i won't turn around

Today is one of those days that seems to occur in every graduate student's career. I'm not wondering whether or not I'm capable of doing this. I know that I can. I just don't know whether or not it's worth it, it being all the pain and suffering the pursuit of a PhD in molecular biology, or any field of study, entails. When does a person get to the point where they choose quality of life over being a ridiculously high achiever? Wherever it is, I'm not there yet, though sometimes I wish I was. At the end of all my complaints I know that tomorrow morning I will walk into lab as well as the day after that and the day after that one. Two years from now I will still be walking into lab every morning. Giving up and moving to a small coastal town somewhere warm isn't as easy as fatasizing about it.

Today it's one-way ANOVAs and everything that is involved with never having been exposed to them. Tomorrow it will be mice or RNA interference or microarrays. There's a lot more that goes a lot deeper to fuel my frustration, but for fear of being dooced I can't and won't risk mentioning it here. Let's just say I wish I could vent about work and not worry that anyone would consider it more than just venting. Ah grad school, where one professor's bad opinion could potentially ruin your career for life...

“God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us
lessons we could not learn in any other way. The way we learn those
lessons is not to deny the feelings but to find the meanings underlying them.”

Stanley Lindquist