Lilly

Just because I hide my frustration well doesn’t mean I’m not frustrated. I’ve been internally tearing my hair out over a math problem set for days, but my friends and colleagues seem to think that until there are brown locks strewn all over the floor of the lab, I’m perfectly willing and able to play TA or computer technician or life advisor. The truth of it is that although I have no doubt whatsoever that I am on the right path,

One tangled wire or snapped cord and the whole thing could come crashing down.

So I detach sometimes. I hide. Not from my work, but from the people who’d have me stop doing it in order to help them. It makes me feel selfish and antisocial—the active avoidance of friends and teammates to facilitate my own self-advancement. I crunch numbers in a rarely trodden corner of the physics wing, sneak into the lab during lunch and dinner hours to grind through commands to my server on a computer in Puerto Rico, where our data is being stored. I feel guilty, because I don’t want to be doing this; I still want to help people. But a small, vicious part of me feels justified, because lately it seems like I’m only being called on when people want help. My conversations are either 30 seconds of small talk in the hallway or hour-long tutoring sessions on what little I remember of special relativity or R. There’s no in between. I tell myself I’m overreacting, but sometimes I feel more like a resource than a peer.

In class I keep my head down, except when I can’t. There are different types of “can’t.” There is French class, where part of my grade is dependent on participation, and my desire to improve far outweighs my desire to stay under the radar. There is physics class, where today we were given a “riddle” to solve by our professor, which I recognized immediately in the context of the lesson and turned to my neighbors to share.

“One sixth times the charge over epsilon naught,” I said.

The guy to my left said, “What?”

I explained. The solution was an application of Gauss’s law coupled with a bit of basic geometry. Our professor called us back together and said, “Does anyone want to share their answer?”

The guy to my left got his hand in the air a fraction of a second before I did. He confidently rattled off my answer and explanation without a second thought. Or maybe without a first one. But even as I write this I think to myself, there’s no way I can say that, I don’t know how close he was to the answer, there’s no way I can judge people against myself. Everyone is so different, facing different obstacles. Mine are no better or worse than anyone else’s.

I’ve said before that discipline outweighs drive in the maintenance of a work ethic, but sometimes it’s just as essential to be reminded of what I’m working for. Being disciplined doesn’t mean I’m living in a bubble independent of emotions or physical limitations or other people’s actions. I’ve begun actively seeking out those moments, trying to engage more with my classes even if I’m not “participating” (in the sense of contributing verbally to a discussion). I manage to find at least a couple in every week. Sometimes it’s when I’m with my research group and I make some adjustments to a program that allow us to measure most of the parameters of data points that were out of our reach. Sometimes it’s in my French lab when I give an oral presentation and my lab instructor’s eyebrows stay high on her forehead the entire two minutes, not a single mark on her notepad usually full of corrections.

Sometimes it’s in the class that I’m only sitting in on—my advisor’s introductory astronomy class. I have been content to curl up in a corner and passively take notes, especially as the topics get more interesting and the pictures on the projector screen get progressively prettier—star schematics, supernova remnants like the Crab Nebula. They talked about neutron stars today, the cores of stars so massive that upon their deaths, their interiors collapsed to form structures with more mass than the Sun in a space no bigger than a city. Many of these bodies are detected from the way they spin, sending out pulses of energy into the universe on each rotation—hence their nickname, “pulsars.”

The discoverer of the first pulsar was a woman named Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She was a Ph.D student when she detected something unlike anything seen before in astronomy—so it was her advisor who got the Nobel Prize for the discovery, not her. Like, I think I’m not being recognized for what I do?! I’ve got nothing on her! She doesn’t even resent the snubbing. She’s said so herself. I think that right now, at least, I need to take a leaf out of her book. Sometimes you just have to let things go. ♦