As someone who’s lived away from home since the age of 17, I’ve spent a significant amount of time traveling to and from home. When I was in college, it used to be 15-hour overnight bus journeys or 20-hour train rides. Then I moved to the US about 8 years ago, and since then it’s been 20-plus hours of air travel each time I want to go home.
I find that whenever I’ve taken these long international flights, I don’t just put my mobile devices into airplane mode – I put myself as well. This is particularly true when I’m flying from India back to the US.
Do you know what I’m talking about? Is this a common first-generation immigrant phenomenon? Picture this: you spend months, if not years on end, thousands of miles away from your family. You get to visit home once a year, if you’re lucky – given the state of the world right now, it’s easily two to three years without seeing home. So when you finally get to make a trip home and get a few precious weeks with your people – before you know it, it’s time to leave, and you are swamped with a ton of powerful emotions. The millions of goodbyes you have to say. The sheer number of love and blessings and good wishes you carry with you. The amount of love is just overwhelming, like a cocoon surrounding you. And you never want to leave. The last few minutes at the departure terminal curb – saying goodbye to your parents, not knowing when you’ll see them next. The double-barreled swords of visa and COVID restrictions you’ll have to navigate to see your family again. Meanwhile, the other parts of your heart are tugging you the other way. Your husband of just over six months, whom you can’t really bear to be separated from. Your friends, who you see even less of, now that you have moved to a different city. Your independence, the life you painstakingly built for yourself from scratch – it all beckons. And so your heart is torn, yearning for all your loved ones to be at the same place, longing to be whole again. But that can only be done if they all collect in one room together. And given everything going on at the moment, it has been impossible to bring everyone together, not even for your wedding. And so the heart has no choice but to remain forever yearning, forever incomplete, forever aching.
And because you cannot afford to fully experience all those feelings when you’ve just reached the airport and have a 30-hour journey ahead – you turn off the signal, you go numb. You go into your airplane mode. You purposely put some distance between yourself and your emotions – and instead focus on the next step. You worry about your luggage being overweight. You sigh at the serpentine security queues. You fumble to take off your shoes and your jacket and your work laptop and your personal laptop and your kindle and your phone, and put them all in a tray without bumping into others or dropping something. You keep all your documents ready for the immigration counter. You glare at the idiots who don’t wear their masks properly; the very sight of exposed nostrils irritates you these days. You worry about reclaiming your baggage at the claim – visions of just standing at the carousel with the merry-go-round turning endlessly, delivering everyone’s bags but yours flood your brain. You hope that a freak storm doesn’t delay your flight – if it did, you’d have to rebook your connecting flights, painfully redo your PCR test, and pray to the universe that you haven’t caught the virus at some point during travel. You focus on getting through your journey with minimum hassle – because that is all that you can deal with at this point. Just trying to keep track of night and day, what time zone you’re in, what country you’re flying above – because you can’t deal with the painful emotions. If you let yourself feel them, you wouldn’t get on the plane in the first place. You’d be bawling your eyes out in the serpentine security queue, making it even harder for the agents to match your face to your already unrecognizable passport photo. You would be so sad, so broken up to be on a long unending flight, each minute taking you a mile further away from home – you couldn’t face it.
And so you activate your airplane mode when you’re flying. It’s not just for devices, you see.
I attended my long-awaited PhD commencement a few months ago. It was a virtual ceremony of course, given the pandemic – but it was a proud and triumphant moment nevertheless. It was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Ever since I was 4 and walked into my dad’s super cool lab, I wanted to become a scientist, wear giant goggles, and add that “Dr” in front of my name.
In my dad’s lab, circa 1994.
In fact, one of the very first books I ever wrote at the age of 5 was titled “Doctor Pooja”, complete with a Clifford the dog sticker. The contents don’t quite make for a compelling story, but it’s something I have always thought I would become. I never really questioned the dream, it was always the path I was going to follow.
The reason I did a STEM PhD is because I have spent my whole life truly believing in science. I grew up in a land where luck, superstition, and religion prevail, however I have considered myself above the fray – I will not blindly believe things I cannot see the evidence for. Why should I be wary of black cats who cross my path? Why shouldn’t I cut my nails on a Thursday or Saturday or whichever day is considered inauspicious? Why exactly do I need to eat white food before a big exam? I have never considered myself a particularly religious person, nor do I quite care for societal and cultural norms. I do not think they make sense in the current day and age – even if by some chance, they made sense in the day and age they came to be. I need a reason to believe in something, and it needs to be a convincing reason. I like questioning, I like analyzing, and any worship I did was at the altar of science. So yes, I proudly call myself a woman of science, a follower of logic, and in battles of the head vs heart, I like to think that my ultimate decisions are the ones that make sense. I have followed this path from my nerdy parents’ home in a scientific colony to a premier institute for science in India, all the way to a well-respected graduate program in New York City, where I finally earned my doctoral degree, confirming to myself and everyone else that I am indeed a scientist through and through.
And yet, one of the primary ways I got through my science PhD was by learning faith. Along with all the scientific techniques, the methodology, the endless assays, critical reasoning and analysis I learnt- in parallel to all that I had to pick up a good ol’ dose of faith along the way. Faith, which I had dismissed and scorned for the first 25 years of my life. Because like I said, I am the person who believes in concrete evidence, in irrefutable data. And all my life, I had enjoyed science. I did well in science at school. And the evidence for this was that I always scored well. My marks would not lie, would they? Neither would my teachers, my superiors, the people I looked up to. All the evidence pointed to the fact that I was and would be great at research. A science PhD was my calling, and I would barrel towards it.
Fast-forward to two years into my PhD: my driving force had collapsed upon itself. I was struggling to juggle multiple projects. I was floundering. None of my results were promising or convincing – they weren’t a definitive yes or no answer to my hypotheses, they were all a ‘try again later’. They were inconclusive and frustrating, and with each experiment that failed, I felt like I had failed. There was no evidence that my projects were working, and no evidence that I was suitable for grad school. In addition, I would routinely be told that all the failed experiments were because I wasn’t smart enough, focused enough, sincere enough. Every time I didn’t get the expected result, I was told that I must have done something wrong. I didn’t feel supported, I didn’t feel encouraged – instead, I was doubted, time and again, and I took it personally. I started doubting myself and my capabilities. I felt like I was flailing, thrashing about to stay afloat and yet still drowning. And the world, my world kept getting darker and darker. Every experiment, every lab meeting just made it worse. I couldn’t see a way through. It felt like I was all alone, struggling and failing, and instead of helping me up, the person who was supposed to help was kicking me while I was down. Meanwhile, everyone else around me appeared to be doing just fine. And so I stopped reaching out to people – family and friends and colleagues who could have helped – I didn’t want to let them see the full extent of the failure I felt, because, well, what if they agreed? What if they thought of me as a failure too? I couldn’t face that. And so I shrunk some more, curled up upon myself, hid my tears and panic attacks – and tried to hide away from the horrifying thought that maybe I was completely failing at the one thing, the only thing I had ever wanted to do. The only thing I wanted in life. This was my dream, this was it. There was no Plan B. And now, it looked like I wasn’t strong enough, smart enough, capable enough of achieving my dream. And that fear, that sheer terror of not being enough took over my life. It took over every thought, every action. I spent months, years, on the verge of tears. I burst into tears so often, that I quickly had to come up with a tried-and-tested three tier-system for places to cry in secret, based on the intensity of emotion, and how much time I could afford before I needed to suck it up and get back to work. My sleep patterns were completely wrecked – I lay awake at all hours of night just silently panicking about the results I still didn’t have, the experiments I needed to redesign. On the occasions I did manage to fall asleep, I would wake up with my heart thumping in my chest, feeling a crushing weight pinning me into my bed and I couldn’t sit up. I felt exhausted and broken down, and every single day, it was the same fight over and over. There was no light to be seen at the end of this tunnel.
I lost my driving force, you see. My belief system, in myself and my abilities had crumbled. My belief in academia had collapsed. I turned to gallows humor and escapism, joked about quarter-life crises, and spent every non-working moment immersed in fictional worlds. If I read fantasy novels non-stop till bedtime, if I binge-watched Friends over and over, perhaps it would turn off the part of my brain that was obsessing over my failures. For two whole years, I couldn’t fall asleep unless I had the TV on in the background. My head was not a safe space, my thoughts were not kind.
I had three options at this point – (1) quit my PhD, (2) switch to a different lab and hope things would be better, and (3) stick it through. I ruled out option 2 pretty quickly, because after a certain time, switching to a different lab would only restart my PhD timeline and add even more years to grad school. That was unacceptable. I thought of quitting – oh, how I thought of it. I was miserable and drowning and saw no way out. I was in my third, fourth, and then fifth year and was nowhere close to a solid project or a publication. I had no data to present at departmental retreats, no posters, no talks. As someone who was used to performing well, had defined herself by performing well, this was pretty unbearable. The only reason I didn’t quit was because I just couldn’t live with myself if I did that. I am not a quitter. I couldn’t live with myself if I quit my PhD, if I admitted that I couldn’t handle it and walked away. This would involve leaving the country. Leaving my dream. Starting over. Lost years. And so even if it killed me, I would not quit.
And so I stuck it out. I stayed. There wasn’t any one defining moment when I made this choice – I had to choose this option, time and again. It was a long painful process. I slowly started opening up to people about how I felt. I started realizing that I wasn’t alone, that there were people who felt like me. Smart people, talented people whom I looked up to, who were also struggling. The impostor syndrome was very real and isolating. I started letting people in to see my ‘failed’ vulnerable self. I opened up to my friends about it, let them see the messy reality of who I was at that moment. I asked for help. I grew less worried about how I would be perceived – frankly because after a point, keeping up a façade was more effort than it was worth. I relied on my family, I relied on my friends. No, the project did not change overnight. The constant stream of soul-crushing feedback I had to deal with didn’t change either. But I stopped hiding and tried to fight the shame. I swallowed my reservations and went to therapy. I reached out to people around me, to people in charge. I had to teach myself that ‘being sensitive’ was not a weakness. I am fond of logic and efficiency, yes, but I will never be an unemotional robot. I will always have feelings, big full-blown messy feelings – and that’s okay. I slowly learnt to accept all my emotions, to know that how I was feeling was not inherently wrong or right, it was just the way it was. I started advocating for myself, for my thought process and experiments, instead of immediately assuming I must have screwed up.
And somewhere along the way, I ended up building myself a new belief system. One that still enjoyed external validation, but did not require it. One where I actively worked on having faith in myself and my abilities, faith from within. And a little bit of faith in the universe. Faith that somehow things will eventually work out. And faith that while I can’t control everything, even if events and circumstances might be out of my control, I have the ability to handle it. That all I can do is control the factors I can, do the best with what information I have at any given moment, and then leave the rest to the universe. And believe that it will work out, one way or another, at some point in time. Perhaps in a way I couldn’t predict. I still wouldn’t call myself religious, but I did built up my own set of beliefs. Of blind faith, even when there’s no immediate evidence in front of me.
And slowly, things changed. I ended up finding a whole new angle to my project. It became a bigger and well-rounded story, and I could finally publish it. I could give talks, construct my own narrative around the data, and how I interpreted it. This was literally in my final months as a grad student, but I managed it. I convinced my committee to let me defend. And I enjoyed giving my defense talk. I realized over time that the process I truly enjoyed was not the day-to-day bench work, but creating narratives out of data, putting together the puzzle pieces to uncover the underlying picture. Surprise surprise! Storytelling has always been my thing. I just never thought I could make a career out of it.
Doctor Pooja at last!
So here I am, finally. Faith got me through my science PhD. It got me on a much different career path from what I had envisioned. It got me to a place where I get to indulge in my creativity, as well as think about science and data and how to help people. Faith got me to an unexpected place that has been a joy and revelation. It might someday lead me down other paths I haven’t planned on. But maybe I’m okay with not having my whole life planned out anymore. Maybe I don’t have to follow a trajectory I set in motion twenty five years ago. I know there are probably lots of surprises in store for me, of the pleasant and nasty variety – and there’s no way of knowing what will happen – but what I do know now is that I am capable, I am strong, and I will figure it out.
Today marks exactly one month since I have been in self-isolation. Exactly 31 days since I last went out for brunch. 31 days since I sat inside a cute restaurant and ate avocado toast with poached eggs. 31 days since I went to a coffee shop and sat outside in a sun-warmed chair, sipping my cappuccino with the pretty foam art. 31 days since I last browsed in a bookstore and bought yet another cute journal to add to my burgeoning collection. It has also been 31 days since I last saw anyone I know.
The final cappuccino, March 14th 2020
We’re living in rather surreal times these days. The COVID-19 pandemic makes every day feel like a horrifying new episode in a dystopian TV show, where reality and rules shift rapidly. Most of us are cooped up indoors, terrified of this invisible virus that is wreaking havoc around the world. It feels like a zombie movie, except the zombies are too tiny to actually see. I know this situation has been around for a while, but a part of me still can’t believe that this is actually happening. It’s surreal that we’re living through a true global pandemic, with different countries and states implementing quarantines to varying degrees – from total lockdown in India to New York’s PAUSE. I almost feel like Anne Frank, scribbling away and recording all my mundane happenings in the midst of a petrifying period that will go down in history.
I don’t know about you all, but I am vacillating between two very different mindsets here. There have been a lot of changes in my life in the last three months – I graduated and left Weill Cornell, moved out of my beloved Manhattan, applied for jobs, got a job, started a job, got a new apartment in New Jersey, and promptly started working remotely, after a mere two weeks of working in my new office. With the onset of the pandemic, every choice I have made feels weightier, has more severe consequences.
First, my choice of job ensures the ability to work remotely, as opposed to my PhD, in which physical presence in lab was mandatory for any work to get done. The job also ensures that I have an external fixed schedule, with meetings and deadlines – all of which are very helpful in setting up a daily routine (my innate discipline is nowhere up to such a monumental task). Second, my choice of apartment was serendipitous – it happens to be outside New York City, outside the immediate epicenter in the US. My final choice has been to live alone for the very first time in my life. I have spent the last eleven and half years living with roommates, some of whom I’ve loved, and some not so much. I was eager to strike out and live on my own. And now due to the virus, I am all alone in my apartment every single day. These choices have led to a much different lifestyle than I’m used to, and a confusing duality.
One side of my quarantine life is shrouded in fear. I am constantly worried and panicked about what might happen. I am terrified to go to the grocery store. I am too afraid to go for walks, because viruses aside, this is also an unfamiliar neighborhood with no helpful Manhattan-like street grid for navigation. I don’t go anywhere and stay indoors at all times. I am constantly worried about my family and friends, none of whom are immune. I desperately want to keep all my people safe but there’s nothing I can really do, which makes me feel tiny and helpless. I wish I could put everyone in insulated bubbles, safe from the world. Though I guess that’s essentially what we are doing by staying in our homes.
I am also a little worried about the perils of living alone. Sure, it is an empowering sign of independence, but also means that at the end of the day, I need to handle everything on my own. If anything ever happens, nobody else is close enough to help me here. It’s not student housing, so I don’t have my friends living in the same building anymore. Here, I live in an unfamiliar building in an unfamiliar state. I also have new health insurance, new doctors whom I’ve never actually met, in medical centers I have never entered. So all I can do is make sure I stay safe to the best of my abilities. This has led me to wash my hands for so long and so frequently that they are constantly dry and cracking. No amount of hand cream seems to make up for it. I have to mostly fend for myself, food-wise, and that’s not something I enjoy or care to do. I don’t know when I’ll get to see my family. We had plans to meet next month for my PhD convocation, and that is out of the question now. I am worried about the flailing economy and what that could mean for me, now that I have an industry job. And the worst part of all this is the sheer uncertainty. Nobody knows when this will end. When it will go back to normal. If normal is even possible after this. As an obsessive planner, the uncertainty bothers me the most. If I knew that we’d stay in limbo for exactly 3, 6, or even 12 months, I could work with that. I could plan my life around it. But we now live in times where we can make no plans, and the future stretches out in front of us, a gray, bleak cloud with no end in sight.
And yet. Once I take a breath and look for the silver linings, there are plenty to be seen. When I take stock of the situation, I am grateful for everything I have – I know I am privileged in so many ways. Because on the other side of this strange new life, well, living alone for the first time has been pretty incredible. I love having a place that’s just mine. I can furnish it the way I like, organize my things the way I like, and my apartment is exactly as clean or as messy as I like -everything is according to my standards. Nobody else is leaving dirty dishes in my sink, nobody else needs to shower exactly when I want to take a long bath. I can play loud music in the living room while I’m cooking myself dinner. I can talk out loud to myself, put on the silliest karaoke performances, have impromptu dance parties, and once this pandemic is over, have guests over without worrying about inconveniencing any roommates. I have pulled out all my journals and art supplies to start flexing that creative muscle again and am happily binge-watching new movies and shows. I can do as many loads of laundry as I want (having an in-unit washer/dryer feels like the heights of luxury). The lack of commute allows me to sleep in longer (thank goodness, ‘coz mornings are my nemesis). I can use the entire fridge for my food, instead of cramming everything on allocated shelves. I can eat what I want, wear what I want, do what I want, when I want, and there’s nobody to stop me. Living alone is so liberating! I didn’t get enough waking hours in my apartment after I moved in, but now the pandemic has gifted me time to truly enjoy my place. I have an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and I get to see miles and miles of land around me. I get to watch the sunsets, which look a little different every evening. I get to watch all the lights turn on in NYC in the east. I see the clouds scuttling across the skies, rain and storm and sun passing me by. I get to see the ever-changing interplay of shadow and light, and I am wonder-struck at the beauty of the world.
The sunrise over NYC on one of those rare mornings I was awake to witness it
This pandemic is also making me marvel over the power of human connection. I am in awe of how much beauty there is, the strength and resilience of mankind in the face of crisis. You can see it in the little things, of people reaching out to their neighbors, of clapping together, singing together, finding creative ways to reach out and survive this new reality. From old-school phone calls, to video calls, to Zoom happy hours, to Netflix Parties and House Parties -we are finding newer and different ways to connect. There is such beauty in all the ways we cope and talk and laugh, in all the glorious arts we are consuming and creating, in the collective human spirit which is shining so brightly through the darkness and fear.
Having said all that, I am aware that I am one of the lucky ones. There are millions of people who are worse off and can’t stay isolated at home. I am in awe of everyone who is out there, on the front lines, fighting the battle for us all and ensuring that we remain safe. If you are essential personnel, I commend you and thank you – you are our heroes. The rest of us – please let’s all stay inside, stay safe, and stay connected with each other. We’re going to get through this. Take care!
Sunlit Prism 