Familiar

It’s no secret that I love my family.

Family is the first opportunity for companionship. While you may not be able to choose your family, you can choose how close you draw to them. Therefore, your family is where you first learn what it means to love or be loved.

“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.” ~George Bernard Shaw

I have seen what true love looks like because of Team Newton. And while I could go on and on about that, I will save it for a later date as recent developments in my life have turned me to analyze something else.

“We raised you in a way that set you up to be lonely,” my mom told me at midnight a week before Thanksgiving.

What she meant was not that we were lonely people, but rather that we lived significantly different lives than the rest of the world. No one went to Mass with our family at Dance Competitions. Hardly anyone would plan on being sober on their 21st birthday. Sharing anything and everything with your parents and siblings? Even though there is a lot of praise for Gilmore Girls, there certainly are very few relationships like Lorelai and Rory’s in the real world.

The thing is, I was lonely.

I was not lonely because I did not have friends. Notre Dame Biology, Reslife, and CGC have given me some of the greatest friends. I was not lonely because all of my friends were in relationships or moving towards one. 

I was lonely because I did not know where I could connect with people like I did with my family.

There are many people who share in this situation. Many of us feel misunderstood, left out, or just misplaced. Sometimes it is even within our own homes. Because of a clear disconnect between the world around us and ourselves, we feel a sense of loneliness that is difficult to describe.

With my empathetic spirit, I often notice the loneliness.

As I response, I created communities around me and I called them “families.”

This really hurt my sisters’ feelings. Imagine being the younger sibling of someone who is constantly posting about her “family” online. My siblings actually would ask my mom if I still cared about them in the same way as before I left home. This was devastating for me to hear.

What I realized was that these “families” were not a family, but they all held a trait that the lonely people of this world can identify that is shared by families.

Familiarity.

There is a reason why family is part of the word “familiar.” In order for something to be familiar, one must be able to recognize something from themselves in something else. It makes sense biologically since we can see ourselves in our parents’ faces. Families also share a sort of a mini-culture to identify with, which then allows for even non-biological children to become a part of the family unit.

These “families” that I made were not truly families.

But each member shared something with another

Everyone was familiar with one another.

Now, we cannot always be with our families, and perhaps our family unit is not perfect. Familiarity is what allows for our hearts to connect to the world. And as time moves forward, that familiarity can grow further and further so that the relationship can resemble more and more aspects of a true family.

There are two stories of how I found familiarity that eased my homesickness.

And while I love my Bio Girls Squad, I will save that story for a later date.

This is the story of the Vaughan Lab.

As I have written before, I really did not take my return from Fall Break very well. I was sick with a bad cold, heartbroken, and home-sick in a way that I could not reason with. The sadness took away my ability to focus, and I ended up turning in a grant with the wrong font size, and I was rejected without review. That, and my friends had to deal with a less than whole Felicity.

Everything around me was changing

Nothing felt the same

And I could not figure out how to feel better.

There was one place that did not change: my lab. As evidenced by the many odd pictures and sticky notes and ancient instruments strung out around the place, the Vaughan Lab doesn’t really change. We do routine experiments that answer novel questions, but as a general rule of thumb, the Vaughan lab stays the same.

I was familiar with the experiments, the people, and the space. Much like my home in Nashville, I felt very safe in my little desk in the basement covered with bubblewrap and oddly shaped sticky notes.

I was happier in the lab than anywhere else on campus.

But it was not just the space that helped.

It was the people.

My advisor created a culture where we get to know one another as people moreso than we know one another as scientists. Sometimes it takes three tries to tell him my results because he is talking to me about life in general. Because the leader of a group defines the dynamics of the group itself, all of the members have adopted a similar conversation style.

As a result, I am familiar with the personalities of each member of my lab

And they are familiar with me.

There was a point in the beginning of the semester when I was completely exhausted, confused about an experiment, and hurt (like I literally cut my finger on a test tube). One of my undergrads was in the lab working on an experiment when he caught me crying. He gave me a big hug and he said

“We’re here for you”

We’re here. Not I’m here for you.

That was the first time that I realized how important familiarity is within a team. While none of the other members of the lab knew anything about how I was feeling, that undergrad could confidently say that they were here for me. I would have been happy if it had just been him, but it was significantly more comforting to know that I had an entire team beside me.

So when I came back from Fall Break, I let my lab become my support.

Why?

Because they were familiar with the real Felicity, the happy Felicity.

I let them have some insight in to what was happening in my life. While I did not tell them every detail, they heard me out and understood why I was struggling with certain things. They let me talk because they knew that I needed to talk. My advisor himself asked me why I had been so tired, not because my benchwork was bad, but because he wanted to make sure I was doing ok as a human being.

The best example of familiarity though would be my current mentee. I don’t think she was aware of it conciously, but I have to believe that subconciously that she knew something she could do for me.

I love teaching. It’s the one thing I haven’t screwed up since I started graduate school.

Everything is better when I'm teaching.

My mentee was working on essentially the same project as me. We had to start over after Fall Break because of another silly mistake I made early on. That meant we had many experiments with many steps, all of which taking a decent amount of time to work on. And while my mentee was completely capable of working without me in the lab, she would ask me to come in and make sure everything was perfect.

And since I loved teaching, I came in to the lab, happy to sit and watch her outperform me at each step.

When I could have just been wallowing in another space, I went to the lab. I spent more and more time among the people that already cared about me and desired for my success. They were familiar with my way of working and my way of talking.

Everything was familiar.

And everyone was familiar.

And I wasn’t lonely anymore.

Familiarity is transient though.

We cannot always be with these people. People change, move, and grow. And while we would love for everyone to be completely familiar to us, that just cannot be. We cannot wish for them to stay forever because we know that their lives will be better when they are where they are meant to be.

We all move and change.

Things may not be familiar.

And that’s ok.

What the Vaughan Lab taught me was that familiarity is something that we can choose. We can choose to get to know those around us and create a sense of familiarity among the members of our community. Things may change, but our ability to connect does not go away.

Team Newton is my true family. I know that they will love me forever, and I know that they will never leave me. 

With that knowledge, I know that I am never truly alone.

Thank you Mommy and Daddy for loving our family in this way. I am extremely blessed to have y’all. 

However, when Team Newton is not easily accessible, I know that by allowing myself to become familiar with those around me that I will be able to fight the loneliness that this world is constantly thrusting upon us.

Thank you to my platypups, my fellow grad student, my mentor, and my advisor. Y’all, with your constant gluten related jokes, failed experiments, references to Eggo Waffles, and awesomeness have made me feel at home here again.