Who Am I?

There has been a lot of talk about finding one’s identity lately. This is mostly due in part to Taylor Swift’s newest single “Look What You Made Me Do” or LWYMMD for short. While I think finding one’s identity is important, I do have some concerns with this song. However, I do not wish to make this post a roast on Taylor Swift.

Rather I would like to point out the underlying issue which brought this uncharacteristic song to the top of the charts.

We are all too ready to let others dictate our lives.

As soon as society decides that something in our personality is wrong, or if we hear that some crucial part of our lives is considered unimportant, we try to remove this aspect from our lives. We’ll change so that people will stop identifying us with something they’ve deemed as unworthy or unlovable.

We fear that the critics will identify us with that one thing

Even worse, we let that one piece become our entire identity. 

Taylor actively decided to highlight that she was a snake in her song. Women who are “slut-shamed” often start to just give themselves over to the next guy who looks her way. Academic failures will drop out of school because they do not believe that it is for them.

Whether we run from what we are hated for or embrace it more than we ought to, we all want to erase the hate.

After all, nothing is worse than being hated right?

No.

The worst thing we can do is lose ourselves for the sake of the hateful words around us. Sure, we can improve our lives for the sakes of those who are affected by us, but we cannot change who we are just so that a few harsh words don’t come our way.

Those words will always be there, regardless of how much we change. Someone else will receive the same words as us, and they cannot avoid it.

What are we to do?

I belive that there are two things we have to do in the face of the hate.

First, we have to embrace the reality of who we are.

Society may say things about snakes, mentally challenged, mentally ill, physically ill, millenials, baby boomers, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, Scientists, Musicians, Athletes…the list could go on forever. Whatever it is that people nit-pick about you, don’t let it change the reality of what it means to be a person who partakes in that activity, belief system, or way of life.

Unless they are part of that community, they may never fully understand the truth.

Take my lab for example.

We are described as a lab that does “esoteric bullshit,” which loosely means that we study small details of life that no one understands or believes is real. It seems like all we do is make up stuff and somehow make it sound relevant to the world.

“It’s not real,” they say

“It’s too good to be true,” reviewers say.

After enough rejected grants and manuscripts and proposals, I can honestly say that it would be easier if I just stopped and accepted that maybe everything they say about my work is true.  It would be nice to stop trying so hard to change the field of cell biology. My life and future career would be so much smoother if I could half-ass my experiments and just graduate.

However, my advisor does not allow for bullshit.

If we want people to accept our model, if we want to be successful, then we have to give it our best. In fact, the quality of my images, my blots, my sequencing, anything really is not considered worthwhile until everything is done perfectly and tell a story without a shadow of a doubt. We have to be the most straightforward and honest cell biologists in the field.

Unless we do what we do to our best ability, no one is going to believe us.

So too should we live our lives.

People will never fully understand what it is like to be someone else. As much as we would like to admit that we empathy for our neighbors, we often choose to take bits and pieces of the truth. We see the missing links, the imperfections, and the problems associated with someone else’s life. It’s not your fault that people don’t believe you. They just don’t know the truth about you.

So show them the truth.

Don’t half ass your life or try to be someone else to make them believe you.

Never give up.

Last Friday, I watched the movie Rudy (for the millionth time) on the ND football field. For those of my Dear Readers who do not know the story, Rudy is about a young man who was far too small to play football and not academically inclined fought his way through life and ultimately ended up playing two plays for Notre Dame.

The world said no, and yet Rudy continued to fight.

Rudy let himself be beat to a pulp practice after practice, and he never let someone tell him no.

Rudy embodies the second aspect of facing the haters.

The second thing we need to do in the face of adversity is believe. It is one thing to do our best, to be as true to who we are and do what we ought to, but it is a different thing entirely to believe in who we are. Belief forces us to face the unseen every day, and it calls us to be accept that we do not know everything.

To believe in oneself, in one’s mission, in something greater than us changes how we present ourselves.

If we choose to believe in that piece of ourselves that the world is so willing to discount, then we are untouchable. The words thrown at us cannot win if we believe in who we are, in what we do, in anything. Not because we aren’t affected, but because our outlook is past the haters.

When we believe, we act differently.

And people see those actions.

Rudy could not have dressed or even practice with the team had Coach Parseghian not seen the heart behind his practice. He could not have looked in to the eyes of that young man and give him a chance that no one thought should go to him. Coach Parseghian was a wonderful man, and his soul is certainly with his three grandchildren in Heaven, but he was no miracle worker.

He saw Rudy’s belief because of his actions.

Now, no one will see our hearts if we do not believe in ourselves first and in our own way.

My advisor forces his students to reiterate their results over and over again. At first, I thought this was because he forgot my results. I thought that he didn’t think I was important enough to go over data with. Eventually it got to the point that I stated my results in short, somewhat angry sentences. 

I could not be more clear.

Everything I did in lab was important. If not to my advisor, then to me and my 12 undergrads. I planned and executed extra experiments following my own ideas. All I wanted was to prove my hypothesis to myself, and I worked as hard as I could for as long as I could.

I believed in my project.

And my advisor heard me.

I’m still starstruck from the day when my advisor told me that I had progressed more than he expected, and that he was impressed with what I had done and what I planned to do.

The same thing happened with my own undergraduate mentee. I could sense her frustration as I forced her to share her data over and over again. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what we were looking at. I wanted her to tell me what mattered. I wanted to see the fire in her eyes, the kind that I only saw in my advisor’s and a few other PI’s who worked on questions no one believed in.

It broke my mentee, just a little bit.

But man…when she finally got it, when she finally saw the value behind her own work, she shined.

She shined so much that she won an award for her talk, even though Notre Dame students were supposed to receive an award at that meeting. 

The director of undergraduate studies finally believed in our model because my mentee was able to clearly explain and define and demonstrate the truth behind what we studied. The light in her eyes and in the gestures she made, she brought us down the path of disbelief and showed just how real our novel mechanism was. It had taken years, but at long last, this professor actually understood what we studied.

My mentee was rewarded for her heart and her passion, which is far greater than the exceptional experiments that she performed.

And I could not be more proud of that acheivement.

People won’t believe that there is good in many of the things you do. People won’t believe in the truth if we ourselves do not believe. People will hate you and scorn you and abandon you. However, when they see your heart, they will turn around. They will see the truth for what it is.

Beauty.

The most beautiful souls that walk this Earth are those that are willing to risk it all for the sake of the truth. The truth of what their lives really mean. No one can change you, but you can choose to be changed by society.

Don’t let anyone tell you who you are.

Don’t do something because someone spoke down on you.

You are worth far more than any aspect of your life, of your career, of anything really.

You just have to believe.