I let myself cry.
by Yayoi Teramoto
Like many graduate students, I suffered from a pretty bad case of what is often referred to as Impostor Syndrome. I believed I was accepted to my PhD program and lab by mistake and would soon be exposed as a fraud. So much, in fact, that I refused to write this post until after I finished my PhD.
Right around the time when I was going to start my doctorate, Professor Tim Hunt became infamous in the blink of an eye. He said, “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry”. This led to outrage in the science world alongside pretty funny reactions like a viral #distractinglysexy hashtag on Twitter where women in science posted pictures of themselves in the lab. Tim Hunt’s particular distaste for crying lingered in my mind throughout my PhD journey. Whenever I felt tears swell up in my eyes, I fought the urge to cry. I believed my crying would perpetuate a disturbing image of women weeping in labs. Whenever I did cry, tears streaming down my face felt like proof that I was not a “good” scientist. The act of crying made me feel like I was “part of the problem”, like I was letting down every single woman in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields.
Every time I felt like crying, I tried to stop myself. Every time I did cry, I felt doubly guilty. Not only was I being emotional, irrational, and “girly”, I was also letting down all women in STEM. Some people even told me that crying was useless, “If you just do your work, it will all be okay.” But, for the most part, I was my biggest bully whenever I cried.
Until, one day, I decided to try something different the next time I felt like crying. I decided to give myself permission to cry. Research is tough. Some of my friends describe research as floating around in the middle of the ocean by yourself. To me, research often felt like walking around in circles in a very dark and lonely room. The unknown is a scary place to be in, and I think that from time to time, crying can be cathartic.
Most importantly, whether or not you cry during your PhD has nothing to do with whether or not you are a “good” or “bad” scientist. I am a scientist. I love, fall in love, and, sometimes, I cry. I have seen all of the things that Hunt spoke of that day happen in a lab setting. But I don’t think they constitute “trouble with girls”. I think it is a common “trouble” because scientists are human. We fall in love, we form friendships, we get into arguments, and we cry. We do all of these things while also coding, debugging code, making figures, writing papers, attending lectures, and hopefully, finding out something new about the world we live in.