A Tiny Grant?
There’s an opportunity for some local (but not internal) funds to submit for a tiny health care grant. It’s $10,000. While my job here is not about getting funding, this opportunity came out of the blue, and my boss’s boss is interested in going for it. I have to submit the one-page proposal on Friday. No salary support, which is just as well. That kind of money doesn’t go far if it needs to go for salary.
My job isn’t very research-y. But if I can submit for this, and get it, then maybe I can help shift the vision of my position more over toward research. Or, at the least, I would be able to demonstrate that I continued to seek and get funding in the event that I decide in the future to focus more on an academic position. Though, for the moment, and for the forseeable future, I’m very happy where I am.
Nevertheless, I’m excited to have the opportunity to demonstrate my expertise in a venue that my office hasn’t traditionally participated in. If I can succeed here, it may open up new doors for me in a way that is really exciting. So, wish me luck. I have 5 days to dream up, write, and submit a grant. And figure out, what do I want to spend money on that isn’t already available to me? One really nice thing about MECMC: they provide me with everything I can possibly imagine needing.
The Value of Sponsorship.
I am beginning to feel a tiny bit odd about my sponsorship situation. My sponsor is in St. Louis. I’m living on the East Coast. It’s not an ideal situation. But it’s also not awful, theoretically. I know people with out-of-town sponsors, and they do just fine. But I also know that I need to have regular contact with people in the program and someone who I’m directly accountable to in order to work the best program I can. And I’m not 100% certain that I can do that with a sponsor who is something like 1000 miles away. I’m also not sure that I can’t. But I’ve met a couple of men at my men’s meeting Wednesday nights that seem like they might fit the bill for a sponsor “in loco parentis” even if not the real full thing.
So, what is a sponsor? What to they do? When someone is new to AA we tell them to get a sponsor right away. We tell them that getting a sponsor and doing what they say will help them stay sober. Does it work? Well, hard to say. Now, obviously, if you get a sponsor and do what they say, you’ll stay sober, because one of the first things a sponsor tells you is: “Don’t drink.” But of course, the research is conflicting. A recent study suggests that meeting attendance and sponsorship are quite important, while noting that previous research has not shown the same[1]. But, as I’ve noted many times, I don’t know that we understand how to research recovery very well. So even when the research supports my own view – meetings and sponsorship matter – I remain skeptical.
Fundamentally, a sponsor is someone who has what I want. Long-term sobriety. A pleasant countenance. And optimistic view of the world. And the supposedly superficial things too. I wanted a sponsor with a family. A nice home. The things I wanted to have or to keep. AA allows us to engage with the world, and live good lives, while being of service to others and to fellow alcoholics. So I found a sponsor who had those things.
But I feel like I may need to adopt a local sponsor. I don’t want to risk my program getting out of whack. I’ve missed a few meetings lately, and I need to make sure that that doesn’t happen regularly. If I miss a meeting, I need to make up a different one. I need to talk to my sponsor more, or get a local one. It’s too easy for me to become complacent. Then I begin remembering my drinking differently from how it really was. I remember the euphoria. Not the misery and compulsion. My disease will use whatever tricks are available to satisfy its needs.
But I know the tricks. I know the score. I understand the consequences. And I know what I need to do. I need to engage with the program here, in ECC. It’s not enough to do what I’ve always done when my circumstances have changed. I need to take new measures. Life is too precious. And my sobriety is the cornerstone of my life. If I lose one, the other will follow shortly. This is how I work my program. But understanding the dire circumstances of my disease. And by being willing to do the things that are required to forestall it.
Which means understanding that I cannot relieve my alcoholism if I see it as a battle. I cannot approach my sobriety as if it comes from some inner strength in fighting my addiction. My war has been over for years; all my strengths and weapons lie broken on the field. I am lost. I am defeated. And so, I fight no more. Such freedom there is in true surrender. I do not have to struggle any more. I am unbound.
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[1]Zemore SE, Subbaraman M, Tonigan JS, Involvement in 12-step activities and treatment outcomes. Subst Abus. 2013 Jan;34(1):60-9.
My first project here at MECMC is to develop a discrete event simulation (DES) of the surgical core. It’s a cool project that I can’t get into all the details of, but suffice to say that there’s a lot of interesting work to be done and much of the work is brand new to me. Obviously, I’ve specialized in DES for many years now. It’s my wheelhouse. I enjoy it, I’m pretty good at it, and I was hired specifically for this skill.
But operating rooms are a whole different world from my usual areas of application. DES is, in large part, a system for building very intricate networks of queues. Queues in parallel and series that interact with each other in peculiar ways. This allows us to model real-world Complex Systems and make predictions about their responses to perturbations. Perturbations might be to arrival rates, service times, or the flow of objects from one queue to another. But fundamentally, it’s about things lining up for service by other things.
This makes it ideal for healthcare delivery systems. Because we have servers (physicians, nurses, and facility capacity, etc.) and we have customers (patients, but also supplies, and phone calls, and other demands on resource time and attention). So healthcare delivery is well-modeled by queueing systems. This is especially true in the environments I’ve worked in in the past, like emergency departments and telephone systems.
However, there are challenges when writing simulations of systems which use scheduled arrivals. Queueing theory was developed with random arrivals in mind. All the math is done for random arrivals. But when we’re modeling elective surgeries, the arrivals aren’t random. Sure, they might be if you go far enough back in the chain (i.e., the ‘arrival’ of a person discovering they need surgery), but for my purposes, I need to model the patients from when they are scheduled for surgery. And that schedule is a rigid object, with particular timed events associated with it.
It would be far easier if the operating rooms were for emergent patients. Then, you just feed them in according to their interarrival time. But when dealing with scheduled patients, you have to devise a different kind of arrival system. What I’ve done, is build a separate “patient creator” entity, which looks at OR availability each day, and iteratively fills the OR with patients until there’s no capacity left using a greedy algorithm. I could simply have generated a bunch of patients and stuffed them into the rooms until there was no room left and then sent the rest home. But this way is far more elegant.
I would say that in general, DES is not necessarily the best tool for the optimization of appointment-based healthcare delivery systems (Mixed Integer Programming, for example, may be appropriate.). It’s far better for systems where the random arrival stream is a feature of the system being investigated, like the ED. In order to treat appointment-based systems with DES, you need to rig it like I described above. But in the position I’m in, I don’t necessarily get to choose the approach to the problems. I’m the simulation guy, and they want a surgical simulation. So I took the challenge to build something, and I think I came up with something kind of elegant.
Now I’m hoping the IRB decides it’s exempt.
Ego Inflating Propositions.
After a very good weekend with lots of sunshine and exercise (I ran 10.22 miles and walked about another 9. I even did a 17 second plank balanced on three medicine balls. It’s hard. Try it.), I had a difficult conversation first with a friend and then with my sponsor. The essential gist of it was: I don’t always behave well when I find my ego being stroked. It’s easy for me to get a big head. I start to feel important and then indispensable and then I can justify just about anything. My friend very rightly took me to task about this. I talk a lot about gratitude here, and other essential things about the program, but I rarely talk about humility.
Because humility sucks. I’m not good at it. And I’m bad at it in two ways. When my ego is up, I feel like I’m the best there is. I’m handsome and virile and important! I work at a prestigious institution and do important work that saves lives! Women are attracted to me! I have incredible talents and I’m eager to tell you about them! When my ego is down, I’m stupid and vile. I’m ugly and fat and repulsive. I’m a fraud and a charlatan. I’m useless and ashamed. I want to slither into dark corners and be avoided.
Both of these modes are bad for me. The first mode is also bad for other people. When my ego is stroked, I will seek more of what feeds it. Often knowing that this can lead me to behave in ways that I shouldn’t. And that leads to having to make amends to people. Or, sometimes, those amends we don’t make because making them only hurts a person again.
In sobriety, I’ve learned how to deal, largely, with the second type of ego problem. I know how to responsibly drag myself out of the modes of thinking negatively. I’ve learned to accept that I am probably not the worst person ever to walk the earth. But I have real difficulty with the first kind. Especially in relationships, but also at work. I don’t know how to handle positive attention, and I can end up saying and doing stupid things, and acting like an ass. And I can end up doing things that hurt other people.
So my friend, aware of this behavior of mine, gave me some well-earned correction. And when the concept of ego was brought up, things clicked into place for me. I then called my sponsor and discussed the same issues with him. He told me the same things. “Avoid ego inflating propositions.” I don’t behave well when I’m convincing myself I’m great.
These issues are hard to write about. I don’t like admitting publicly that I’m not necessarily working the best program. And these are sobriety issues, not just humanity issues. If my ego gets misaligned too badly, I will end up feeling the same old shame and self-hatred and fear and rage that I drank over. For an alcoholic, these are often life and death issues. So I’m grateful to have been admonished. Even if I’m ashamed that I let my ego get out of whack. Or rather, because I let my ego get out of whack. It’s good to have people who will remind me. Bring me back.
That’s how the program works. I can’t do it alone. I’m not good enough. I’m not strong enough. I don’t have the gift of perspective. I need others’ experience to help me see my errors. I’m so glad I know people who will hold me to account.
Excitement!
Yesterday I was informed that my first paper from my first grant was accepted. The paper was first submitted last June or July. At one point, it was rejected because the associate editor couldn’t find reviewers. Which frustrated me a great deal at the time. The paper is a methodological piece about using agent-based modeling (ABM) to create a simulated cohort of patients for in silico randomized trials.
Now, obviously, the state of the art in ABM is such that we can’t model drug effects or new interventions like surgeries and expect to trust the outcome. But what we can do is use simulated cohorts to test the effects of changes to policy, or flow, or capacity, in the health care system. And these types of trials are not possible to perform in vivo. To do so, we’d have to, say, build two identical hospitals and have one adopt one policy and the other another. We can also test policy changes which might, if they don’t work, result in dangerous or unethical conditions for our cohort.
Because this work was interdisciplinary and unconventional, it was hard to find a good place to publish it. Medical journals saw it as computer work, or as too naive with regard to the epidemiology. I submitted to a computer simulation journal, who said that it wasn’t novel as a simulation piece, but was “just” a medical paper. Eventually, I settled on submitting it to a well-known open access journal, which takes as its mission the review and publication of all quality science it receives. There are arguments – which I’ve discussed here – about how valuable, or prestigious, this kind of publication is. But it is excellent peer review, has a good impact factor, and is indexed by the major science search-engines. It puts good science in the public record, which is what matters.
So I’m very happy to have it published. I have a second paper which I need to respond to review. Then, that will close the door on my first grant. I did real science, the way it is done in America today. I wrote a grant, was funded, did some work, wrote a manuscript, and published it. That feels pretty good.
All This Glorious Sunshine.
It’s been raining for days, off and on. Today it is cloudy, and the asphalt was wet this morning. The forecast calls for storms throughout the afternoon and night. I love the rain lashing the windows of my apartment. I sit at my piano and channel the rhythm of the tempest.
I keep telling my stories because I need to remember them. Time becomes a long bridge. The rift between what I was and who I am widens. Becomes nebulous. Menacing presences fade to smudges on pebbled lenses. Urgent pain subsides to low and vague aches; endurable unpleasantries.
When everything shattered, I felt like I was frantically grasping at impossibly edged shards. Desperately I tried to reassemble facades of what was, as blades of the past slit to ribbons the soft flesh of my hands trying to hold everything together. It was all too present. To immediate. I couldn’t see the picture for scrutinizing the details.
I had to let it all fall down. Crush glass to sand beneath my feet. Sweep it all away. Abandon all the glittering images I’d built to conceal the sickness of the core of a self that recoiled in horror from truth as a reflex. Crack the seal and let it all dissipate in wind and rain.
I’ve started building again. With bandaged hands I’ve taken up new tools and raised new edifices. Stronger ones. Plainer ones. Built on foundations of simple bedrock.
I will never be what I was. And I will never be what I might once have been. Those persons are lost to me by time and chance and unknowable potential. I am what I am now. I cannot be made perfect. Nothing can unmake the pain. But I have beautiful scars.
I have come blinking out of the dark. Look at all this glorious sunshine.
The Poverty of AA.
Today is open enrollment in MECMC’s health plan. I get to choose my various medical and dental plans, and decline a bunch of coverage that doesn’t apply to me. I got the Cadillac health-plan, because why not? It’s cheap when it’s just for one person. It costs about $175/mo, and I get $76 a month discount because I don’t smoke and did all the mildly invasive and privacy-stripping health assessments that MECMC offers to incentivize health awareness. I also declined supplemental life insurance coverage, because I have no dependents and I’m 38 and in good health. But I get one year’s salary as basic coverage and there’s nothing I can do about that. So I needed to choose a beneficiary.
I went to twitter and asked who wanted to be my beneficiary. Nobody pounced. But I was asked if it were something I could donate to charity. It is. But my immediate thought was Alcoholics Anonymous. And of course, they won’t take it. I mentioned this on twitter, and people were very surprised. Why wouldn’t AA accept a gift of that sort? Well, the reasons are myriad and compelling. To me at least.
When AA was founded, Bill Wilson and Bob Smith had some grand designs. They thought of building AA hospitals and sending out AA evangelists. All those ideas collapsed, and thank goodness they did. Instead, AA adopted a principle of disorganization and poverty. And I think that this has saved millions of lives. If AA were an organization in the traditional sense, with the kind of membership it has (Two million? More? It remains unknown.), it would immediately be a major player in the healthcare foundation world.
But it isn’t. AA doesn’t fund research. It doesn’t lobby congress. It doesn’t take positions on health care. It doesn’t take positions of any kind. Because as soon as the organization has an opinion on anything other than how to stop drinking and live a better life, it opens itself to controversy. And then, alcoholics who have different opinions about health care delivery, or alcohol research, or congressional funding, or anything that AA might take a position on, will have reason to say: “Those people can’t help me.”
This is why AA has never taken an organizational opinion on any topic other than recovery from alcoholism. And even there, it’s not a hard opinion. It’s not: “AA’s way is the only way to recover.” It’s: “We think this way works for people who dedicate themselves to it. Our evidence for that is that millions of people have succeeded.”
We maintain our effectiveness at helping people recover by refusing to participate in all the distractions that divide people. AA’s institutional vow of poverty is written in our traditions. The sixth: “An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.” The seventh: “Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.”
You cannot go in to a AA central office, tell them you’re not an alcoholic, and then give them money. They will decline it. (At least, they should. The lack of organization means that you can never truly predict what will happen.) We are self-supporting. It’s important. Each of us contributes because each of us benefits. We are our own benefactors. We all have skin in the game. If we accept donations from non-AA members, we’d eventually likely have to cede some influence over our program to them.
There’s even a famous story of a very rich AA member leaving more than a million dollars to AA in her will. It was declined. We do not have any desire to be wealthy, institutionally. I believe the current limit on posthumous donations is $3,000.
Our poverty is a source of unity. Strength. Investment. Solidarity. We don’t want money to corrupt the individuals who have positions of service and responsibility. We don’t want prestige to seduce us into policy and program statements. We are simply a loose-knit band of drunks. Saving each other’s lives. It’s all we do.
Run Like Hell.
Saturday I went to New York City and met up with several people from Twitter that I’ve known for a long time, and several people I was meeting for the first time. It’s hard for me to emphasize just how positive a factor in my life Twitter has become. I’ve met dozens of people, in real life, who have become true friends. I’ve met people who’ve reached out to me for help with alcohol. Or with their marriages to alcoholics. I’ve met scientists who study fascinating things. And I’ve come to see the true face of science in America, and in other places, today. The passion, the pain, the heartbreak, and all the challenges. I see how the system churns in the background, and I wonder what can be done to save it. The rotors of this machine are about to bite into the soil, and this massive apparatus could all come spinning apart.
There are huge, terrifying challenges in life. This should be news to no one. I’ve faced some, and surpassed them. I’ve faced some, and been beaten. And I’ve only survived some because I’ve been beaten. If I hadn’t abandoned my battle with alcohol, if I were still trying to fight and hadn’t surrendered, I can’t imagine the straits I’d be in. If I were even alive. Alcoholism cannot be beaten. We can only surrender. If I hadn’t given up fighting for my marriage, I’d be trapped in bitter loneliness. Sometimes, surrender is the only route to relief.
Yesterday, I got up at 7:30 on a Sunday morning and made coffee. Had cereal. And then I ran 10.67 miles. Well, I ran 6.21 miles, and then I did walk/run intervals for 4.46 more miles. I ran that first 10K in 61:53. I ran, at a 10 minute per mile pace, for more than an hour without breaking stride. I know I’ve written before about my amazement at my running accomplishments. I won’t rehash it all now. But I have to comment that, this is what I love about being an alcoholic. I love that I can go out, and run myself like hell into the ground, and it feels like a privilege. I drank and I smoked and I nearly killed myself. Now, I am healthy and free and happy.
A lot of alcoholics in recovery end up running marathons. We’re people driven to excesses of all sorts. When we leave drugs and alcohol behind, sometimes we replace it with other obsessions. But being driven to run, be healthy, surpass goals and achieve big things, these are not destructive obsessions for the most part (Though, of course, anything can be destructive when it is used to the exclusion of important aspects of life.). These are healthy dedications. Dedications to life, and freedom, and to the exuberance of experience.
I used to use alcohol to run from things. I hid, and slithered into bottles of shame and degradation. I used to travel in order to feel like I was out of myself. Far from the life I didn’t want to be living. I spent most of my third decade running from myself.
Now, I run toward things. There’s nothing I need to run from anymore. I know how to face difficulty. I know how to give up my illusion of control about outcomes. All I can do is show up, do the best I can and give the most I have. And I will be all right, most of the time. The times I’m not, I’ll cope with. With help. Because if there’s anything that my forays into both Alcoholics Anonymous and Twitter have taught me, it is that I am never alone. I am buoyed by a throng of supporters. And I am a voice in the chorus of support for others.
There’s nothing for me to run from anymore. But here I am. Running like hell. Toward a bigger life.
The Other Side of Intimacy – A Guest Infact.
After I wrote my post on intimacy, I received a lot of feedback on twitter. I have been, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, surprised by just how many people in the scientific community have had their lives affected by alcoholism. Below is a Guest Infact from a female scientist, describing her marriage and the impact alcohol has had on it.
I do need to put a trigger warning up front for potentially distressing sexual situations.
I was deeply moved by the post on alcoholism and intimacy that @Dr24hours wrote. As with many of his posts, it offered me the chance to understand the other side of a problem I’ve experienced. I’m so thankful he is sober and able to blog with honesty and openness so other can learn from his experiences. I’m going to attempt to approach this subject with the same openness and honesty as Dr24hours, but I’m not sure I can. My wounds are still fresh, but I’ll see how this goes…
I have to admit that I don’t know that much about alcoholism. I’m not sure what comes first, the alcohol or the alcoholic. So many of the personality traits that Dr24hours describes sound like my husband. The thought patterns, the self-esteem issues, just about everything. But, he was not an alcoholic when we met. He enjoyed alcohol in the causal way that most people do. We’ve gotten drunk a few times, and had fun doing so, but it wasn’t something that happened regularly. The longer we were together, the more he drank. I don’t think it was cause and effect, but a byproduct of our circumstances. We got married right before I started a PhD program, he got a masters degree, and we had a kid. Lots of life happened has happened in the last 10 years. When kiddo was 3, I defended and we moved for my postdoc. He has never been particularly motivated to find jobs and when we moved, he had even less motivation. We used the excuse that he would be a stay at home dad. But, he didn’t want to stay at home. He didn’t really enjoy it and neither him, nor the kiddo, were thriving. I was stressed and felt guilty for moving the family. He started using alcohol as an escape. He finally got a job that he liked, but then it ended after 4 months when funding fell through (yay soft money science!). That sent him to alcohol even more.
He had little motivation to even look for jobs. He would fall into the thought pattern of not wanting to apply because nobody would want him anyway. He would count himself out of the running before even applying. I ended up writing several cover letters for him and helping him apply to a few jobs. He had interviews, but nothing came through. Then he got a few months of work on the soft money research position again, but he his tasks had shifted and he didn’t enjoy what he was doing, or the commute. Every day he would come home and have a beer in his hand before he sat down his work bag. He would pick up a beer and check out. He didn’t drink till he passed out, but he had a beer in his hand from the time he came home to the time he got ready for bed. If I tried to talk to him about it, he became defensive. At one point I had asked him to cut back on the beer and he replied, “it’s the only thing I have to look forward to at the end of the day.” It made me so sad that he felt this way. Even if he wasn’t excited to see me at the end of the day, how could he put beer above our daughter? My dad had said something similar to my mom not long before their divorce. I remember her telling me how much it hurt. I remember going for a walk and calling her to tell her. We both cried.
As Dr24hours describes, our intimacy started to fade as the drinking increased. He drank as a way to emotionally check out. I felt like it was my duty to “be a good wife and give him want he needs” but his low self-esteem meant that I had to initiate any intimate activities. And, well… as Dr24hours describes, alcoholism is associated with sexual dysfunction. This made intimacy harder for both of us, eventually all aspects of intimacy faded away. There was no kissing, no hugging, no handholding. Alcohol combined with his insecurity and inability to connect on an emotional level also led him to make some very bad decisions. I became an object to him and little more. I felt like shit and I feared him. If anyone else had done it to me, I would have called the police, or left immediately and never returned. But I couldn’t, I had to see him the next day. I had to continue to live with him and my shame. He was not someone I wanted to be with and I didn’t give a shit about being “a good wife” any more, I just went into survival mode. I did what I could to keep it from happening, but it didn’t always work.
I was working my ass off trying to do my postdoc and keep us financially afloat, but I didn’t even have my friend, my partner, at home. I couldn’t talk to him about my good or bad days at work because he didn’t want to talk. He had nothing to say so he just watched TV and drank beer. I felt emotionally abandoned. Conversations about alcohol went nowhere. He’d get defensive and walk away. I knew there was no way I could talk to him about our intimacy problems. I knew he was hurting and would be ashamed, if he was even aware of his actions (I have since learned that he was aware of what he was doing, but at the time I didn’t know if he was too drunk to remember). I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone about what was happening. I felt ashamed. I felt like it was my fault.
While all this was going on, we also hit the wall financially. We couldn’t make ends meet on my salary alone, but he couldn’t find a job (in his field) and he didn’t really want to work. I had a few interviews for TT positions, but it wasn’t looking like anything would come through. I had another year of funding, but started looking at other postdocs to see if there was one that paid better or was in a location where he might be happier.
I ended up getting a postdoc that did pay better. I really hoped that moving would get him out of his rut. The next place had a smaller kitchen and no garage, so there was no place for the “beer fridge.” He liked the our location and was much happier. But he still drank and his actions continued. He was having fun staying at home. He went for bike rides, he hiked, he cataloged his record collection. The kiddo had entered school and was gone 6 hours a day. He had plenty of time to do his own thing and really enjoyed himself. I was glad that he was happy again, but it also showed me that his depression and our previous location wasn’t the root of our problem. I was paid more, but it still wasn’t enough to make ends meet. Once again, the credit card was piling up. He deferred his student loans (without discussing it with me). I was stressed about applying for TT jobs, learning new things at work, and working till 1 or 2 am every day. I was frustrated with my work and frustrated with home. I would tell him that I was very worried about my ability to support us. He didn’t think he should apply to jobs till after I got a permanent position. I told him I was worried that it wouldn’t happen for a while, if at all (like many people I’m seriously worried about the current state of scientific funding). I felt crushed by the responsibility of being the breadwinner and having all the financial pressure fall on me. I also felt so emotionally abandoned. I was alone. I was trapped. I hit the wall. I was crying every morning and every night. He would see me crying and say nothing. There are so many different kinds of intimacy, and I had none of them. I can’t say it was all because of alcohol, but alcohol played a role.
I have since entered counseling. My getting help has led to marriage counseling, and now individual counseling for him as well. He is no longer drinking, but our marriage is over. We have not had intimacy for nearly two years. It is hard to imagine it ever coming back. For now, we are working on moving forward and parents and friends.
Developments at MECMC (and Elsewhere!).
Today I meet with my boss and her co-director, their boss, and her boss (the CMO). I am giving a short presentation on the state of simulation efforts at MECMC , and then we’re all going to discuss how to move forward. Yesterday in prep I was talking to my boss’s co-director (who I will often also just refer to as “my boss”), and he told me that he wanted to see MECMC really invest in my work, develop a department for long-range efforts, build a bridge between research and quality improvement and have me direct the whole thing.
Um. How did I get here? Now, that’s still just a guy spitballing with me in his office. But the CMO seems to have a similarly ambitious vision for my ideas and industry. I’ll tell you more when I know more. But it is decidedly exciting that people with authority at one of America’s finest medical institutions are interested in developing my skills and putting me in leadership positions. That they want to explore a new direction, take risks, and invest in me. And it’s terrifying.
My path from lazy drunk to valuable asset has been blindingly fast, dazzlingly blurred. And unremarkable. In the sense that I have seen it happen so many times, for so many drunks who get sober. We rise fast through professional ranks, as a rule, because we are have a sense of urgency about our work. Employment becomes a source of serious gratitude. Having a job and being able to be self-sufficient and contribute feels like an incredible privilege after years in sloth and uselessness.
Of course, not everything I do works out. And I don’t always do a great job. I just got a brutal review from PLoS One on my recent manuscript. They complain that my simulated cohort is unclear and that they therefore can’t evaluate the appropriateness of my methods. And that’s probably true. I rushed the paper because I wanted to finish it before leaving my last position and really it needs to cite another paper that’s still under review itself. I shouldn’t have submitted it until the other one was accepted and could be cited. It’ll clarify everything. But I’ll still need to rewrite the second.
And the R03eq that was funded looks like – after months of drama – it can be accepted. I had the conflict of interest discussion with my bosses, and they agree that as long as I don’t use MECMC time and resources, it’s fine for me to work on the grant. Which is an exciting prospect, and will be a very cool project. And it’ll involve me having an excuse to buy a piece of software that I really want. And my colleague is the kind of guy who can build amazingly interesting papers out of small projects, so I’m excited to finally be able to collaborate with him.
So, time to go prepare for my presentation. While I’ve been writing this, a new colleague, in her third week with MECMC, has been complaining to another colleague that we’re not doing things “the right way”, by which she means the way she thinks people should do things. She’s nice and competent and might be right that in this case, her way is better. But I am unbelievably grateful that I no longer have to think that my perspective is the only perspective. I no longer have to think that people need to do things my way or the wrong way. I’m so grateful I don’t need to have people adhere to my vision in order to feel useful.
I have such a wonderful life, today. Because of my sobriety, I am open to so many things. And free from so many things. I am alive.
Infactorium 