Maybe it's Not Meant to Be: On Becoming Dr. Nielson

There is a story we tell that goes like this: a person has a dream. They have always known what career they want to pursue. They work hard. They have some successes and failures, at some points they aren’t sure if it will work out, there are bends in the road they didn’t foresee. But in the end they achieve their dream. 

There is another story we tell: a person doesn’t know what to do with their life. They go to college with no idea what to major in, but then they take a class that they like or do an internship they find meaningful, and so they find a major that fits. They still don’t know what career they want, but they feel drawn towards a certain direction, so they head in it. And eventually they sit on a career panel telling students that they didn’t always know what they wanted to do, but life has turned out better than they could have imagined. 

These stories may seem like opposites, but they share a common thread: for both people, there is a sense of rightness to their chosen path. There is a sense of being led or guided, of feeling peace or a pull. Even for people who feel called to a career they don’t want, there is an element of pull, with something outside them, God or the universe, nudging them along. (There is also of course the privilege of being able to choose what they want to do for a living.)

Here, I want to tell a different kind of story. My story. It is still brimming with privilege and choice, but not with the pull of rightness. I don’t know how often real people’s experiences actually fit the stories above, but I know that they haven’t fit mine. This might come as a surprise to anyone who sees my life from a distance. Surely, they might say, Catie must love psychology. Otherwise, why would she spend six years earning a PhD in it? Fair question. What I know is that I’ve spent years worrying that my career decisions are a series of bad choices. That I’m doing it all wrong because my story didn’t match the other stories. So in case your story is like mine, I want you to know you’re not alone. I want you to know that there are so many stories about how to make a life, and honestly our culture probably focuses too much on the ones about our careers (for a great commentary on that, see the end of the Barbie movie).

After a wonderful four years of college as a neuroscience major, I decided to wait a year before applying to grad school. Thinking I wanted to be a therapist, I got a job at a residential treatment facility for teenagers with mental health challenges. It was a very meaningful job, but utterly exhausting. Six months in I wanted to quit, but I also didn’t want to quit just because it was hard (see our family motto: “Nielsons do hard things”). A year in, as the deadline approached for graduate school applications, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I couldn’t stay in my job. I got so desperate that one day I pulled up a list of all the majors from BYU (my undergrad university) and wrote down every one I was even remotely interested in, looking for themes. (The themes were Nature, Teaching, and People, which actually tracks pretty well with what I’m doing now.) On a backpacking trip with my dad in October (applications were due in December), he asked me what I would research if I could research anything. I said something like “how people’s emotions rub off on each other” (something I had never studied before). We took that idea and ran with it. My dad helped me find professors whose research seemed related and interesting, including my eventual advisor at Northeastern. Within a month I had written my materials, gotten letters of recommendations, and submitted applications to 11 schools, including 9 PhD and 2 Master’s programs (luckily I’d taken the GRE over the summer). 

Backpacking in Zion with my cutie dad, October 2016

In case you are wondering if I was rushing into this, I was. The best advice I got about grad school (which I did not take), was from a family friend and mentor, George Handley, who said “you should only get a PhD if you can’t help it.” I suppose I couldn’t help it, since I just so desperately wanted my life to make sense and to feel like I was moving forward in some way. It was in this between-schools time that I first watched what became my favorite movie One Day, which has the brilliant line “everyone’s lost at 25.” I believe this with my whole heart, although in my experience it was more like 22-27. After I was accepted to Northeastern, I went to the temple to pray about it. I didn’t feel any grand confirmation, or even a feeling of peace or conviction that it was what I wanted to do. Looking back, I think what I felt was a thin veneer of feeling ok about it, delicately balanced over a chasm of the fear of staying and the panic of leaving. Five months later, I had moved to Boston, 2,000 miles from anyone I knew.

My roommate recently asked me (sarcastically) if the hardest part of grad school was writing my dissertation and I laughed. As she was not surprised to hear, hands down the hardest part of my PhD were the first three years. The loneliness and imposter syndrome were bad enough, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to be there. I felt like everyone else in my program had finally “arrived,” getting to the place they had worked towards for years, while I had sneaked in without really wanting it or trying. On top of that, I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone, not my family that I had just moved away from, or my friends who were so supportive and excited for me, and certainly not my new labmates and advisor. I’m not even sure I could fully admit it to myself, thinking the feeling would fade with more time or that it was just imposter syndrome, normal for a first year PhD student. And I so desperately didn’t want to fail, to admit that I had started this big thing in vain. Already emotionally exhausted from my previous job, my mental health suffered with the high expectations in my new lab and the sneaking suspicion that I was living a lie.

Halloween 2017, when I learned that apparently it's not a thing to dress up in grad school (I was the only one in costume in my classes).

This is one of the moments where my story diverges from the stories I told above. In my read on those stories, this would be the point where our brave protagonist recognizes that they made the wrong choice and course-corrects. I have friends who have actually done that: moved far away to start a grad program only to leave a week or a year in. I can’t tell you how much I admire them for that, and also how jealous I was. It felt like they had made the right decision. Meanwhile I stayed, and I kept on staying. (Substituting actually leaving with constantly agonizing about leaving to every family member, friend, labmate, fellow grad student, and roommate who would listen - sorry and thank you!)

That’s not to say I wasn’t brave in my own way. At the encouragement of friends, I started seeing a therapist after my first year in Boston. This was immensely helpful to my mental health and to understanding the patterns of behavior and thinking that led me to the desperate spot I was in. I also mustered the courage to talk to my advisors about shifting my research focus towards something I was more interested in. Instead of internalizing everything as my fault (as was my habit), I started to recognize when something wasn’t just on me. And, eventually, after three years and in the height of the pandemic, I decided that something had to give. Drawing on the skills and understanding I had developed in therapy, along with the support of my family, friends, and God, I told my advisors that I had to leave their lab. This meant I either had to transfer to another lab to finish my PhD or leave the program entirely.

In the end, I was fortunate enough to transfer to another lab, with a wonderful advisor and labmates that I am so grateful for. It has been a place of support and intellectual growth, as well as a soft place to land. Now, three years later, I am happy. But I also wonder if this was another moment when I said no to “rightness,” if leaving my PhD program to pursue something else that really called to me (like philosophy or poetry) would have been the better option. Was I not brave enough to throw caution to the wind, to really start from scratch and see where I was led? Maybe I should have moved to South America, applied to divinity school, dropped out to finally write that novel. I don’t know. I can’t access my Sliding Doors alternate reality, the counterfactual of my life. As Dana Gioia put it in her poem “Summer Storm”: “There are so many might have beens/What ifs that won’t stay buried/Other cities, other jobs/Strangers I might have married/And memory insists on pining/For places it never went/As if life would be happier/Just by being different.” All I have is the life I have lived. 

The Charles River, on the day I decided to transfer labs

So this is my story. Not one of rightness, but of choice. Because I chose to move to Boston to pursue a PhD, a decision that was not co-signed (as far as I can tell) by God or the universe or any internal pull of rightness, I had three years in a difficult lab, many dark nights and tears, and much emotional distress. I also met some of my best friends in the whole world (hi Coven!), swam in many ponds on glorious summer days, enjoyed New England traditions of apple picking in the fall and blossoms in the spring, listened to amazing concerts at Symphony Hall, had the chance to serve my community and teach two classes, an experience which ultimately convinced me that I did want what was on the other side of a PhD. And maybe this is where the story I’ve been telling about my graduate school journey as one without “rightness” breaks down. Because of course there were moments that kept me going, things about grad school and psychology that did feel “right”: working with amazing students, finding (to my great surprise) that I enjoy computer programming, the intellectual chase of an interesting theory or experimental design. As theologian Adam Miller put it, “your life is not a movie. There is no climax and no soundtrack.” No matter what story I tell about my life, it will ultimately not capture the real complexity and mundanity of it all. 

Still, if there is one thing I have learned from my journey it is that decisions do not have to be right to be good. I don’t believe that I was “supposed to” spend the last six years in Boston getting a PhD. But I did, and there were good things that happened because of that. Maybe I wasn’t “meant to be” here, but I am here. And maybe for us to really have agency, a reality that Latter-day Saints believe God planned the whole cosmos around, there needs to be things that aren’t meant to be but that we choose. As John Steinbeck famously put it in East of Eden, “the Hebrew word timshel—'Thou mayest'—that gives a choice. For if 'Thou mayest'—it is also true that 'Thou mayest not. ' That makes a man great and that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice.” And though I do like psychology, maybe life isn’t about having just one calling. Maybe we are called to many different things at different times, in our careers, our hobbies, our service, our relationships.

So if you, like me, feel like you have made bad decisions, in your career, your life, your relationships, please know that you’re not alone. Even if you feel like you aren’t living a good story, you can still have a good life. After all, as Steinbeck also said, “Now that you don’t have to be perfect [or right], you can be good.”