"Midway upon the journey of my tenure-track..."

"...I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost." (adapted from D. Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 1)

The past week has been tough, but also a recuperative one, desperately trying to gather some energy both physical and emotional to deal with pulling the lab together one more time. I have been battling burnout for months, but I was fighting to keep one of the projects in the lab alive. Due to a couple of toxic hires part of the project was recently scooped and another big part is under extreme competitive pressure. Because the bad hires are now gone, I need to pull a paper out of thin air by myself working with some of the new people who just joined the lab.

Despite this I was finally starting to feel secure in my tenure track, I was going to pull this project together and another big part of the lab was running smoothly with the promise of continuity. The goal of having a cohesive body of work by year 5 (1.5 years away) seemed possible. It finally felt like the lab was hitting a positive stride after being wobbly in the Spring. Then multiple disasters hit in rapid succession. One R01 application which had taken an ungodly amount of energy to coordinate and pull together fell flat leading the Program Officer to recommend to just write another grant. Samples I had been trying to secure for months failed to materialize killing a whole new exciting direction in the lab. Then I found out that all the personnel leading the only viable project we have is going to be gone by the end of next month without any of the papers being completed. WTF?!

Now I have to run the lab, deal with a packed travel schedule for the Fall and be primarily responsible for 4 major publications with no manpower or manpower with limited expertise. I feel like I'm standing on a boat watching my projects drown and having to decide which one should be saved, because I cannot possibly try to rescue them all. It's heartbreaking and a little terrifying. "What if I pick the wrong one?" Year 3-4 in the tenure track is that defining moment where you feel like your career should take off and as I was preparing to take that leap, I was hit by ton of bricks. I am gasping for air.

In the middle of all this, I got to take break thanks to a conference tied in with a visit to a friend's institution and to my old postdoctoral lab. And the upshot from talking to multiple friends was "Boohoo, this happens to everyone." "If this was easy, everyone could do it." "You think you have it bad, my student graduated and went to Nepal for 6 months with no email access." So basically, shut up, get your shit together and finish the papers. God, this job is hard! I'm realizing that to just survive you have to be made of steel. The more I go on, the more I feel the steel getting tempered.  At the same time it seems like everything is going against my generation: the crazy-low funding rates, the scarcity of jobs. We were sitting at this meeting watching talks from fancy HHMI investigators presenting 20 transgenic mouse lines and we were just like "Sure, I could do that if I had the money, but I don't, so I can't"...and watching these massive projects, you wonder if in your little lab with a revolving door of trainees (some good, some bad), you will ever be able to do something significant. Or even if this roller-coaster of emotions will ever stop.

In any case, back in the lab shit must be pulled together, projects must be finished, so I need to get back to the bench full time and everything else will have to wait. As Winston Churchill once said "Success always demands a greater effort". So 150% effort, here I come!