I was knocked flat on my back over the past few days due to a horrible cold I must've picked up at the airport on my way back from home. Trying to work through it on Friday and Saturday made it worse; on Sunday I was attempting to make it into the lab to finish my starch extractions but couldn't handle it. I ended up with a fever and headache and wrapped up in more blankets than I was using all winter, waking up every few hours to clear my nose because I couldn't breathe, and basically just being gross and pathetic. Today I gave myself a little leeway and focused on resting instead of feeling guilty about not being productive and getting frustrated. During my random show hopping I found this reality tv series called "World's Toughest Jobs" where they took a few usually spoiled/unproductive 18-25 year olds from the UK and put them in difficult positions to see how long they could tough it out, and recorded their "before/after" mentality and watched how they responded and learned and changed through the experience (or didn't).
The first one I watched was filmed in BC, where the British kids were trying tree planting. At first I thought, ha! what are they moaning about, it's a simple task, one we've done ourselves at KSR... then they said a good (not exceptional, just average) planter does 1,000 trees in a day, and does that straight for 2-3 months, and that they were expecting to plant 2 million trees in one season with a team of 45 planters, which does NOT work out for 1000 trees/day/person. One guy on the regular planting workforce said he could do one tree every 4 seconds, which is 900 trees/hour (?!?!?!?!), which if he did 8 hours would be 7200/day. Which is insane. At KSR if I remember correctly we planted about 1200 trees, but it took two days for a team of us to do it (although granted in the tree planting job the exact placement of trees was not as big of an issue).
Anyways. The kids did not make it very far (apparently they quit after 3-5 days on the job after variously getting injured, whining, and bursting into tears). After that I just had to watch the rest of the series. It's not bad actually, as far as reality tv goes. It made me think a lot about myself and my own position, how relatively comfortable I am even though a lot of the time recently I've been feeling pretty shitty about where I am and what I've done with my life. How being the second child, the spoiled child who could always get away with everything cause I was the young one, meant I'd never really needed to fend for myself ever. On the show there was a spoiled guy who was 22 and had never gone on public transit by himself before or washed his own dishes and it made me think of the first time I went to college and had to do my own laundry instead of just leaving it for my mom to do. I've earned my own money, sure, but till I came to Canada on a stipend that was meant to be enough to live on, I never lived strictly off my own earnings. The only jobs I've ever taken were ones that I thought would be beneficial for a career as a scientist, and as a result I've only ever worked in labs all my life. I looked down on other jobs and opportunities, thinking it was inferior, thinking it would be a waste of my time.
What is a waste of my time? Honest hard work? I think over the past few years I've learned a bit about time, and about the value of it, and how arbitrarily I had valued it for the wrong reasons. There's a warped perception at least in the US that if you get a head start you'll go far in life. I'm sure that works out for some kids, the brilliant ones who go to college when all their peers are in high school. I shaved half a year off of college, thinking it meant something that I left early. I signed up for a PhD without a Master's, thinking it meant something I started early. But what did it mean?
On a personal level, rushing about with misplaced priorities meant I missed out on a lot of things. I lost a lot of my friends by leaving to come here and by thinking egotistically that I was meant for a different life than theirs. I missed major life events (weddings, funerals) of many people I knew well. Even relationships with my own extended family members have changed drastically since I first moved here. I lost my youth, and more importantly the remaining youth of my parents. It actually hurts to go home because I realize that when I first left they were still healthy and active and now my mom actually qualifies as a senior citizen (!!!) and they can't do the things they did with me five years ago. And I can't take that back. They are aging fast and I can't give them the grandchildren they dream of, for so many reasons, and I don't even have my shit together to at least support them financially.
Also, I want to know what other life is out there. I constantly feel as though I can't integrate into society. Because I've never been a part of it. I've never gotten myself dirty, so to speak. I haven't had to tough it out and pull myself up by my own bootstraps. That's why I have been panicking so much about the looming end of my PhD (and not the fact that I must actually finish the damn thing, which is not a doubt in my mind) - because I cannot allow myself to take any more from my parents, but need to give back. I need to be there for them, and I need to make my own way and find my own place and self in the process. And maybe what I need when I finish is not to just faff around on a self-indulgent trip but to go somewhere and fucking work for my living and stop dreaming that I will one day have the perfect job in a perfect place that will bring me nothing but joy and security because there is no economy for that. I need to face reality. I'm going to exit here young enough that I have a bit of buffer in which I can catch up on all of the learning I've missed, and hopefully still have the resilience to bounce up again after a setback, and the adventurousness to not fear taking a risk. That's what I've saved those years for. That's what I must do.
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