There and Back

When I moved from Boston it took a while before it felt real. I also had to keep going back to get a quote on an instrument, and then pack and ship said instrument, and recently went back again for a conference. Therefore, with all the flying back and forth, my sense of New England belonging wasn't quite severed. And for at least the first trip back to Boston, it still felt like I was on a prolonged trip to Utah. My mind had framed Utah as a vacation destination for the last 8 and 1/2 years, so how was this going to suddenly feel any different? It would seem that the job would have helped convince me, but instead it all still felt like just another place to be for a bit before the next segment of my life.

I remember flying back from my second trip to Boston and finally having that feeling that Utah was home. The feeling was a sigh of relief mixed with some residual longing. My post-doc was hard, as I've written about before, but it was also amazing. So much of who I have become finally settled into an easy confidence that I hadn't felt in graduate school, and in doing so I had space to make really good friends, explore my neighborhood and city, and even go on a few weekend adventures without my usual rising tide of guilt. The miraculous part of this balance was that I still got a ton of work done, an outcome that I had never felt was possible in graduate school.

Severing that self that was there, and trying to remind myself that this is who I could still be here, has taken some doing. When I left Utah so many many years ago, I was a very different person than I am now. I had a million things that I loved to do, and a really intense determination to leave the state and focus all that energy on the one thing (being graduate school) with a voice in the back of my mind promising to one day return. On coming back, I now feel like I can do "all the million things!" It takes reminders to remember that I'm at a season in life that feels (and is in reality) in between graduate school and post-doc.  There is definitely a lack of that easy-confidence I had in New England and I'm not sure where it got lost along the way. On coming back, I have to remind myself of the growth that absolutely happened, and retain it as who I am instead of imagining that only time passed and everything is as it was before I left. I'm figuring out the balance, and luckily I have good mentors who have been through these exact feelings who tell me how to balance the new responsibility. The work of aligning time, interests, and confidence is mostly my own. However, in a sweet irony that I love, the friend who mentored me as a grad student, still mentors me on life in what feels like a reversal. She now repeats back to me almost the exact phrases that I used in talking her down when she was getting started, but she has way more credibility to use them than I ever did.

There is so much there and back in life. I'm often reminded of how iterative progress is; with so very many valleys and setbacks there still remains an imperceptible but definite incline upon looking back. On we go to there, wherever there may be.