Rock Bottom...The Hard Hitter

Oh yeah, we are going there girlfriend buckle up! As I mentioned, life kinda went sideways on October 4th, 2017. That was the day of the phone call. The phone call that changed everything I had been working towards for the past 12 years of my life.

See, that summer/fall I had been dissecting tuna heads for research. Remember I was doing Marine Science, specifically into the fisheries management side of things. I was dissecting heads, writing my thesis, and battling my advisor on the harsh realization that my study didn’t yield positive results. He wanted so badly for my 3 years to amount to a breakthrough in determining Bluefin tuna sex, and flat out it just didn’t. That’s science, right?!?

Anyways, I was slaving away smelling like tuna daily and underpaid, but everything was about to work out…my time smelling like an open-air fish market was about to pay off.

See there was this funding my advisors were waiting on for me to start my doctoral program. If they got it, I had been told I would 100% start in the Spring of 2018 with my tuna advisor in Portland, ME.

THEY GOT IT! I was walking on air for weeks knowing we had got the funding. I just had to wait for the official word that I’d start in January of 2018 at the University of Maine.

Side note…in the Fall of 2016 I was accepted by my first pick advisor that fell through... just keep that nugget tucked away in the back of your head.

We heard that news in late June…I “patiently” waited all of July…all of August….all of September…and well considering I’m writing this blog at a coffee shop on Magazine St in New Orleans not Commercial St in Portland, ME, guess who isn’t getting their doctorate?!?

As soon as I got that news I fell to the ground crying… that feeling of your stomach falling 5 floors down and you’re not sure you’ll be able to get back up again. I sat on my bedroom floor for about 30 minutes balling my eyes out. Before I picked myself up, wiped the tears away, and went down the street to cut up the tuna heads for the day red-faced with tears still leaking out of my eyeballs. You know the tears ladies and gents, the ones you want so badly to hold back, but somehow, they just keep coming. Needless to say, it wasn’t a good day at work. It wasn’t a good day in the Life of Laura.

While this was not my first heartbreak in my marine science career…it was the one that made me realize 2 things in my life…

One, why the fuck was I fighting so hard to fit into a profession that I had been miserable at for a solid 6 months. That I had dedicated my life to and just nothing seemed to ever fall into place like it did for so many others.

Two, I got into Marine Science because I loved the ocean. I wanted to work on the ocean. Guess what Marine Science is not all boats and bikinis, and cute fish pics like I had pseudo imagined when I picked this profession at the age of 17. Yes, at 17 that’s basically what I wanted to do with my life. It sounded fun okay?!? It’s a lot of writing grants in tiny offices, processing samples in converted closet spaces, and analyzing data anywhere there is Wi-Fi or not WiFi…I reorganized, and half analyzed all 280 samples from my graduate career on a flight from Boston to L.A once. When the flight landed I received an email from my advisor that almost gave me a panic attack:

“From the results, we will have to concentrate all the samples for Estrogen and rerun. Don’t worry about this now. Enjoy your vacation.”

Three simple sentences that I knew would mean 8 solid weeks in the lab, all the time I had left to spend physically at graduate school. I did it. I’m proud I did, but if you’re wondering this is when my life started really spiraling down for my career in marine science. Regardless…none of this involves being outside on a boat in the sun.

That’s when I realized, this heartbreak was a blessing. Being rejected from my second Ph.D. program was the biggest fucking blessing I’ve had in my life to date. Why? Because it finally woke me up, and really think...

“Am I doing this for me?”

Or am I doing this because I was told to find a path at age 17 and stick with said path the rest of my life?

Can we just take a second and think about how much shit that is to tell a 17-year-old?!? At 17 you have to find the career you will do for the rest of your life. And we listen. We listen because these are the same people that up til that point in your life you have been relying on for survival. Better figure it out otherwise I won’t survive!

The concept that you pick a career at 17 and work it the rest of your life had been deeply engrained within my psyche from a young age. I came from a family of scientists and engineers. Thus, for me changing this concept wouldn’t come easily…plus I’m stubborn as shit. So I had to hit a wall…I had to hit a really hard fucking wall full force to wake my stubborn ass up!

I truly believe the universe tried to give me little hints before. Hindsight 20/20 I see them now, but I would’ve never then. Because I was doing what I was supposed to be doing according to society. I had picked a profession. I had planned out my life. It was admirable. It was respected. It made me fucking interesting. And I was so stuck on having it all together and having that plan that I was ignoring the struggles I was going through.

I was ignoring never quite fitting into the Marine Science world. I was ignoring that I didn’t have a strong natural curiosity about the inner workings of the ocean or the damn membrane of a fish blood cell…legit topics that comes up casually in the marine science world. I know it was all-important to know to solve the problems presented to scientists, but it just wasn’t my jam in all honesty. I was living someone else’s jam…someone else’s dream. In grad school I was so afraid to admit that…admit I had made the wrong career choice. Or maybe not even the wrong choice for me back then, but I had changed my mind about my future. I wanted to change my future, but I didn’t have a clue towards what.

I was so afraid to go down an unknown path, I was making myself miserable. I would say for a good 2 years in graduate school I slowly got more and more miserable. Slowly more and more depressed until the phone call that changed my future.

But thank fuck at 29 it changed. I finally listened. It didn’t take another 12 or 24 years into my career to look around and realize…. “Well fuck me, I don’t like this.”

I am so grateful today that phone call happened the way it did. I am so happy it pushed me to walk away from a career in the research field of Marine Science not because I wasn’t good enough….not because I wasn’t disciplined enough to get my PhD…but because it was sincerely making me unhappy. I didn’t want to spend my whole life unhappy. It was a blessing that finally the scariness of stepping into the unknown no longer outweighed the unhappiness I felt in the life I had created. That’s what it took to make me finally change. That’s what makes all of us change. We reach our threshold of pain, unhappiness, something and we decide this isn’t how life is going to be anymore.

Slowly you begin to make small steps to changing your currently reality, and it changes. You don’t even have to decide exactly what you want to change. You just have to decide you want life to be better and start looking for better. Better will find you. It may take some time, but I promise things will get better if you are searching for better.

For me the easiest way to get better quicker, I started listening to that little voice inside my head. You know the one…the scary one you listen to for a second and then ignore because you wonder what other people will think of you. The one that says:

“Hey girlfriend, how about you start selling those candles all your friends love that you make?!? See how it goes…. what could it hurt? What do you have to lose?”

Or

“How about you quit that job you loath going to…or at least polish up that resume and start applying to jobs elsewhere.”

Or for me….

“Why don’t you start a blog? No one would read it?!? Come on…at very least your Second Bestie would be a religious reader…we both know that!”

It’s listening to the little voices, having the doubt, and doing it anyways. Because maybe no one but your close friends and family will buy your candles, but what if your close friend happens to know someone who works for Urban Outfitters who loves your little homemade candles?

Or

Your polished up resume lands you the job you’ve always wanted.

Or

That blog leads to something bigger…a book deal…a motivational speaking career.

Those things personally scare the shit out of me thinking about them…but they also excite the hell out of me! Maybe they are far fetched and maybe they aren’t….

For every negative possibility you come up within your mind, you can daydream a positive one. And maybe that’s all the change you need. Start looking for the positive side of what if’s instead of the negative.

I know for me that’s where all the positive change starts to happen in my life. When I get excited about the positive that could happen, the small risk or little investment today is worth the possible HUGE reward tomorrow! That’s my two cents for the day!

Til next time boo boo….you do you!