Redefining expectations: I'm a PI now.

Today should have been a good day...
A very nice review article which took a lot of effort in the past couple of months was accepted and for the first time I saw my name in print in Science. Granted this was my collaborator's paper, so it's not from my lab, but it's pretty sweet CV padding. My department chair will like it. Plus, one of my postdocs told me about some pretty spectacular data which we are hoping will lead to a major publication from my own group. Yet, I was miserable and almost closed my office door to curl in the fetal position and cry. And know one thing, reader, I'm not the type of person who cries. When I cry, people who know me tend to freak out, because something major must be catastrophically wrong.

The Shining screenplay.  By William Beutler  [CC BY 2.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons" 

So, what is so wrong? This summer multiple people quit the lab, leaving me understaffed and we need to finish a paper, so I had to get back to the bench and step in to help with experiments. This paper/project is under very strong competitive pressure and through false information I thought we were getting scooped, so I have put in back to back 80hr weeks to try and finish it. I have been mostly alone in the lab up to 10-11pm every day. We have done a lot of stuff, but one critical experiments will be delayed by a couple of weeks because I overlooked some details and some things need to be redone. I have regressed...I'm back to my grad school hours, occasionally wearing my grand school clothes, feeling the pressure of my life and my lab depending on this project. And then it hit me. "What am I doing? I'm not in grad school! My life and my lab do not depend on this project. I'm supposed to be writing 2 grants on the other super cool project my postdoc was telling me about."

If we cannot finish experiments in time I had already agreed with our collaborators that we will fold our data into their paper instead of going back to back. And then I will have a ton of extra data to get a lovely study out. My postdoc's project, which will be finished in the next month, will lead to another paper. And this second project is more likely to get me tenure than anything else I'm doing. Plus we just published in Science...Why was I upset, again?

I was upset because I fell into the mental trap of putting all my professional eggs in one basket. As a student and postdoc this is a common trap, thinking that your career depends on one project, one major paper, one checklist item checked off after another. Getting stuck in an obsessive rut that your life sucks. The thing is, it doesn't. This is all in your head. There are multiple career paths and multiple ways of moving forward. But when you work so much that you need to prop yourself up to keep going and you're exhausted, you're bound to flawed thinking. I'm not a postdoc, I have 6 or 7 baskets at the moment and I have to decide how to distribute my eggs. I have neglected my physical and mental health for this project, and I am too worn out to deal with anything else. This was a mistake. I cannot carry the entire lab on my shoulders and finish every single experiments and run everything. This is not sustainable. Sometimes, all you need is a change of prospective...regroup and objectively see where you stand. Objectively, things are going pretty well and I should just go on vacation.