Tales From The Other Side

In a shocking (cue sarcastic voice) and very unexpected turn of events in the tale of my heart being an idol factory, it turns out that even though I now have a job, I am still a sinner. On the bright side, I am now both a sinner and a gainfully employed person, so I feel like it is a net improvement.

So first things first… long awaited positive news from the job-hunting adventure! I was offered a fellowship position in January at the National Institute of Nursing Research. And I accepted it… but paperwork happens slowly here, so I didn’t start until March. I’m working at the National Institutes of Health main campus in Bethesda, where I am doing genomics and epigenetics(!!) research for studies of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, mild Traumatic Brain Injury, and Phantom Limb Pain (mostly) . So the physical work I am doing is straight genetics, but the big picture is psychology (I get the feeling that the NINR researches whatever it feels like, which is convenient for me because… genomic psychology?!?! I’m sure it is related to nursing. Somehow. And I love it.) The PTSD and Phantom Limb studies are both in populations of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, and I think the only way I could possibly be more excited about the PTSD study would be if they would let me walk across the street to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and help with the clinical phenotyping. The mTBI study is in a population of student athletes, and although I haven’t figured out how you get a concussion playing basketball (trip and hit your head? Hit another player with your head? Hit the backboard with your head? So confusing compared to the logical football/soccer/hockey concussions), the rest of the study is straightforward, as far as epigenetics goes, and should be interesting like the other two projects.

Proverb holding the fort.
If the fort was a bag.

I say “should be interesting” because I haven’t really done much yet. Thankfully it took me less than two weeks to take the safety courses I needed to take (again) in order to work in a lab with potential blood borne pathogens. Then I held the fort while my boss was out all of last week. (You do not hold down the fort. The fort is not inflatable. In this particular case, the fort is a lab with a -80°^C freezer that I am organizing within an inch of its life.) So while I told myself that I would just ‘wait until I start my new job’ to blog about it, and then told myself I would just ‘wait until I actually start working on something,’ time trickled away. Sorry, team. I am still learning that exciting is relative, and writing about real life is not going to flow like a good book.

Instead, life seems to be flowing, slowly, in circles. Like I mentioned at the beginning, it turns out that even though I now have the thing that I wanted,  didn’t have, and spent considerable energy pursuing for the past ten months, getting a job did not resolve all the struggles I had before I had a job. In fact, it was an almost laughable moment when I realized-on the day I accepted my job offer-that I had been subconsciously building up a job in my heart as the solution to all my problems and was disappointed to learn that the real thing did not live up to expectations. I did not really have more control over my life than I did before; I did not have the security that I desperately wanted. My new job was not a guarantee that I would get into the grad school of my dreams, there was no way to know for sure that working at NIH would make me happy, and this job would not secure the rest of my career and assure my success. And now that I am working, what do I struggle with on a daily basis? Yep, it's the same old stuff. Turns out I am not magically better at being content, resting in my identity in Christ, etc. now that I have a job. 

Basically, I still have to trust God’s control in my life for security. I still have to look to him rather than choosing to worry about my future. I still have to seek him for real contentment. But I also get to extract DNA while I do those things. Life is good :)

P.S. Here are some other struggles that aren't fixed by a job. I don't really mind most of them, though...