...When I returned from the walk, Jess drove us to the facility for her 6 PM appointment. The day before, she’d picked up a load of picture frames from a small warehouse in Elkton, Kentucky, a town whose roads were hardly wide enough for a big rig. “This will be interesting,” she’d said, turning her wheel to the right and careening the truck onto a narrow two-lane road lined with red-brick homes and trim lawns, her fifty-three-foot trailer veering precariously.
At the warehouse, a stooping man with shocking blue eyes gave us a tour of the long, mostly empty garage, its walls lined with stacks of boxes and palettes. “I do Lowe’s,” he said. “Also Walmart.” He’d started out working as a janitor for the company, then purchased it himself. A few years ago, he sold it for $3.8 million so he could retire but swiftly bought it back to save twenty-five employees from termination. “It’s a parable,” Jess said when we returned to the Black Widow.
I found this bit particularly poignant:
Trucking saved her, she said, but she still got lonely. Solitude became its own source of claustrophobia. “I have blue days,” Jess said. “If I slammed my truck into a mountain, would anyone notice? Does anyone know I’m out here?”
...On blue days, Jess went through her phone’s contact list and called and called. If no one answered, she screamed.
I had a cell phone in grad school, but I didn't really call very many people on it. Makes you wonder if I would have been more social or less social in grad school if I had one...
A network of non-chemist friends helped a lot during grad school for just those days. However, the longer I've remained a chemist, the more alien I've felt to my non-chemist friends ("why do you work so hard?" is a common and tiring refrain, reflecting in my view a lack of understanding what it's like to be a minnow in shark-infested waters).
ReplyDeleteSimilar experience as Anonymous 11:05pm.
ReplyDeleteAbout a decade out from grad school, I still go through phases where I really wonder if going through a PhD was/is worthwhile. I feel that alienation and feel I lost something along the way.
PhD in organic chemistry here. For the large amount of emotional abuse I had to endure mostly from my advisor but also to some extent from the department and graduate school, it was not worth it to me. It wrecked me for a VERY long time and I'm still having occasional bouts of PTSD/flashbacks of anxiety and depression.
DeleteI've been out for 20 years, and I still have nightmares to this day that my advisor somehow forced me to go back and do more experiments at my current age. I learned a lot of chemistry, but it absolutely wasn't worth it. I had zero self-confidence throughout my twenties, and I wish I could have a do-over on that decade of my life.
DeleteAgreed with the above that having a network on non-chemistry (non-grad-school, really) friends was very helpful -- especially to distract me from the guilt associated with socializing.
ReplyDeleteIf I had been friends with regular people and not other grad students in grad school, they probably would have insisted I get psychiatric help. The grad school system depends on isolating us from the outside world, and the abuse we accepted as normal never would be tolerated in a corporate workplace.
ReplyDelete