Lilly

The professor stands at the center of the room and calls our names, one by one, and one by one he holds up our personal statements and rips them to shreds. I wish it were literal. It might feel better if it were literal. But instead we all just have to brace ourselves for our ten minutes spent under his scrutiny, everyone else wincing as he tells us, one by one, that clearly we didn’t understand what this question was asking, and how can you call this a personal statement if it isn’t personal at all, and this last paragraph should have been the clincher but I found nothing of substance whatsoever in it, and how are you going to fix this? The first student to be questioned tried to clarify one of his points and was simply told to stop trying to defend himself. So we all swallow our shame and sit in silence.

The next week he does the same thing with our research proposals. This time it’s one-on-one, which is both a blessing and a curse; it’s an opportunity for him to cut even deeper, but at least no one else is around to witness the total destruction that will likely ensue. In the end, though, he spends less time with me than I expect. He chuckles at the naïveté of a few ill-worded phrases, skims the rest, then tells me that my proposal is much too ambitious, that I don’t have the necessary background to conduct this kind of research, and that I would be better off selecting a less competitive branch of physics in which to attempt to apply myself.

Everyone else? He tells them they should be applying to Harvard.

By the time the conversation ends, I’m only half-present. I stumble out of the room and find myself standing by my high school locker, the principal of the school in front of me. He asks, “What are you planning to study in college?”

“Physics and astronomy.”

His eyebrows go up. “Really,” he says. A statement, not a question, and I don’t have a good response, so I just nod and wait. “I didn’t think you were really the science type,” he says after a short pause.

“I—”

“I always thought of you as more of an English student. Or history. You know, my daughter’s degree is in American studies, I bet you would love that.”

“I don’t—”

“You should consider it. American studies,” he says, shaking his finger at me. “Remember it was me who told you!” And then he walks away, smile just as bright as when he arrived.

Even when I snap back to the present, I still feel like I’m sixteen years old. Sixteen and always getting told off for not being assertive enough to make it in physics. Sixteen and watching the boys complain about their homework for their engineering and sustainable energy classes—the same ones that topped the list on my course registration form, but still denied me entry. Sixteen and furious and being actively silenced whenever I tried to get a word out in my defense.

I go to the gym to try to sweat out all my stress and residual anger but end up straining a muscle high in my back. I hear it happen, like I did with my hamstring all those years ago. I rerack the barbell, grind my teeth through a little low-impact core work, stretch halfheartedly, and leave. My pain tolerance is high, though, and by the time I make it into the lab, the stabbing sensation has retreated to a steady, localized ache, only flaring up if I turn my head in just the wrong way. It’s a twisted kind of comfort, because I know how to deal with this. Even years after my last soccer-related injury, my brain still goes into physical therapy mode the moment the first jolt of pain crunches through my nervous system. I can fix this. It’ll just be leg day most days for a little while. ♦