Epiphany on the beach

From Thursday to Sunday I was on Myrtle Beach, having the best time I'd had in a VERY long time! It was somewhat of "girl's weekend out" in that along with my daughter, I went with my Sister/Best Friend, her 2 nieces, and her oldest niece's best friend. It was Senior Week for my sister's niece who along with her BFF, had just finished high school and yes, it was CRAZY with young people! But so full of life and energy!!

Anyway, we had a suite right on the water where I took the above pic, and NOW I understand the fascination people have with the beach. Sure, I've been to the beach more times than I could count in my lifetime, but I had never actually stayed on the beach. Truth be told, it had never occurred to me to stay on the beach since in my adulthood, I'd never been a fan of the beach (like many other Black women, I have that "hair thing" going, LOL!!) But I enjoyed myself so much, I'm already planning my next trip for later this summer.

So I got up every moring to the sound of waves crashing at the shore (we left the door to the patio wide open), then laced up my sneeks for my morning speed walk. The last night we were there, I got up at 4 AM and let's just say it's REAL interesting the things that go on on a quite, somewhat dark beach, LOL!!! I decided not to go walking since it was still kinda dark, but I really enjoyed the hour or so I spent just relaxing on the balcony, watching the water roll in, and thinking about my life over the past few months.

Since I resigned from my position earlier this Spring, which was followed by my "new job" moving to Ohio, I've been thinking a LOT about the kinds of environments I work best in, as well as the things I need to improve upon, and I feel like I had yet another epiphany in this regard over the weekend. While I've had a tremendous amount of success as a Scientist, I realized that to have the kind of success I think I've earned in the future, I'll have to significantly change who I am as a person. What do I mean? I'm the kinda person who after running a successful gel after 100 times of trying, will spike the ball in the end zone so to speak to celebrate my success. The problem is that the majority of the Scientists I know have little that resembles a personality, so this type of "celebration" would be and is highly frowned upon. So I learned early on to adapt my personality to survive in other words, have far LESS personality. Now I'm realizing that in addition to that, I need to NOT work for certain types of women and since it's hard to know the type of person a woman is going in, I need to do my absolute best to avoid a woman boss altogether. As many people know, women are entering the science fields in numbers larger than men at some graduate programs, so avoiding having a woman boss, is getting harder and harder to do. And while I'm okay being a less vibrant person in the lab, I'm NOT willing to go out of my way to make working with certain kinds of women a success at this point. As an example, if there's a woman in the group with a very strong personality (which some others usually call a bitch), SHE is the one I tend to get along great with (birds of a feather flock together, LOL??) And by "bitch" I mean, she expects/demands perfection from her work and can get real snippy when things aren't going well in the lab. She's highly educated and VERY secure, which comes across to some as arrogant. And she and I tend to be peas in a pod, LOL!!! The kinds of women I need to avoid are those who are insecure, lack self-confidence and who likely got ahead due to their connections, sleeping with their bosses (yes I had one like that in the past 5 years), and all those other no work/skill related reasons some women tend to ahead. Worse, she's usually a dumb ass, she knows it, and is intimidated by ANY woman who's smarter than she is. She is also usually less attractive due in large part to the fact that she never wears make-up and tends not to care much about her appearance (one 10 year Vet I worked with had a couple broken/crooked teeth). Now it's understandable to me that mentioning things like make-up and teeth seems crass in a convo about careers, but women like this are out there making life hell for ANY woman who's the opposite of them. And THESE are the women I'm going to avoid at all costs at THIS point in my career because over the past 5 years, I've simply had enough of them!!!

So what's my epiphany? My epiphany is that as long as I work as a Scientist alone, I'll never be truly happy because I have to change too much of who I am in order to be successful, especially as it relates to working with certain kinds of women. I also realized that I would be doing myself a HUGE diservice staying in a field long term that offers very little contact with people outside of the folks I work with, because I am and will always be a "people person". So that means I'm probably 50/50 on staying in pathology, though I know Paths that see patients. And if I stay committed to the field, I'll VERY likely be one of those does procedures like core biopsies of women's breasts or thyroid biopsies (which was the worst experience for me ever!).

At any rate, I'm VERY happy with my life these days and will likely have some VERY promising job news to share real soon!