Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
On the other end, Vivienne makes a little noise of disbelief.
“He’s not—though I can certainly see how it would seem that way because he handles all the politics and leadership nonsense.
But no, he’s not my boss and has never been,” she continues, which I’m grateful for.
I don’t know what to say. “It wasn’t an option for either of us.
Even if that meant staying long distance until we finally got funding together at the beginning of this year.
You know, we applied for a joint grant two years in a row, and they got turned down.
He absolutely would’ve had the resources to hire me on money he got for another project, but we both didn’t want that for our relationship.
So we tried again, and this time it worked.
Now he runs the lab and manages the people, but I steer the research because that’s my specialty and… Well, it works for both of us.”
I cringe inwardly, ashamed that I made assumptions about her that would make me furious if I were in her shoes. All this time I was worried about Jacob treating her how he’d treated me, when he seems to have learned from our relationship, like Vivienne said he had.
Maybe it’s time for me to learn from it, too.
“What would you have done if your application wouldn’t have been successful?” I ask.
“Honestly? I would’ve probably stayed in Paris, and tried for funding some other way,” Vivienne muses. “Even if long distance is horrible and it seemed silly to put ourselves through that any longer when I could’ve just worked for Jacob.”
She’s silent for a beat, and I wonder how things would’ve played out if I’d drawn such a clear line five years ago.
Karo showed me that boundaries are for keeping people in your life, not to push them out.
Maybe, if I’d said something earlier—if I’d given Jacob the opportunity to back off when he took over the wheel—our relationship would’ve taken a different course.
I’ll never know, but I do know I don’t need to repeat my mistakes.
“I get it,” I say.
“I thought you would,” Vivienne replies and I can hear the smile in her voice.
“Look, it wasn’t an easy decision and for a while I felt like I couldn’t find a way to make everything work that I wanted.
But in the end, it’s the same as running an experiment.
So often, it feels like they’re not working out—that we went wrong somewhere, made a mistake.
But if you really think about it, we always get an answer.
No matter how confusing the results, how unexpected, we get an answer to the question we were asking at that moment.
And especially when they’re unclear, they tell us, we need to take a step back and reevaluate.
It’s like shining a flashlight into the dark.
If there’s nothing in our cone of light, we know not to shine there again, but move elsewhere.
” After a moment of silence, she adds, “Or maybe we just need a different flashlight. A new perspective.”
I let her words sink in. Maybe it’s time for me, too, to throw out my old flashlight and try a new one.
At the Q and A event, after receiving the news about my last rejected grant, I’d told the students to put their eggs in many baskets, to find connection, and grow outside of work, because that’s how you manage the setbacks.
Maybe the time has come for me to heed my own advice and learn how to look out for myself.
Therapy has helped with that. Opening up in my first two sessions was hard, but I’ve realized I don’t want to pack down so much of myself anymore, especially not for a goal I’m not sure I’ll ever reach.
What I want is to put down roots, to hammer nails into the walls of my living room and hang up pictures rich with memories, to make friends I can cook dinner with, people whose lives I can see change right in front of my eyes and not through biannual updates in nondescript conference venues.
I want a life that’s hard to pack up, one that is full and grounding and confusing and messy, and very much not only about work.
I still want to make a difference, but the no matter what needs to go if I want to last.
Maybe I can put up boundaries. Not only for Lewis, if he’ll still have me, or for me and Karo, but for my own sake, too, so I get to have the life I want, with a career that works for me.
It’s something my new therapist hinted at in our last session, but I only grasp it now.
Maybe I’m not stuck with the two options I drew out on my whiteboard.
“Is this about the grant with Lewis?” Vivienne asks, tracking the direction of my thoughts.
“Yeah. That and everything else, too.” I bite my lip, and then the admission finally comes slipping out, the one that has been bouncing around between the walls of my skull since my last grant got rejected. Or maybe even longer than that.
“Vivienne, I love my research, but I don’t know if I can keep it up. I think I’m tired of academia. Of always having to think about the next next thing and feeling like I can never catch my breath.”
She’s silent for a beat, then: “I can try to help. You know, from one academic to another?”
When she said she’d like to be friends all those weeks ago, I didn’t think I’d end up asking her for relationship and career advice, but here we are. Talk about surprise stops along the way.
“How about friend to friend?” I ask back.