I’ve never had much patience for those girls that reinvent themselves in their boyfriend’s image every relationship. You know, when they’re dating a beer-loving football fan they develop a taste for stella and when they’re dating a cricket lover and wine aficionado it’s all about a nice Beaujolais.
Of course if you’re friends with someone like that, how much you have in common depends on who they’re dating – and that’s kinda weird.
But, post-breakup is a time for reinvention. And so I’ve cut my hair dramatically, bought new clothes, and upped my workouts. Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? And I’ve evaluated what new experiences from my ex I want to keep – no to Woody Allen movies, for example, but yes to (vegetarian) sushi. And then I’ve started some new ones – 6am bootcamp, Ally McBeal, the Awesome Foundation, my internship.
The biggest change though, comes from the reassessment of my life I made when I realized I was starting to burn out – I have free time. And during it, I ask myself – What does Cate want to do?
It’s wonderful. I recommend it highly.
And so whilst being a little lost, and a little lonely (my ex was my best friend for the entire time we were together, and we’re not currently speaking – it would be weird if I wasn’t lonely) – I’m happier than I’ve been in some time. I come home from work and it’s not the many things I have to get done – it’s the things I want to. And they are not all happening, but that’s OK. I’m giving myself a break – I deserve it.
Back in March, I had a really terrible week. My paper got rejected and I realized I wasn’t going to be able to finish this semester, and the following day, my boyfriend and I broke up.
It’s not uncommon for a paper to be rejected, however, frustratingly, the comments I got were mostly aspects of it that I had been unhappy with, that I had asked for help with, but, perhaps given the short time frame had not got the feedback I needed to fix. Finishing this semester was always tight, and this was really the final straw – my internship this summer is probably better for my employment prospects than a masters degree, and I was risking going in there burnt out and distracted, which I can’t afford to do.
My boyfriend and I had been together for over a year and a half, in fact, he was one of the first people I’d met when I got to Ottawa. I always found this rather romantic, but I had been aware for a while that this meant my identity here was somewhat tied up in being his girlfriend, and most of the friends I have here are mutual. We had been living together, so this was a further complication. Fortunately, he had somewhere to go so I didn’t have to deal with a post-breakup cohabitation nightmare as well.
I don’t fail often, but here were two – huge – failures in one week. I crashed. I’ve been pushing myself so hard and all of a sudden I didn’t have as many pressing deadlines. I also didn’t have anyone to notice if I stayed in my pajamas all day watching My Family. I was physically ill from – I don’t know – exhaustion? Stress? Misery? I pushed myself so hard, for so long, that when it all came crashing down, I did too.
Credit: flickr / James Jordan
This is normal. But yes, this is when my posting schedule went to hell. It’s been on my mind – failure – so it was hard to write about other things. I didn’t have the perspective that I needed to write clearly, and without blame. Initially, my explanation was that we were married to grad school – and cheating on it, with each other. Because honestly? That’s what I had been feeling like, for months. Then I got angry – at the two 30-somethings who had spent most of last winter in our apartment to the point where one day we looked at each other and asked, “how did we end up parenting two 30-somethings?” – that should have been our honeymoon period. They ruined it.
And, of course, he blamed me too – for working too much, and for taking that job in Shanghai last summer.
I am 24 years old, and I am having trouble balancing my ambition with my personal life. I don’t have children. I don’t want children. Partly because I think all this talk of “having it all” and “balance” is a load of crap. We make choices. We prioritize our careers. If we date someone as focused, we might never get to see them. If we date someone less focused, they don’t understand our choices. If we prioritize our personal life, we risk giving things up, making compromises for something that ultimately may not work out. This cuts both ways, of course, but somehow – call me a cynic, sure – a career seems a more certain and reliable thing than our relationship. I know we’re not supposed to say it and there are women that manage but… I can’t see how having children can not affect your career. And what if they grow up to be traffic wardens? Or politicians? Then what? I hear you love them no matter what but I have a hard time believing that is true of traffic wardens. (Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage(Amazon), by the way, is a fascinating exploration of women and marriage – and the compromises women make for family.)
I know very few grad students in relationships. Graduate school is not conducive to a balanced life, and as a result is often not conducive to relationships, other than those with anti-depressants, alcohol, and electronic devices.
Credit: flickr / squarewithin
So, in all, I’ve been knocked for six. And so, I’ve been doing less, whilst I try and regain my balance. It’s amazing; I’m properly living alone, for the first time in my life, and I have all this space – in my apartment, in my head, in my schedule, to just be. And of course I’ve used some of that in mindless TV watching – My Family, Lipstick Jungle, Brothers and Sisters and Big Bang Theory – but what’s been amazing is that when I’ve had to focus, I’ve created some of my best stuff. The other day, I woke up with the math clear in my head for a fractal. My workshop the other day was really successful, and I’m really proud of the content. I’ve read several books – including Women Don’t Ask (which merits it’s own blog post, and will get one). And I’ve been exercising more, and having the time to actual consider what I’m eating and when – rather than just refueling so I can continue to run about.
My life is changing, and that is really scary because it’s like starting over. But I think this pause is helpful – to take stock, to reevaluate. And I’m not going to change completely, but maybe I am going to do a little less, because when you’re constantly moving, you can’t see the view, and because doing less could mean doing fewer things better.
Several months ago, I met someone who had been reading my blog. We had a chat, but from some things that she said I got the impression that my blog made me seem a bit too much like super-woman. I’m not, as you may have noticed, because since then I’ve tried to temper my writing with stories of failure, or general inadequacy.
Why? Because I aspire to be a role model. We don’t have enough of them, as female programmers. The high profile ones are out of reach – I’m not ever going to be like Marissa Myer, for example. So I think what we need are the women in who are happy, successful, and in a place that we can realistically aim for.
In the midst of some recent angst-ing, I was on chat with one of my role models and mentors. She was super helpful – acknowledged what I was getting worked up about, but then gave me some advice. Not on the basis that I should do better, but on the basis that I am better than the person who I had allowed to bother me. I can choose my reaction. I’m trying to choose a better one.
I’m always striving to do better, and beating myself up because I don’t live up to my unrealistic expectations. And then I’m making myself feel worse by comparing myself to other people, when the situation is completely different – a factor of age, or profession, or focus, or timing. The dot-com bubble occurred when I was between 10 and 15. For much of that my family didn’t even have a computer. Of course, my career will be different from someone who was in the industry then.
It’s easy to look for role models and think – I want X’s personal life, but Y’s career. But are we being realistic? X may have compromised on career for that great personal life, and Y may have compromised their personal life for that career. We don’t know. Ultimately, we will have to make our own choices and our own compromises and hope to be happy with the final result.
Anyway, as I try – frantically – to graduate, I’m thinking about what I want my future to look like, and I’m looking for role models.
I’ve had a rough couple of weeks. I was told my work didn’t make a contribution, went through a rocky patch with my boyfriend, had loads of events for WISE, including one huge, never been done before one, had the whole job search and resume writing process, wrote a paper in just over a week, hurt my lower back trying to teach a small child to ski and aggravated my knee injury training.
Over the course of this, I’ve been trying to come up with something new and interesting to write on this blog 5 days a week. I often think of these ideas on the walk to school, and honestly, there have been days when I felt so strung out that what I wanted to write about was how I felt like I was having some kind of nervous breakdown, and how do you tell?
I haven’t. In part because I like to be positive here, but also because I had a job interview on Wednesday and I didn’t want that post going out the day I was Googled (yes, they checked out my website). But then I was looking at the posts that I’ve had featured on Brazen Careerist: there’s The Importance of Perspectives (where I admit that I’ve not been loving what I do lately), Dream Big or Go Home (where I admit to being afraid to fail) and Rediscovering Balance (where I write about last semester being miserable and needing to take a break from my life). Of course, I try and give these a positive spin, and focus on the things I’m learning from the experience. But is that the posts people find most useful/interesting? Not my tech-focused posts like this one on humans and developers, or this one on Facebook?
The truth is, that I take on a lot and want to bring 110% to everything I do, but ultimately sometimes I can’t bring 110% or I screw up and this devastates me. I set myself aggressive goals, challenge myself constantly and as a result Ifail everyday. I feel like a failure a lot of the time, but I try to believe that I am only a failure if I stop trying.
So why have the last few weeks been so difficult? I’ve finally had some space to think and I think it’s not the volume, it’s the intensity; i.e. it’s not how much I’m trying to do, it’s how important the things happening right now are. Maybe this is normal as graduation approaches? The university stuff is stressful because this is something I’ve been working on for months, and it directly impacts when I will graduate. The job hunting stuff, well we all know that’s stressful, right? I think it’s the waiting. I interviewed on Wednesday and at the end of the day Thursday I haven’t heard. On Wednesday I was positive, but as I write this (on Thursday afternoon) all I can think of is better examples to answer every question and a concept for the problem we were talking about that I think is really workable (I had the genesis of this idea in the interview, but not enough to think it worth mentioning. Now it’s fully formed). I was convinced after the interview that I would be a perfect fit for this project – and I still 100% believe that – but, I’m also 75%+ convinced I’m going to be rejected and debating my backup plan – should I ski in New Zealand, do yoga in Ibiza? Apply to a work experience/language program in France? Or, stop running away and keep putting myself out there for potential rejection.
There’s an obvious analogy between dating and job hunting, but here’s the kicker: if some guy rejects you it’s easy to rationalize, weird uber-Catholic interfering parents, for example, or (the classic) commitment issues. But when a successful and innovative company rejects you, it has to be you, right? Either you wouldn’t be great at it, or you didn’t present yourself in such a way that you managed to convince someone else you would be great at it.
Now, time for my positive spin. How have I been hiding my meltdown? Literally physically hiding is one way, I guess. Aside from my non-response to email, who can tell? I have been (trying to) maintain a positive attitude in conversation, where instead of moaning about “oh I’m so overwhelmed” I talk about what I’m doing instead. I’ve tried to minimize my commitments, but keep the ones I have made already (I hate being flaky, the guilt of letting someone down typically is more time consuming than actually doing the thing I’ve committed to). Last week, I gave myself a break from working out. I’ve grabbed relaxation time whilst I could, e.g. watching movies whilst marking and running experiments – I find I focus better on boring and somewhat mindless tasks if I’ve allocated a distraction, and as a result I’m less likely to be sidetracked by other distractions.
And going forward, what can I change? Really, I want to try not to cram so many stressful/highly important things together in a short space. I think for the past 3 weeks, it’s been unavoidable, but maybe I could have managed it better – or managed expectations better so that during this period people at least stopped asking me for things. But aside from that, being told my work had no value hit me for six, and I spent a week and a half feeling discouraged by that (or, until I had a meeting where someone who understood better what I was doing made it clear that he didn’t think that was the case). Linking my productivity to my self-esteem is not great. Linking my self-esteem to what someone who doesn’t know what I’m doing says about my work, though, is really ridiculous, and I see that now. I should be confident enough in what I’m doing, the value I’m creating, and in the feedback I’m getting from so many other people that this one person doesn’t carry that much weight with me. So I guess I’ll be working on that, too.
My life has been out of balance for as long as I can clearly remember. And I know, the most successful women embrace that imbalance but my feeling is that mine has been too far out of balance, or perhaps just too imbalanced in the wrong way.
Last semester, I was in so much pain from dislocating my kneecap a lot of activities were off the table. I worked a lot. My TA frankly sucked. I achieved some things that made me really happy, but the pressure that I felt because what I was working on was always defined took it out of me. I had too much structure, and not enough freedom and creativity.
This semester, I’m trying to re-equilibriate. That means working hard, but carving out time to be inspired and un-pressured. I bunked off today, and as a result finished something that I’ve been working on for weeks. The time I needed was there in my schedule, but what wasn’t was the freedom I need to be inspired.
Teaching skiing on Sundays is so far amazing for my balance. I spend the day without my phone (or computer!), outside, doing something physical. And I return too exhausted to do anything other than watch movies and go to bed. Then, I sleep for 12 hours. I’m not sure how much I enjoy being a ski instructor, but I do enjoy skiing, and the feeling of achievement when after an hour I see an improvement in a student’s skiing. I think, though, what I really enjoy is not being a grad student. It’s like a break from my life.
I want a life that I’m sufficiently happy with that I don’t need to take breaks from it. But I don’t think I will have that whilst I’m at graduate school.
With WISE, lately, I’ve been delegating as much as I can. There have been some teething problems, but what I notice is that I’m doing more but it’s easier – I’ve tipped the balance from a list of obligations to inspirations. I need to do that more in my life, generally. So tonight, even though I know what I should do is go ski training, what I’m going to do is go to Body Pump followed by Body Balance. Because, honestly, I know what I need to do to improve my skiing. It’s 1) buy new ski boots and 2) go and work on being able to ski on one leg (dislocating my kneecap didn’t just imbalance my life) and do consistent short radius turns down a black run until my thighs burn. And what I need to do to improve my feeling of imbalance is to make a shift from “what I should do” to “what I want to do”.
There are three ways to do this, I think. One is to rejig things, which is what I’ve done with WISE and my schedule by bunking off.
Option two is to ignite my passion again, so something goes from “should” to “want to”. Going back to kickboxing in January, it was a bit of a should. But I’ve upped my fitness to the point where I can go to the non-beginner classes and it’s starting to become a “want to”, instead. For school, on Saturday I was working but came across something that was really inspiring and as a result was able to clarify some things I’d been thinking, then I had a brief chat with my co-supervisor which was so helpful after the other day (he seems to have read what I’ve worked on, and see things more in line with how I’m seeing them).
Third, and finally, I think leverage is important. Leverage is buying new ski boots (my current ones are so beat up they don’t fit right anymore and keep coming undone when I ski hard). Leverage was getting a trainer when I started going back to the gym because it was helpful for using my time there best, and motivation. Leverage has been getting someone else to write my CV – I’ve found that the amount of time I’ve put in has been about the same as it would take me to write a (mediocre) resume, but hopefully as a result I’ll get a much better one. I also feel more prepared for interviews. Leverage, is delegating stuff to other people for WISE, we had a big event on Saturday, and are introducing monthly “workshops” – so we’re achieving more as a group now I’m not a bottleneck. It can scary to give up control, but it can also be empowering.
I guess for everything that gives me this feeling of “don’t want to”, I need to consider whether I can rejig, ignite, or leverage to make the situation better. Because ultimately, I don’t want to rediscover balance, I want an imbalance – I just want a better one.
On Wednesday, uOttawa WISE had the latest talks in our Inspiring Women series. As has happened every time so far, I think this is the best yet. How do we top it in February? (OK I have a sneak preview of what will be happening in February, and that’s going to be awesome too).
Our speakers were: Dr. Jennifer Decker, Team Leader, Metrology for Nanotechnology, Institute for National Measurement Standards, National Research Council Canada; and Mrs. Stephanie De Silva, Head, Monograph Management Unit, Natural Health Products Directorate, Health Canada.
I didn’t make notes about specifics, so I’m just going to write a little about the different themes it pulls out for me.
First up, I was struck by the similarities in what these two women spoke about, despite the disparity in their career paths and ages. We think we’re unique, that our problems are special in some way, but they’re not. We all have similar things that arise, we just deal with them differently. We all struggle to find balance, but being imbalanced is okay – if we manage our imbalances. I.e. unbalanced weeks are okay, but we can aim for our overall life to be in balance.
Second, I was reminded of Clay Shirky’s “A Rant About Women”, which I blogged about the other day. Both of them had been persistent in getting the job they wanted – without being pushy. If you want to work in the government, calling regularly to say, “so, how’s my application going?” is likely a good idea.
This is something I struggle with, and it was a reality check for me. I released on Monday but I’m not sure some people who I wanted to notice had (it’s hard to pick out one tweet in a stream if you follow a lot of people). And I knew I should message them and say, “hey, thought you’d like to know I released this” but I was prevaricating because maybe they noticed and weren’t that interested.
Seriously, I was holding off letting people know who had already expressed an interest in my work, that I had released something new. OK, I don’t want to be a jerk but this is likely going to far the other way! And isn’t it more arrogant to think they would just notice? People are busy, I’m just one person in a stream of information. Saying, hi and letting them know is not such a big deal! So I pulled myself together and put it out there. I’ll probably do it a couple of people at a time.
(As I write this, I’ve contacted two people. One of them replied within an hour suggesting we connect via phone next week. Seriously – why was I prevaricating?)
Third was asking for help. Stephanie has a young family, and wasn’t ashamed to say that being a working mom was made possible by the help of her friends and family and the support of her husband. This was echoed by Dr. Decker. I think we can be reluctant to ask for help because we think we should know, but none of us is superwoman! The most effective people I know don’t mind asking for help, and do it with regularity. There’s nothing less effective than spending hours struggling with something that someone else could take 5 minutes to set you on the right track with, really, is there?
So Thursday morning I took the thing I’d been struggling to write for nearly a week now and emailed the guy who asked me to do it. Because I’m angsting that I’m on the wrong track. And he can just tell me, and probably make some really helpful suggestions. Of course he was nice about it, and arranged to meet me later the same day.
The fourth, and final aspect, was failure. Some people get seized up by failure, and waste their time berating themselves about it. But if you’re not failing, you’re not pushing yourself. So fail, dust yourself off, and try again.
So far this is the best new name I have for my blog. I’m still brainstorming, but this is a story I want to tell and now is as good a time as any.
I wrote, a while ago, about how I don’t have Imposter Syndrome any more. Perhaps it would have been better to say, I mostly don’t have impostor syndrome. Sometimes I don’t feel geeky enough. I don’t subscribe to xkcd (although I do appreciate the ones that I see), and I’ve never watched Star Wars or Star Trek, don’t understand the distinction, and I’m not particularly interested to either. I don’t drink Red Bull and stay up all night coding.
The nerdiest thing I ever did was get fed up with Windows when I was 16 and wiped it off my hard-drive, replacing it with RedHat. Only I was at boarding school, with no internet connection, and couldn’t download all the necessary drivers. So my dad took it in to PC World, they fixed it, and I put up with Windows until I eventually got my first Mac nearly 3 years later.
I learned HTML at 13 or 14, but didn’t learn to code until I was 16 (when I learned C in school). Then I went to University to study Chemistry, I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do but I liked making stuff go fizz and occasionally burst into flames. My DOS (director of studies) put me in Computer Science as an elective, and I took the mandatory math course.
Part way through my first semester, I went to him and said “I hate Computer Science”. I was frustrated by being taught programming through slides, not doing (I still don’t think this works well, especially not for beginners), and weirded out by all the boys who didn’t seem to wash regularly. I was also completely mystified by “Object Orientated Programming”, having learned procedurally. I could explain it beautifully, but the concept just made no sense to me. I remember a professor commenting in my third year that Computer Science had changed because you couldn’t expect everyone coming in to have taught themselves a good chunk of what they needed to know anymore – because there were non-geeks. Non-geeks like me.
My DOS bribed me to stay in CS for another semester, promising he’d get me into Economics the following year. Anyway, it turned out Chemistry didn’t have enough explosions for me and I ended up still in CS, and Economic History rather than Economics (another story altogether, and not such a happy one… Economic History is all the boring bits of History and all the non-math-sy bits of Economics. It’s very dull). I guess at some point I started to like it, and then to love it. I wrapped my head around OO, discovered Recursion and Functional Programming (which I really liked) and met people who, if rather more nerdy than me, were at least clean. I interned at a wonderful company which gave me so much more confidence in terms of my ability, and I graduated with a good 2:1.
I wanted to be a programmer, but I wasn’t sure where, or what kind, and I wasn’t yet ready to settle down, wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to grad school or not, so I took off. I worked in the US, trained in martial arts in China, hung out in Europe for a while, qualified as a ski instructor in Canada, worked for a bit in the UK and then went back to the US to work, ended up here in Canada at uOttawa. I’d realized I wanted to know more stuff and as only banks seemed to be hiring (oh, the irony!) it was a good time to go back to school.
In the US I worked as a programming instructor, and after the second summer they recruited me to develop the programming curriculum. It also lead to the opportunity to work in China, last summer. In the UK, I worked to transform the zillions of spreadsheets a department was using to organize themselves into a database, that was easier to update and maintain and easier to extract information out of.
The job in the UK really hit it home to me how we as programmers often don’t really understand how “normal people” use computers, which ultimately means that we don’t always know who our users are. People who don’t realize what a little know-how can do, and how if you represent your data the right way it can be a goldmine of information, with little effort. It’s now something that I try to consider, and it influences my research and general attitude to users.
I read this article the other day – don’t let your strengths become weaknesses. It’s fascinating, because it explores this idea of how your weaknesses have corresponding strengths. So if my weaknesses that I’ve been talking about here are:
Lack of confidence
Not feeling enough of a geek
My corresponding strength are:
Lack of confidence -> Patience as an instructor: I remember what it’s like to be confused so it’s easier for me to be patient when my students get confused. When they make an endless loop, I find it funny rather than frustrating.
Not feeling enough of a geek -> empathy with end users, and a better understanding of people for whom computers are a facilitator, not the be-all-and-end-all, or even the most important thing. An interest in how computers can be useful to regular users, rather than just technologically or programmatically more advanced.
So an accident? Yes! A happy one? Yes! And if I don’t always quite feel like I belong, that’s not necessarily a bad thing – it can lead to other opportunities.
Cookie Consent
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
(Amazon), by the way, is a fascinating exploration of women and marriage – and the compromises women make for family.)
