My Grief

For weeks now I’ve been staring at a blank page. Putting down a few words. Deleting them. Trying again. Deleting them again, getting frustrated. Closing down everything, and walking away. Over and over again, not quite vicious but definitely a cycle that I’m trying to get out of.

I did not realise what was happening when it was happening. I didn’t see how the darkness got ahold of me and consumed me fully, from my toes to the top of my head, submerged in cold water, slowly filling my lungs – unable to draw a breath. I didn’t realise that I was thrashing, grasping for anything I could get my cramping fingers on, I didn’t understand that I was beginning to panic – because to me, everything crept in slowly. There was no sudden realisation, no surprising awakening, it just was – I forwent all stages of grief and just accepted.

Yet, all of a sudden, it was just me – searching for new life, searching for new purpose, searching for what was lost and in this, finding myself again. Slowly getting acquainted again with who I used to be, who I never thought I’d let go but somehow, who I lost grip of…

It’s all a bit meta, isn’t it? What actually happened, say it… Use the words and just say what you mean, you must be screaming – that’s what I am screaming at myself all day long because I have words – so many words, but I seem to be unable to form sentences with meaning. I lost the ability to just say what’s at the tip of my tongue. Well, what happened was that I decided to move abroad to pursue an academic career. Start a PhD to support humanity in the endeavor of achieving sustainability in the marine space. I wanted to help the thing that made me the happiest, I wanted to protect it, make sure it is healthy and wonderous and will remain for centuries to come. And what happened? It engulfed me, nearly drowning me out.

Research is hard, the process itself is challenging at best, but research is hard because you’re breaking yourself out of a mold you didn’t know you were in, and you keep on pushing pushing pushing. And it hurts, because you are all-consumed by your research, your brain all of a sudden lost the capacity to feel. Empathy, compassion, passion, relief – you try to hang on to these feelings, but slowly you’re removed from these feelings, focusing on the facts and trying to make sense of the facts. Science is meant to be objectively subjective or subjectively objective which means that at the end, when as a result of the process of research you broke all the structures that kept you together – and sane -, you need to be put back together again. But differently than before because you now know more, now you are different, so naturally, the structures within you cannot be the same, they change. The challenging part is that there is no manual, no one-size-fits-all solution, you just have to dig deep and keep working through it.

While you do that – for days, weeks, months, and years – the world moves on and you think you’re the same, you think you remained as effervescent and lively as ever. The truth is, you are not, and people around you ‘don’t treat you differently’ but they do, they put an extra layer of velvety blanket around you, to protect you and themselves, because you are not reasonable. Working in academia expects you to be sound and of bright mind, but at the end of the day when you finish your PhD you are everything but reasonable.

And then, once you handed in hundreds of pages of your PhD, and there is nothing else you can do anymore, you try to fill your days with things. It’s a very odd sense of grief and loss for your own research. The separation anxiety is real, and the thing that caused  you to struggle over the last few years is gone but you still can’t function properly. I grieve that there is nothing I can do at the moment, other than resting and regaining strength both mentally and physically. I grieve my sense of purpose. I lost a lot in the last five years, I missed a lot of birthdays, I missed closeness, I missed happiness, I missed just doing… Most of all, I missed me, the one who had the bravery to start this journey. I really miss her, you’d love her, she was fearless, she just was unapologetically.

So, would I do it again? Considering all that I have been through, would I decide the same? A thousand percent yes, full-heartedly. I held my breath a lot during the last few years, but being able to breathe again, being able to see what comes next, and how I can actually go about the thing that matters most to me – yes, I would do it again. What I know now, I can put to use and be more powerful than I would have been five years ago… and yes, it’ll be a struggle to readjust, come back to who I used to be and I will most likely never be the same, but it’s worth it.

I suppose that’s the thing about grief… Grief is love that has nowhere to go, I forgot who said that but really that’s what it feels like. I grieve for a lot of things, but I know that in a few weeks I’ll get over this grief and I will put that love to good use and I get to work towards making sure that our oceans are healthy and stable and sustainable. An academic career is not easy by any stretch of the imagination, it requires a lot of sacrifice and determination and no – these are not always worth the return, because sometimes the return is so minimal, almost non-existent, little to no praise, little to no appreciation for your work – but really, if you’re looking for this, academia is not right for you. Instead, and this is why I can accept the grief, you get to forge your own path, you get to push forward, you get to set your own agenda and build on the shoulders of giants (and sometimes tear them down to recreate and regrow). This innate sense of grief, I hate the way I am feeling now, but I love what it has allowed me to do and what it will continue to let me do and for that I am forever grateful.