Member-only story
Who am I?
I am 29 years old. I was born in India and lived in the UK and USA. Now I live in Paris. I have a Ph.D. in molecular biology. Maybe you imagine me as a lab rat donning a greasy white-coat, tinkering away at DNA in a fuming test tube.
Wrong.
Well, kind of. I used to be that person until the summer of 2018. Growing up I always thought biology and research were my passions. So I pursued them and became a scientist. Until I realised that academic research did not nourish my mind and spirit — not fully anyway.
Often our minds sabotage our own happiness. Staying put in a career, relationship, country only because it is all that you ever imagined yourself doing is a self limiting barrier. I think we too get to decide, at key moments, which adventures we want to have with life, and not always the other way around.
So last June I decided to leave academia and take a personal and career break. While many would consider this brash albeit extremely fortunate (who doesn’t want to break free from a job they dislike?), I must admit not having the comforts of familiarity and predictability (read a fixed, safe career-track and monthly pay check) feels like being in the throes of enormous guilt and anxiety, oscillating with a lucid, cool sense of freedom…
