Enough

I like cleaning. Perhaps not the most interesting or progressive hobby to enjoy, but I find it cathartic. You see a stack of used dishes, fill the sink, and 5 minutes later, they’re clean. Ready to be dried and put away; checked off the list of things to be done. Same goes with vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing the bathroom – there’s something that’s dirty and with a relatively minor amount of work, it’s clean again. Though it’s a continuous process, and therefore a good hobby since you must repeat it so often, it’s satisfying to know when you’re done, to see progress and enjoy the outcome of your efforts.

I didn’t mow the lawn much growing up – it was a task better left to my brother. I preferred the cool of air conditioning to the heat and humidity of Midwestern summers spent in the sun, cutting grass. But with my own home, living alone, it’s either mow or pay someone. Unwilling to part with $20 for a little over an hour job, I do my own yard work. Surprisingly, or maybe not so much so, I find it equally rewarding. Straight lines, back and forth, front to back, across the extent of this property I bought. Squeezing the handle made my wrists ache at first – it must be an unfamiliar position – but they have adjusted. By the end of this season, it felt natural – I knew why the mower stopped, how high the grass could grow before I needed to raise the deck, how much gas to pour in before the tank overflowed. I like trimming less – you have to carry that tool around rather than just pushing it, and it gets heavy. But still, I make sure to open all my blinds after I finish so I can enjoy the yard. I once missed a spot and it bothered me all week. Not enough to drag out the mower and fix it, but enough to frown over it – glare at it even – as it marred the perfection of the job I had completed over the weekend.

I find definite answers to be the most reassuring. You’re done when the grass is all short and neat, the kitchen doesn’t need attention after the dishes are clean, counters disinfected and floor mopped. I have tasks – clearly defined and easy to understand – and I can do them, knowing with all certainty that I did well.

Research isn’t like that. Definitive endpoints are horrifically difficult to achieve. By nature, the community is critical and questioning – you should have designed the study without this confound; you could have used X’s method rather than Y’s and noted greater reproducibility; these results are flawed; this interpretation is more speculation than fact; your patient population is skewed and doesn’t represent the true status of those who suffer from this disease. There are always problems, and while some are due to inevitable mistakes and can be corrected, some issues are continuously present. I believe if I could design a perfect study – all the right background information, no confounds, perfect patient population, impeccable methods – there would still be some questions, problems and comments about the results I presented.

This is positive – few mistakes slip by the scientific community without comment because we’re trained to tear things apart, play devil’s advocate, question someone’s training and qualifications, and continuously review what is known, how we know it and what degree of confidence we have in the current knowledge. The problem, especially for someone like me, is the erosion of confidence that comes with never being done, never knowing enough, never calling a project a triumph. Because there aren’t any triumphs, really. Steps forward, yes, but always with an eye toward the future path. I think the arrogance – the desire for people to acknowledge our training and the years spent in education, the battle over author order on papers, the need to be Principle Investigator or not involved with a grant proposal at all, the awards, the accolades – stems from never feeling like you’ve done enough. So please reward me for trying, for making progress, though I know there was no overall triumph. It’s like the shower in the bathroom still has that weird soap-scum around the drain, the lawn is only mowed down one side and has a little strip cut through the center, you didn’t trim around the fence in the backyard at all, there are pots and pans still soaking in the kitchen sink…

So I may work all my life, do good work, help people, create an environment that invites new ideas and encourages diligent work, maybe even answer a couple of critical questions in my little niche of cancer research. But I’m afraid that all I’ll see when I look back are those missed spots – the soap-scum, uncut grass, trimming that should have been done, and pots and pans that never quite got clean. It’s discouraging, and I’m noticing even now that I focus on the critical things that didn’t happen, rather than the nice ones that did.

I feel like that in writing too. Clearly, I’m just starting out, and don’t have any training that leads me to believe I have much of anything to say or the talent with which to say it. But it helps me – seeing things on a screen, reading over something I’ve created. And I’m making progress – I like seeing the number of posts counter go up on my blogger dashboard. So I’m content with this little piece hobby in that respect.

But I had a nightmare last night that someone discovered my little site here. A person I will in all likelihood never meet, but whose writing I greatly admire and look forward to reading more of. The thought of such a person – with elegance of words and strength of character – reading what is located here is disturbing. While it’s clear that posts appear online with the vague hope that someday someone might read them, I find it incredibly comforting that nobody has happened to find this. It’s just for me – to find my voice, to spill out words, to be stupid and obsessive and self-involved. And it’s not ready for anyone to see yet – it’s not enough. Not enough content, not enough growth – I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say sometimes.

Will it ever be enough? Or will I continue to see the flaws – the posts that ramble on too long, those that won’t be meaningful to anyone but me, the lack of humor, the babble about abstract concepts rather than real events… Maybe there is a point where you say you’ve done enough – in research, in writing, in life. Maybe I just don’t see it yet, or worse yet, maybe I’m the type of person who will never see it at all. But for now, I’m at the “not yet” stage. Don’t give me a real job yet – I’m still in training - done with the education, but not ready to tackle reality at this point. Don’t read this blog yet – it’s not representative of what I think is important, of who I am, of what my academic experiences have been.

Not yet – that indicates that there will be a time when there’s enough, right? I’m just not quite there…not yet.