i’ve never been the least bit tolerant of being stepped on. i’ve seen far too many attempts come at me, i can identify that shit miles away, and i don’t respond well to it. i will not make the least hesitation to walk away from those situations. i may be a nobody postdoc in my field, but i have my limits.
in my first postdoc, they skipped the stepping-on attempts and opted for the steamroller. just a few months and sheer exhaustion of running from that steamroller later, i initiated a job search. if they were going to treat postdocs that way, i wasn’t going to volunteer to sacrifice my career/self-respect/self-confidence for it. i did the science there dispassionately and because i had to, i wrote an award application with full intensity, and i waited. and waited. and waited for that award letter.
in the meantime i got crushed under that steamroller. i fell apart in so many ways, i can’t even describe them all. i even lost sight of who i was- the people i met there never got to know the real me. but i stuck it out and ended things as professionally as possible- because they hadn’t destroyed my self-respect. the day i quit that job was the best day of my post-doctoral life, but it also found me the lowest and most wretched that i had felt/been in many years.
if there ever was a test of my resiliency, that would be it. i’ve seen my share of adversity and bounced back to functionality from all of it, but this was a different kind of monster. it took a lot of work, but a few months after that ordeal ended i’ve mastered yet another comeback. i’ve put the pieces of my life back together once again. the things about myself that i lost have been located and shined up a bit. my sleeves are rolled up, my ass-kicking boots are on, sights are laser-focused on my new goals in my new environment. i have yet to be knocked off-course by some fuckwit with power-abusing tendencies.
