"What Happened to the Girl Who Got Everything She Ever Wanted?" "She Overanalyzed the Poop Out of It."

In my last post I was roughly halfway through my summer semester. My biggest concerns were a roadtrip with my grandpa to Niagara Falls, finals, and organic chemistry lab.

My, how times have changed.

I now have been working at Shire Pharmaceuticals for almost six weeks. I have gone from, “what’s a micropipette?” to, “the phage display titering failed last week because our tetracycline was in culture too long.” I can also identify “E. coli smell” (and yes, that is a thing.) The job is not exactly chemical engineering, it’s more like straight up biology, but I’m learning a lot and the group I’m in is full of genuinely fantastic people. I now live in Cambridge, about halfway between MIT and Harvard. I am kitty-corner from both a Rite-Aid and a Whole Foods, and it takes about 12 minutes to walk to the subway.

I also started dating someone almost two months ago, and our compatibly weird senses of humor are still compatible (and, as always, weird).

I have had two visitors to Boston (three if you count when Joe came here with me), took one roadtrip to Pennsylvania (where the boyfriend and the best friend are on their co-ops), and for the future I have planned three trips to NYC, one trip to Ithaca, one more trip to Pennsylvania, and two trips to California.

In a nutshell here are the life goals I have for myself: go to a good college (check), have an awesome, supportive best friend (this role is filled by about 5 people simultaneously, so a resounding check), have a healthy happy relationship (check), work for a biopharmaceuticals company (check), have wonderfully funny and intelligent coworkers I’m excited to see every day (check), live in/near Boston (check), finally get a smartphone (check), have enough money for spontaneous trips/shopping sprees/coffee runs (check).

Basically, if I sat down and listed all of the things I wanted to do by the time I was 21, I have already achieved them. (Crushed that deadline by about two years…)

And yet I haven’t been that happy the past few weeks, and I finally figured out why. I, Lola, am a huge worrywart.

Do I really want to work in pharmaceuticals? I’m not getting to do engineering right now, what if I don’t like the engineering? Or what if I’d like it more and I’m not getting a chance to do it? What if I don’t take [X Class] that would be oh-so-crucial to getting a job at [Y Company] when I graduate? What if I never live in the same state as my parents again? What if I’m not married before I’m thirty? What if I have kids? What if I have to give up career stuff for family stuff? What if I have to give up family stuff for career stuff? What if I go into the wrong industry?  WHAT IF I DIE ALONE AND MY 14 CATS DON’T EVEN WANT ME? AAHHHHHHH *explodes*

I have been in this horrible worrywart spiral of thinking of every possible thing in my life that I have no effect over and making it seem like it is the worst possible thing ever. But I’m finally starting to get over it.

One of my favorite shows is The Big C (I made you watch a season…) and one of my favorite parts is when Cathy (woman who finds out she has about a year to live) realizes “I don’t need to worry about raising Adam (her son), he will be raised.”

I don’t need to worry about getting married or having kids or choosing the perfect career, because I don’t know what “perfect” is for any of those things, or if it even exists, and I’m not in a position to influence any of them right now. They're most likely just going to happen when it's time. I’m 19, should I really be worried about work/life balance? I can worry about that in 10-15 years! Which is literally 50% of my current amount of life.

Long story short, my life is pretty damn awesome, and all of my problems are in my mind. Hopefully now that I’ve made this fabulous realization I can start focusing more on the A and the E of my CARE. (That stuck with me from when we talked about it with your mom… I have a tendency to let my A and E get a little neglected.) 

This post is a bit on the short side considering how long I’ve been absent and how much has been going on. I feel like I’m at the point where there’s so much to say I have nothing to say… I hope your first week of classes went well! It’s kind of crazy (and liberating) to not have to worry about midterms and problem sets and lab reports and bad TAs and orchestra rehearsals… Who am I and why did all my problems turn into fictitious ones?

I’d love to catch up sometime in the next month or so… Hopefully I’ll write again before then, but I should be home on December 18^th, and I better see you shortly thereafter… or else. (Plus we have an end of the world party to plan.)

Much love,

Lola