voices that constantly told me I was a failure and unworthy of the position. (Imposter syndrome is also rampant amount graduate students and I am no exception.)

I did seek counseling for a short while, which only moderately helped. I told a superior once of my struggles who accused me of laziness and said that they were not interested in my personal problems. I never mentioned it again. I learned in this field, your results are what matter, not personhood. So I internalized the pains. I was able to manage much of this through exercise until a difficult pregnancy made this impossible. So I further repressed.

When I entered the final year, I had no time to deal with mental health issues. I was working full time, researching full time, and attempting to be a mother. So ignored everything and fought the anxiety related distraction. I did cross the finish line, but it was a messy completion, in which I feel more shame than accomplishment.

Now I live with the consequences. My anxiety on some days in disabling. I struggle to drive a car for fear of a crash. Some days I am driven to such a deep distraction that some days I accomplish very little. This is followed by feelings of failure. I am seeking help and I have taken some time to heal from my mental issues before beginning my next research endeavor. I have started to exercise again, which I hope will help. Even as I write this, I am terrified that sharing this information could be detrimental. I do not wish to be judged as a physicist by what I have struggled through to get where I am.

We do need to talk about the mental struggles of graduate students. First, we need to de-stigmatize these issues. I love the idea of having mental health forums as a part of graduate programs. These do not even need to be science specific, as these problems are not unique to the field. In my orientation, there was little mention of mental health services available. I would argue that this should be a bigger part since it is so prevalent among graduate students.

Lastly, I am hesitant to suggest this as I am not sure it is their role. In my case, my superiors were unsupportive and disinterested in my mental health. I know it would have helped me if I would have felt supported and safe. I want to fair to them, as I do not know what they were struggling with and some of the individuals I worked with provided excellent support in training me to be a proficient scientist. However, I cannot expect personal interest from superiors and at the end of the day, their job is only to ensure that I can do physics, not that I am healthy. Thus, I would argue for better mentorship programs focused on aiding students in progressing with their work even through personal issues to close this gap.

It is my hope that by writing this piece that I have put forward one more story to comfort anyone who feels that they are alone in their struggles. We need a good dialogue and we need good ideas on how to have better mental health during this grueling process.