Terminal Differentiation (i.e. Life Decisions)

I'm going to quote Thumbscrews here. I don't know her personally, but she is a very eloquent writer and I have her permission to quote her blog.

It's damned unfair, isn't it... how constricted we are by a single lifetime, by a strictly linear timeline? We get no do-overs. You can be resuscitated a thousand times in a video game. You can switch jobs, phone companies, fabric softeners. You can exchange your burger for a BLT. But every "choice" is a single stitch in a contiguous whole. It's a vast lumpy sweater knit from a single thread, and knit only once. You can vary the pattern at any time, but you can never pick up missed stitches. You can't look back on your deathbed and say, "Oh f*ck it... I'm going to unravel this thing and make an afghan instead.

For some of us the very finality of our choices is paralyzing. Thumbscrews goes on to write:

It's a rough state of affairs, particularly for the philosophical and fickle. Failure to choose leads to aimlessness and stagnation... But it's so frustrating, feeling as though choosing one route means barricading a thousand others.

I've given a lot of thought over recent years to my career (much more thought than I initially gave to my past relationships, and suffered as a result of that). I don't want to have to choose one path at the cost of others. I know EB found herself in a similar conundrum during and just out of college, but by now she and my other friends seem comfortably settled in their lives, graduate degrees framed above the fireplace, while I am still deliberating.

I've gotten frustrated with myself for not making a final decision. Family members have gotten frustrated with me too, saying, "Just do something, it doesn't matter which of the choices you pick."

It's been agonizing. So when I settled on applying to graduate school in ecology and got accepted to a nearby university, it seemed like a g-dsend. I was nervous of course, dreading what I call "terminal differentiation" (which is something I picked up in a biology class, meaning when a cell becomes so specialized it can no longer be anything else; the cell loses the ability to change course, reverse direction, perform another function in the body-- the term appealed to me because it sounds so harsh, which is how I feel about specialization). But I knew I couldn't stay a pluripotent stem cell forever, that to succeed I would have to differentiate, so I packed up my things and moved to Washington, DC for the summer to begin my new life.

As is often the case, life did not go as planned. It turned out that this particular avenue of research was not a good fit for me. It took me awhile to wrap my head around the fact that I would need to go back to square one, start over again with my career search. Perhaps that is not entirely the case. I was graciously given the option yesterday to defer graduate school for a year while I explore my options both within and outside of that department.

I've already enrolled in one class at a local state school. Once again, I have a panoply of choices before me. This time around I feel less paralyzed, more certain of my course. Things could change, but I have priorities now and I am working on meeting them.

I once spoke to a counselor who strongly encouraged me to abandon my paradigm of terminal differentiation. She herself had gotten a PhD in genetics and then gone on to medical school at a later age (in a different country from the one she got her PhD in no less!). I suppose this is true, but when one is 30, like me, time feels more limited. It's not that my next career move has to be my absolute last, it's just that I want it to work well for me. I'm chasing that elusive post-modern dream of being happy at one's work rather than just being grateful to have a job and food on the table. I'm even optimistic that given all the thought and exploration I've given it, that I may find such a thing. EB and D certainly did (and not in academics either shockingly) so I know it is out there.