Saturday, August 06, 2005
It is late at night, I am applying hydrogen peroxide to my strange ugly feet, I am listening to a CD my stepmother gave me, and I am having a mini-crisis. I guess it's that time of the quarter/season. Do any of these minicrises lead to anything I wonder? Have I really changed my course at all? Or is a good psychological shake-up all I need, even if everything settles back into the same place eventually.
Pretty lame. But anyway, this crisis was precipitated by a conversation I had with my coworker J last night. I mean precipitated in the chemistry sense - not 'initiated', but 'causing something to become solid that was already there'. To cause to crystallize. I am a beaker of hot solution and J plunged me into ice water, causing all the tiny crystallize of Doubt and Serious Reservation to fall to the bottom. Of me.
She said several things that I have been thinking about since: first, that sometimes (esp. w/ regards to research) I acted as if I thought the only way I could help people was through being a doctor; second, that while most doctors have a motivating desire to heal, I seemed to have a motivating desire to figure out was wrong. To take the system apart, not to fix it - not necessarily in a destructive way, but in a curious way. Both of these statements sort of hurt me, but in a true way - the second especially. I don't want to think of myself in that way.
It's not technically a negative, of course. I believe that people driven this way can still be compassionate, can still care deeply about suffering people and desire to help them - though through a different way. Scientific research would be one obvious answer for me. This is the field my coworker's in, so she may be a little biased. I've worked in research for two years now, both clinical and wet-bench, andI've resisted even the idea of doing it as a profession.
Why do I act as if, for me anyway, the best way to help people would be to be a doctor? I'm more than willing to encourage others to enter the academy. I strongly believe that you can serve God and do good in most any position. Yet I've still pursued medicine, even as I've become more excited about public health and infectious disease prevention. So I've tacked public health onto my goals. I've thought multiple times that if I really wanted to make a difference in public health, I would just go into public health. What do I want to do with medicine, if what I'm really interested in is populations - figuring out how to stop the spread of a virus among prostitutes, for example. Or... I don't know. Isolating an infectious strain of bacteria.
Besides, just seeing patients is call enough. It's a demanding profession. If I'm honest with myself, I don't think I can handle clinical medicine PLUS some kind of public health thing (larger scale, rather than just dealing with patients one-on-one.) Or adding some type of research. All of the research docs I know are insane, absolutely insane. Almost all are men, and almost all have basically made their careers their lives. I can't do that. Maybe if I didn't have a family - but even then, I don't think that would be at all satisfying.
So for me it's got to be one or the other perhaps: medicine or research. (I'm putting fulltime public health under the 'research' heading because in my head it involves the same type of skills, the same basic type of lifestyle. That's ridiculous of course.)
Research... I guess my main objection against research - not against research, against ME in research - is the level of abstraction. With a lot of research, even the stuff that will end up being life-saving, the researcher is at a level removed. I'm afraid of that. I'm afraid of getting wrapped up in the process. Becoming distanced from suffering, until my compassion and desire to help is an abstraction (perhaps like it is now.) Of course there is suffering in every walk of life - I guess I'm thinking of the Suffering, of refugee camps and war and AIDS orphans. I know research does impact these people in a positive way (new antiviral cream that women can use to protect them against AIDS, for example. Public health research on the effectiveness of AIDS education programs like ABC.) But... it is an abstraction. It is something people call for when they don't believe in things like behavioral change. (of course not all suffering can be dealt with by behavioral change, duh, yes I know this...)
But research, academia: well, I hate a lot of it. I hate the jockeying for prestige, the raging assumption that the less-well-educated are less-worth-listening-to. I hate academia's sense of its own importance, I hate how the answer to everything is "more research". I hate the politics, the workaholism, the American individualism, the focus on achievement - publish or perish, and you'd better publish in a prestigious journal or people will start to wonder about your scientific chops. The absorbingness of it: the fact that because there is SO MUCH going on, you really have to bury yourself in your field. I hate the field's ties to money: the research that brings in money, gets funded (often less creative and downright less important.) The worship of knowledge.
And personally, I hate: writing grants. Meeting people, networking, schmoozing, hoping you'll get tenure. I hate the friendly (but secretly not-so-friendly) competition between labs, the factions, the gossip.
?
Just a few hours ago someone told me this: although panicked students are always obsessing about Careers and the Future, these things are really secondary. The primary thing, the most important decision, the one that has the greatest meaning to your happiness, to the meaningfulness of your life, to the rightness of your life, is the small daily one to follow Jesus that day, or not. The secondary (so-called 'major' decisions) are important, sure, but you can screw up amazingly there, you can make horrible mistakes and follow rabbit trails and have to turn around and start all over and still come out all right, if your main concern is the Primary concern.
I realized tonight that I've been using the Secondary concern as a way to get around the Primary concern. Because I very often don't, and won't, make the right Primary decision. My life is divided into days, hours, and I want control of most of them.
Pretty lame. But anyway, this crisis was precipitated by a conversation I had with my coworker J last night. I mean precipitated in the chemistry sense - not 'initiated', but 'causing something to become solid that was already there'. To cause to crystallize. I am a beaker of hot solution and J plunged me into ice water, causing all the tiny crystallize of Doubt and Serious Reservation to fall to the bottom. Of me.
She said several things that I have been thinking about since: first, that sometimes (esp. w/ regards to research) I acted as if I thought the only way I could help people was through being a doctor; second, that while most doctors have a motivating desire to heal, I seemed to have a motivating desire to figure out was wrong. To take the system apart, not to fix it - not necessarily in a destructive way, but in a curious way. Both of these statements sort of hurt me, but in a true way - the second especially. I don't want to think of myself in that way.
It's not technically a negative, of course. I believe that people driven this way can still be compassionate, can still care deeply about suffering people and desire to help them - though through a different way. Scientific research would be one obvious answer for me. This is the field my coworker's in, so she may be a little biased. I've worked in research for two years now, both clinical and wet-bench, andI've resisted even the idea of doing it as a profession.
Why do I act as if, for me anyway, the best way to help people would be to be a doctor? I'm more than willing to encourage others to enter the academy. I strongly believe that you can serve God and do good in most any position. Yet I've still pursued medicine, even as I've become more excited about public health and infectious disease prevention. So I've tacked public health onto my goals. I've thought multiple times that if I really wanted to make a difference in public health, I would just go into public health. What do I want to do with medicine, if what I'm really interested in is populations - figuring out how to stop the spread of a virus among prostitutes, for example. Or... I don't know. Isolating an infectious strain of bacteria.
Besides, just seeing patients is call enough. It's a demanding profession. If I'm honest with myself, I don't think I can handle clinical medicine PLUS some kind of public health thing (larger scale, rather than just dealing with patients one-on-one.) Or adding some type of research. All of the research docs I know are insane, absolutely insane. Almost all are men, and almost all have basically made their careers their lives. I can't do that. Maybe if I didn't have a family - but even then, I don't think that would be at all satisfying.
So for me it's got to be one or the other perhaps: medicine or research. (I'm putting fulltime public health under the 'research' heading because in my head it involves the same type of skills, the same basic type of lifestyle. That's ridiculous of course.)
Research... I guess my main objection against research - not against research, against ME in research - is the level of abstraction. With a lot of research, even the stuff that will end up being life-saving, the researcher is at a level removed. I'm afraid of that. I'm afraid of getting wrapped up in the process. Becoming distanced from suffering, until my compassion and desire to help is an abstraction (perhaps like it is now.) Of course there is suffering in every walk of life - I guess I'm thinking of the Suffering, of refugee camps and war and AIDS orphans. I know research does impact these people in a positive way (new antiviral cream that women can use to protect them against AIDS, for example. Public health research on the effectiveness of AIDS education programs like ABC.) But... it is an abstraction. It is something people call for when they don't believe in things like behavioral change. (of course not all suffering can be dealt with by behavioral change, duh, yes I know this...)
But research, academia: well, I hate a lot of it. I hate the jockeying for prestige, the raging assumption that the less-well-educated are less-worth-listening-to. I hate academia's sense of its own importance, I hate how the answer to everything is "more research". I hate the politics, the workaholism, the American individualism, the focus on achievement - publish or perish, and you'd better publish in a prestigious journal or people will start to wonder about your scientific chops. The absorbingness of it: the fact that because there is SO MUCH going on, you really have to bury yourself in your field. I hate the field's ties to money: the research that brings in money, gets funded (often less creative and downright less important.) The worship of knowledge.
And personally, I hate: writing grants. Meeting people, networking, schmoozing, hoping you'll get tenure. I hate the friendly (but secretly not-so-friendly) competition between labs, the factions, the gossip.
?
Just a few hours ago someone told me this: although panicked students are always obsessing about Careers and the Future, these things are really secondary. The primary thing, the most important decision, the one that has the greatest meaning to your happiness, to the meaningfulness of your life, to the rightness of your life, is the small daily one to follow Jesus that day, or not. The secondary (so-called 'major' decisions) are important, sure, but you can screw up amazingly there, you can make horrible mistakes and follow rabbit trails and have to turn around and start all over and still come out all right, if your main concern is the Primary concern.
I realized tonight that I've been using the Secondary concern as a way to get around the Primary concern. Because I very often don't, and won't, make the right Primary decision. My life is divided into days, hours, and I want control of most of them.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
I'm going to start work on the grant.
This is what I tell myself every night. I'm writing a proposal to go to Uganda this winter to study evangelical organizations involved in AIDS education. I started this way back last winter, but couldn't get everything together in time for the spring grant deadline. So, I'll be cobbling funds together this fall, but my going remains a big "if" depending on whether the school approves my proposal. Especially if I can't convince myself to even start working on it again.
The major problem is friend Fear and his buddies Self-Doubt & Inertia. Well, Inertia isn't a buddy so much as a tagalong. I wonder where this comes from, this fear which quite frankly impresses me with its persistence & scope. I'm aware that others experience it - some more than me, some less - but some people don't seem to feel it at all.
Is it something we pick up over a lifetime of small traumas? Or is it genetic, like ear hair? Or is is the tendency that's inherited, like alcoholism? Can we trace the fear over the generations? Do a pedigree with squares and circles (dark shading would distinguish those individuals with The Fear, of course.) Then I wonder if sometimes there's a reversion-to-wildtype (or is fear the wildtype?) and two fearful individuals bear a sunny, fear-free child. Or vice versa.
Of course, my own personal fear isn't so bad compared to the fear of dying of AIDS, the fear of being murdered by Janjawid militias, the fear of starving to death if the crops keep dying. However, thinking of these things does little to minimize my fear, but instead makes me want to go into the bathroom and beat my head against the bathtub wall just a little bit.
AHHHHHH so self-absorbed. It's OK, it is my blog. Let us all bask in me.
This is what I tell myself every night. I'm writing a proposal to go to Uganda this winter to study evangelical organizations involved in AIDS education. I started this way back last winter, but couldn't get everything together in time for the spring grant deadline. So, I'll be cobbling funds together this fall, but my going remains a big "if" depending on whether the school approves my proposal. Especially if I can't convince myself to even start working on it again.
The major problem is friend Fear and his buddies Self-Doubt & Inertia. Well, Inertia isn't a buddy so much as a tagalong. I wonder where this comes from, this fear which quite frankly impresses me with its persistence & scope. I'm aware that others experience it - some more than me, some less - but some people don't seem to feel it at all.
Is it something we pick up over a lifetime of small traumas? Or is it genetic, like ear hair? Or is is the tendency that's inherited, like alcoholism? Can we trace the fear over the generations? Do a pedigree with squares and circles (dark shading would distinguish those individuals with The Fear, of course.) Then I wonder if sometimes there's a reversion-to-wildtype (or is fear the wildtype?) and two fearful individuals bear a sunny, fear-free child. Or vice versa.
Of course, my own personal fear isn't so bad compared to the fear of dying of AIDS, the fear of being murdered by Janjawid militias, the fear of starving to death if the crops keep dying. However, thinking of these things does little to minimize my fear, but instead makes me want to go into the bathroom and beat my head against the bathtub wall just a little bit.
AHHHHHH so self-absorbed. It's OK, it is my blog. Let us all bask in me.
