my supervisor and my job

I love my supervisor. She's amazingly smart but seems unaware of it. She doesn't use her job or her life as a way of proving how smart she is; she just is. She doesn't really care that she didn't pursue the education and career that her abilities would be associated with; she's happy. She's laid-back and outspoken; she swears freely. As scrupulous as she is with science, she lacks the neurotic and uptight tendencies that usually go along with that. She has reddish blondish brown curls that are typically tied up in a bundle and the fray curls wisp in every direction, and that along with her blue eyes and long face make her a frenetic unconventional beauty. She has an amazing work ethic, not in the sense that she works without breaks or comes in every weekend (she's very good at work/personal boundaries and making her own life hers) but she does everything with the care and accuracy that's required when you're doing something for the first time. Except she does it over and over, all the time, this way.

Her mother was diagnosed with leukemia awhile ago and passed away just a couple weeks after they found out. Being the only sibling in the area and also the only one with in depth knowledge of leukemia, my supervisor had to juggle taking care of her parents, talking to the doctors, researching new treatments, informing everyone in the family of what was going on, and making sure her own child was coping okay. I've been surprised to find out about my supervisor's family's hematological problems considering that's her field, and these problems arose after she'd chosen it. Her son has hemophilia, and then her mom gets leukemia. She was unsurprisingly devoted, practical and capable throughout it all, but not without feeling and sadness. That fragile/strong dichotomy gets me all the time.

We've been tracking the progress of leukemia patients pre and post-bone marrow transplant (which was not an option for my supervisor's mom who was too elderly and sick to survive an operation like that). My supervisor is very invested in these patients, even though she's not a physician and she's not directly taking care of them and in most cases she hasn't met them. She gets genuinely disappointed to see someone relapsing and sincerely wishes to see progress. She so easily makes the connection between paper results and real people. There is a particular woman who she's really pulling for, because she's been through so many different treatments. During the first difficult week when my supervisor's mom had been diagnosed and they knew she'd only have a little time left, my supervisor was tracking this woman's cancer. She always updates me, even though I'm not the one doing that part of the project. She told me the woman was negative for disease, and she looked so happy to be telling me. It wasn't an overt display of joy; it was there in the creases and corners.

I thought how rare it is to be so happy for another person's fortune when your own is dreary. I can't say that I'm always like that; I have jealous tendencies. But it made me very thankful that our work, as steeped in concepts and theories and the grind of experiments as it is, is based on real people.

I like my job. A huge part of that is my supervisor. Other parts of it have to do with jobs in general. I've learned so differently this year. School is linear and structured and designed to educate. I've got a handle on how to follow that; I'm good at routine and learning from books with clearcut purposes and narratives. Tossed into real life, you see that you learn things in scattered pieces, often without a story, and you have to put the effort into seeing how it works or realizing that it doesn't. This applies to the big picture as well as just figuring what the hell you're doing on a daily basis. Also, mistakes. Many of them. And it's hard to think of your job the way you would a curved organic chem test, where 60% correct is not that bad. But it's also what makes it satisfying.

There are frustrating times and wasted hours, but the good, productive moments compensate for the others. I'm not contributing anything that will be very important in anyone's life, not broadly or on an individual interaction basis the way teaching or other relationships are. But I can see different avenues of doing so in the future, and that view helps an enormous amount. I like the intellectual challenge of figuring things out, and explaining what goes on in your body. It's scary not to know, and in trying to just know, I think there's an element of what happens when you teach someone something and they get it and they feel better for it. Also, I don't think scientific inquiries are so different from other kinds. It strives for a more concrete, objective understanding, but at the end of the day, who really knows why it works like that, why things are made to function a certain way? Sure, it works because this causes that and it works well this way and you can see the beauty of a well-ochestrated pathway, but there are always other equally good ways. Why it's this way is a question of all disciplines.

What bothers me about a lot of work in general is that I can easily imagine someone else doing it in my place; I don't find that I bring anything uniquely valuable or that I'm doing it any better than someone else could. I think I did all my past jobs well enough but there was no real reason that it was me doing it; the same goes for my job now. Right now, I feel it's okay for the balance to be tipped in my favor--that because I'm still learning it's okay that I'm getting more out of this experience than I can give it. Because it contributes to a feeling that I've never had, one I'm still developing and don't quite have yet--the feeling that there does exist a path that I am specifically suited to. There is something that I'm not just adequate for, but that I'm meant and exactly fitted for. All the things along the way change your shape or make you see a nook you hadn't noticed so that you end up fitting something only you can fit into.