What Do You Do When You're Angry, and You're Sick of Choosing Your Battles?

I'm sick of choosing my battles. In a movie, the protagonist never chooses her battles and lives to regret it. In real life, the protagonist becomes an avid reader of books at an early age and preemptively resolves on rarely engaging in battle. For decades, she endeavors to say nothing as an array of relatives, classmates, false friends, total strangers, instructors, deans and colleagues tell her that she's "abrasive" because she writes eloquently and passionately about incendiary issues, or that she's too skinny, or that she's ugly and vapid because she's skinny, or that she's too sensitive, or that she asks too many questions, or that she'd ask "nicer questions" about the world if she were a "nicer girl", or that she's evil because she doesn't go to church, or that she can't possibly be a scientist because she majored in English, or that she's lucky that she didn't end up serving coffee at Starbucks for the rest of her life because she majored in English, or that she ought to be ashamed of herself because she's not stereotypically black, or that it was inappropriate and unprofessional of her to try to talk to a professor about his inappropriate and unprofessional behavior toward her, or that she never tried once to please her crazy Korean mother, or that her Berkeley degree isn't an accomplishment because she majored in liberal arts, or that she's a failure because she didn't go to medical school, or that she can't be brilliant because she's not a physicist, or that she shouldn't expect to finish her PhD in under five years or win an NRSA because she's so obviously mediocre. Occasionally, she loses her temper, and she yells in front of a crowd of people. This never results in anyone's taking what she has to say seriously, and it always results in her having to abjectly apologize to the point of retracting her statements, even when those statements are true. Eventually, she realizes that "choosing your battles" has amounted to passivity, and that passivity has made her a very angry person.

I am a very angry person. I hold grudges. I am full of repressed fury over past injustices big and small. This is one reason why I continue to blog, even though I have my doubts concerning the wisdom of my blogging under a thin veil of pseudonymity where my PI can see it. It's either blog or start sleeping all day again.

I want to make it clear that life is pretty good right now. I still spend my Saturdays in a depressed stupor; that's mainly because I spend too much of my off-work time alone. But I like being in my graduate program. I really love working in my lab. I've been entrusted with bigger roles in projects sooner than I'd anticipated upon my arrival. I've been given opportunities to generate publishable data that I never expected to receive so early in my graduate career. I'm an author on a paper, which I have not ceased to be squealingly excited about, no matter how many seasoned scientists with first-author papers might make fun of me.

My attitude has also improved with age. One advantage of being an older graduate student is that I've held a variety of jobs; frankly, I'd much rather be studying my brains out and struggling to squeeze experiments into a jam-packed schedule than copywriting or mindlessly paper-pushing for a much higher salary. Being a graduate student is a privilege, which you don't realize if you're a twenty-two-year-old who doesn't know herself very well, who has all the maturity of a teenager and who has always been in school. Moreover, I am less discouraged in the face of adversity than I used to be. When I get the impression that someone either doesn't think I can succeed or doesn't want me to succeed out of jealousy, I work harder. I don't worry about hurting his or her feelings or coaxing him or her into "liking" me anymore. And I refuse to let people with ulterior motives decide what my limitations are.

That said, I'm kind of in fight mode right now. I don't blame my present situation. It's all those years of repression. I'm sick of choosing my battles. I'm sick of keeping my mouth shut when people say stupid shit. Lately, I have not been keeping my mouth shut. And it feels deliriously good not to keep my mouth shut. It worries me that this doesn't worry me, though. I have a career to think about.

P.S. You know what else I'm sick of? Plays about male geniuses and the women they have sex with. Christ.