When I was little, I enjoyed two things: dinosaurs and story-telling. More so the latter. I’d gather friends and cousins at birthday parties and I would hold their attention with outlandish tales of exploring cavernous depths, only to realize we had been walking all along inside the mouth of a polar bear!
Shrieks would go off to the excitement, and chagrin of family and observing parents. I also thoroughly enjoyed science. I suppose what connected both was my unbounded curiosity, which remains the magnifying loop through which I examine my life. But things took a turn at 14, when my family and I immigrated to Canada.
I studied English from an early age and I was confident in my abilities. But, being a good student in an English class in a Spanish-speaking country, and being surrounded by English are two different things. To say that self-esteem tanked is an understatement. Something that most native speakers fail to realize when they meet someone whose first language isn’t English is that speaking a different language requires courage. Because of this, I experienced my first episode with depression.
I pushed aside my dreams of wanting to be a writer as I tried my best to climb the ever-rising mountain that is learning a new language. I did what others might have done in my shoes; to heal, I leaned on another love: science. Science was safe in the sense that it was logical and I could toss aside (bury) my feelings of what, at the time, I thought was failure. I pursued Biochemistry at the University of Ottawa, and fell in love with the mechanisms of life. I particularly became obsessed with the smallest of critters: viruses.
I naively told myself, I want to be a student forever. I began to fulfill this insane dream by first choosing a project at a lab at the University of Ottawa, where a young, very driven and awfully moody supervisor took me under his wing. The learning was steep at best, humbling at worst. However, everyday at the lab was an adventure. My work consumed my days and my nights. There was only one way to cure this fever: pursuing graduate studies.
Interestingly, something funny kept happening throughout the years: whenever I felt low, or extremely happy, I’d write. Yet, these scribbles wouldn’t come out as diary entries. Even when I would buy a diary to record my worries and joys, these feelings would spill into poems, short stories or personal essays. I couldn’t help myself. In contrast to these writing bursts, my lab notebooks were organized but boring to fill out. I began dreading the lab, but by now I was deep into a PhD. Hello again, depression. I didn’t realize what these feelings were.
This was supposed to be my path; I was on track to what I had told myself would be a Professorship, even though I absolutely hated the outcome of experiments, the planning, the doing. Yes, I loved the ideas and thinking of their potential, but I hated the process. This wasn’t the case with writing. Learning about science, and writing about it is where my heart was. But you’ve already failed at writing, remember? I’d tell myself. And now, I felt I was also failing science.
Toward the end of my PhD, I fought against these feelings by seriously considering a career in scientific writing. I began freelancing scientific writer jobs, and took volunteering positions to expand my scientific writing portfolio, while still finding it really hard to let go of the idea of being an academic researcher; I took a post-doc job. If my life was a movie, this would be the point where everyone yells at the screen in frustration at a character’s self-destructive behaviour. But this turned out to be the most important step in my trajectory.
I was lucky enough to find a very supportive mentor who let me write different things, and allowed me to further expand my scientific writing portfolio. It also gave me enough time while having financial stability to find the scientific writing job I wanted. Today, I work at an incredibly amazing company with technological breakthroughs that are disrupting the antibody market: Rapid Novor, Inc. The best part is that I get to fight for funding for them with my words. When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020, I worked really hard and secured academic and hospital partnerships for my company, and wrote grants that secured funding for COVID-19-centered projects.
Recently, I got to see my company featured in Nature Publishing for their cutting-edge antibody protein sequencing technology used to identify potential therapeutic antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. I felt very proud to have contributed even if only with words to something as amazing as that. But the transition was difficult not just because of my conflicting feelings but because something else happens when you move away from research. Any authority you may have had in science disappears as future scientists you will work with will only see you as “writer”, not someone with research experience.
All the experience you had rightfully earned for the past ten years or more is now nil; moreover, past research peers will not quite understand this new path. It will seem odd and little compared to the grand expectations and self-importance researchers assign to their jobs in both industry and academia. The stigma was not painful compared to how I felt during this transition as I left behind a part of me, but it was exasperating. Having to constantly prove myself in meetings certainly was humbling, but it taught me to develop more patience and know my worth.
It took a few months after this transition to come to terms with the fact that I had done this for myself. It finally clicked during a drive home from work. During this drive, I daydreamed about going back to research. Had I continued in the same academic-bound track, I would have pursued research on schizophrenia and viruses, so I designed experiments in my head, and suddenly I felt a pang in my stomach. The thought of having to sit down in front of a hood made me feel physically sick during this daydream. It was official, my heart didn’t belong to the bench. It was elsewhere.
It was where it had been all along. In other words, I had come back home to writing. There are no words to describe the massive feeling of relief that comes from knowing you’ve made the right decision. Today, I feel immensely lucky I get to pursue my two childhood dreams under one job. This weekend, I will sit down with Antibuddies and chat with them about my path. If you’re a grad student in the sciences, and are considering leaving the bench, check out the podcast and see if scientific writing is for you.
Comments