Ep25_Being your own Worst Critic_Andry Fraass.mp3
Ep25_Being your own Worst Critic_Andry Fraass.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
Ep25_Being your own Worst Critic_Andry Fraass.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Emily:
Hey, there. These are frank discussions about mental health and illness. Please be mindful if you continue to listen and reach out for support if you need it. Today, we travel to Canada to meet Dr. Andy Fraass, an assistant professor at the University of Victoria. He's a micro paleontologist studying tiny fossils from marine plankton that can tell us about past climate changes and how evolution works. During our discussion, Andy opens up about social anxiety, learning he couldn't trust his own self-perception and the impact of academic pressures on family life.
Andy:
I finished the interview process and I was completely convinced that it had gone incredibly poorly. Flying home across both a continent and then an ocean really doesn't lend oneself to a good space. And so I hadn't slept in a very long time and got home and just collapsed towards my wife and basically had like a I'd probably call it a breakdown. And one of the things that I have trouble with when the social anxiety hits really hard is that I can't meet someone's gaze. And I was not able to do it with her, which I've known my wife for over a decade. The kicker is I got that job. Then I know the people I'm up. I was up against for this job and they were exceptional scientists. And so it really demonstrates to me that I cannot self perceive accurately.
Emily:
Welcome to Voices of Academia with Emily King. It's a podcast where researchers from around the world open up about their mental health. They might laugh, cry or say things you disagree with, but this has lived experience, not professional advice. We cover some sensitive material, but it's worth it to normalise difficult conversations, reduce stigma and help people feel less alone. Let's get into it.
Emily:
All right, welcome, Andy, to the podcast.
Andy:
Well, thanks. I'm glad to be here.
Emily:
Really glad to have you. I know you've said in the past that you're a listener, which I was really excited to hear. I haven't actually met any of my listeners before. Oh, actually one. I've interviewed one Henry, but it's really nice to meet them. And also, when you came forward and expressed your interest to be on the podcast, what you wrote in your expression of interest. Actually, it really made my day because you didn't just talk about your own experience. You talked about what the voices of academia platform has meant for you. And I'm just really thrilled that our platform provides you a sense of community and that you're getting benefit out of it. Yeah. So I guess I I was interested to know what you feel the story shared by voices of academia provide for you.
Andy:
So I think with mental health stuff, especially if you aren't terribly public with it, it can feel really isolating. It can be really easy to feel like it's just something that you're struggling with by yourself. And so one of the nice things about podcasts, right, is that it feels like you're friends with the people that you're listening to because they're right next to you in your earphones, right? Yeah. And so just having other people with the same kind of problems or even associated issues can be really, really helpful and it can feel less lonely.
Emily:
It's quite intimate, right?
Andy:
Oh yeah. Podcaster! Strange.
Emily:
And I guess the other thing I wanted to know was why you would like to share your story, Andy.
Andy:
So like a lot of people, I think it's because I saw something on Twitter. There's a tweet from a undergraduate that went viral, and it was somebody going into an advisor, professor office and crying and the professor responding that you're not tough enough to make it in science because you have anxiety issues, right? Like that. I don't generally open up or hadn't for a very long time open up to anybody that I was working with, that I have, you know, generalized anxiety, social anxiety. I get panic attacks. And that really made me mad. Hmm.
Emily:
I have a visceral reaction to that. You telling me that story as well? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Andy:
Yeah. It's the kind of thing like that's beyond just super inappropriate. Like, it's not true. You can make it through academia with mental health challenges and still be, you know, make it out. On the other side, it can be really hard, but it's possible, right? And so, yeah, after I saw that, I decided that I was going to write a blog post where I became public about having these issues and wrote a very long blog post that I got to post on a friend's website. And it was really there's a nicer way of saying Misery loves company. But to have people read that and then respond to it and then send messages to me like, Oh, I have the same feelings it was, it's helpful. Hmm. Hmm. Right. So I thought that by talking about how I have made it through the ringer, that can be the early career process getting a tenure track job that that might be helpful.
Emily:
Definitely. And congratulations, by the way. That is something I was going to bring up that you're a new professor.
Andy:
Hey, very excited about it.
Emily:
Yeah. And we'll get into like a little bit more about, I guess, what that's like and what it's meant for you and your family as well. But yeah, I'm glad you brought up that blog that you wrote, because that was another thing that I was going to mention, and I will put a link to that in episode description, too, so that people can kind of refer to that if they think it might be useful to learn a bit more about your story. So I just want to thank you, I guess, for coming forward and sharing. I know you sort of only recently became public about this. So I feel really privileged actually to have you, you know, choose to open up to me and also to our listeners. And if anyone thinks, yeah, if anyone listening, you know, finds things that you have to say today relatable, I'll let them know that they can find you on Twitter at macro micro paleo. I love that Twitter handle. So it's at macro micro paleo, and I'll put a link to that in the episode description. Cool. So, Andy, as a listener, you know that I'm going to ask you some questions about you as a person outside of academia. So what's your favorite way to spend a day off?
Andy:
It totally depends. So I have two kids and a wife and a dog, and it actually really totally to. Hands on if it's just me by myself or it's us as a family, so if it's me by myself, I'm going to probably order delivery and play video games all day.
Emily:
That's my partner, in a nutshell.
Andy:
Never done. I have done that and probably a good, solid decade. So I've just recently started reading again for fun. Mm hmm. It's one of those things that went away for a bit during my PhD just because I was reading so much stuff for work that, like I was tired of seeing words on a page. Yeah, of course. During postdocs and stuff, it would kind of ebb and flow. But during the weekends I will go sit outside when it's not raining and read like a book for fun, which is is really, really nice. And then hanging out with the kids going to a park, that kind of stuff is what we usually end up doing on the weekend. And then I also enjoy cooking dinner with my wife while the kids watch a movie. Yeah.
Emily:
Lovely. I love that. And I mean, I hope you get some time to yourself sometime soon to spend a day playing video games as well.
Andy:
We're still in a pandemic. Yes, first time I was alone by myself during the pandemic. I lay it on the floor for about 15 minutes and just stared at the ceiling.
Emily:
That sounds about accurate!!!
Emily:
Oh, what about what you lack as a kid?
Andy:
When I was really young, I was one of those kids that would always have an answer, and my parents like to tell a story that their first couple of parent teacher conferences, they are. You trying to figure out which kid I was? And they said, you know, or Andy's parents and the teacher went, Oh, you're Andy's parents? And they would raise up a finger like they were answering a question. So apparently that's something I did as a kid like, Oh, I've got the answer. I've got the answer that kind of went away when I was in middle and high school where I became really quiet. Mm-hmm. I know that my my teachers would talk about how I I had one that said it'll be really impressive. When Andy decides he cares about something, he meant it in a positive way. Oh, OK. It was because I was clearly really smart as a kid, but because I knew I didn't need to work to do well. I just didn't. And so I would do OK. I would do satisfactorily, maybe even above satisfaction. But like, I would never really wow my teachers.
Emily:
Ok, so it was their way of saying they could see your potential.
Andy:
Yes. Potential? Yeah. That realized potential.
Emily:
Yeah, yeah.
Andy:
Yeah, yeah. Which is probably, I guess, to get into it. Why I failed out a college for freshman and sophomore year. Ok, because I just never really learned how to work. And so studying was never something I really tried to do. Things were really easy, so to never develop those skills and flunked out of the University of Wisconsin. Mm hmm. And eventually, you came back after a year and did much better. But I think there was a switch back when I was middle to high school age where I became much, much more quiet in class and sort of in academic kind of settings.
Emily:
Hmm. I love to delve deeper into that, but I think we need to move on. But so I didn't realize that you'd I don't know, like flunked out of college. I left college.
Andy:
Oh no, I I was removed by the institution because my GPA was so low.
Emily:
Wow. Ok, so that's really interesting because like, OK, so I mean, first of all, again, you just reminding me of my partner because he he's super smart and like, got into these like gifted and talented programs in high school, but chose not to go because he just didn't care about it at the time and went to university left after a year because he he he thinks he may have undiagnosed ADHD like he. He really struggles to focus, but he like he's just got so, so, so much potential, but hadn't sort of found the thing that really he was passionate about. And actually, I could tell a story about my brother, like in the same vein, but I'm interested to know, like, what do you think it was? Because I normally ask what drew you to research? But sort of in that vein, obviously something about paleontology or geoscience that kind of drew you in and like, you're passionate about it. Is that correct? Or like, what do you think it was that like drew you back in to sort of help you apply yourself? And now obviously, you've gotten tenure track as a professor. I feel like this is going to be a funny story because I could say you laughing
Andy:
It Jurassic Park. It was the movie Jurassic Park in the book. Jurassic Park, so when I was 10, I watched that movie and it destroyed me as a person. I have always loved dinosaurs. I have loved dinosaurs since I was two and so I always wanted throughout. My entire life, I wanted to be a college professor and I wanted to be a paleontologist specifically. Ok, so the reason that I wasn't motivated is because I knew what I wanted to study and I didn't care about, say, history or English, which as an adult, I think it's terrible. But as a kid, it was like, Oh, I don't need to know as much about this because this is what I'm interested in. This is what I'm going to do. And so I'll read about this for fun. I've got lots of dinosaur books from when I was a kid, but like, yeah, it was. It was Jurassic Park.
Emily:
Yeah, that's so interesting. Yeah, I can relate to that, actually, because when I was in year 11 and 12, I dropped biology because I wanted to like study kind of more medical biology and like genetics and that kind of thing. But at the time we were studying like the cross section of plants, and I was like, I don't care, like I just I can't, I just can't do it. And I don't know. Weirdly, I switched into physics, which I wasn't super keen on either. But at the time in my head, I was like, I just don't want to do this kind of biology, so I'm not going to. And I picked it back up when I went to university. So totally relatable. I get it. I get it. So I guess just another question on that. So micro paleontology. So as we mentioned before, you're a new assistant professor in that area. And you said prior to recording that that means that you're studying tiny fossils from marine plankton. So what excites you about that?
Andy:
So foraminifera, our little single celled creatures that generate a calcium carbonate test or shell, and they follow the bottom of the ocean. They form large amounts of sediment on the bottom of the ocean. It's the same material that we find in like limestone rock, it can form limestone. And so these things, they have a simple geometry and they've also the material they're making the shell out of. The chemistry tells you about the ocean in the past millions of years ago, right? And so they're excellent archives of both climate and evolution. And so looking at these things and our lightest habitat, the the ocean right, gives us a really holistic understanding of both climate science and the way that evolution works. So I fell in love with them as an undergrad and really have not stopped liking them more than dinosaurs.
Emily:
So interesting, and it kind of makes me want to ask like. So I guess I would speculate that people that manage anxiety kind of need to fund. I don't know perhaps more purpose and passion in their work than someone that doesn't. And this is just kind of my personal perspective that I'm thinking of now. And I sort of think that because we do manage quite a lot of difficulty just because of having to manage anxiety, like regardless of what we're doing, it kind of can make things that for other people are quite simple, very, very difficult for us. And so I just wonder whether that means that we need to find more purpose in what we're doing. And so I wonder if for you, is it is it because you're kind of contributing to climate change research that you see as lack a big kind of global area of need that draws you into this? Or am I just like totally projecting?
Andy:
I had I had never really made the connection between my anxiety. Well, OK, I'd made a connection between my anxiety and climate change research because like eco anxiety is definitely a totally real thing. And I most of my anxiety is about other things. But there's definitely an attribute that's. Pretty dedicated to like climate change, but I never really drawn a connection between that and like anxiety and needing to care about. I don't know. I had not really that's not something I really thought about.
Emily:
Yeah, that's right. I'm just projecting. Just just totally came off while I was talking to you and like raining some of your your information. Probably because I currently study something that I'm not super passionate about, and that's made managing anxiety and depression very, very difficult. So I'm looking for my own areas of passion. And I guess, I mean, during this podcast is one of those things, so I'm really grateful to have this platform. Mm-hmm. So I did want to move into your your story now. So it will be sort of, I guess, shifting gears a little bit and talking about some of what you've shared with me about your mental health story prior to recording. And I guess I'd like to do this episode in kind of two sections. So I guess we'll talk first about family history and then we'll move into the the toll that academia puts on families just to kind of signpost a little bit for anyone listening. So you indicated to me that you you do have a family history of mental illness and particularly your grandpa was quite agoraphobic. Mm-hmm. And I know you've mentioned already during recording that you manage generalized and social anxiety disorders and you've also had the occasional panic attack, but you made it through grad school and multiple post PhD positions without really sharing that with anyone.
Emily:
And you've sort of only recently become public about it. First of all, I'm really happy to hear that you've recently been able to sort of share some of this, and I hope that by sharing, it'll sort of lighten the load a little bit for you. And I also haven't really spoken about family history on the podcast before, so I won't ask too many details about, you know, your grandpa's particular experience. But I guess like, there's this chicken and egg kind of scenario that a few of us have been discussing on Twitter. I guess a few of us in the academic mental health space because we obviously know that rates of mental illness within academia are really high. And so it's kind of interesting to speculate whether people with certain psychological traits are drawn to academia or if the high stress environment kind of tips that balance from mental health into illness or both. And, you know, through Twitter, I haven't been able to access anyone that knows of any research around that, and it's something that I'm actually really fascinated by because I can see how it could happen in both ways. But yeah, so I guess on that, like any of your family members, academics.
Andy:
Yeah. So the grandfather with the agoraphobia is on my mom's side and my dad is a Ph.D. He works in radiation oncology. So treating cancer with radiation. He is a very prominent cancer researcher. My brother, though, also has depression. It's an attribute that we know that my parents carry but don't possess themselves, and that both my brother and I and my, you know, my grandfather might have had severe mental health. Issues. So I've come I mean, of course, been thinking about this a lot lately, but I've kind of come to the realization that I would be like this no matter what, because it's I just carry it. My my fight or flight response is set several notches too high, and that's just the way that my brain chemistry works. And if that's an excuse that makes it easier to deal with, and I'm also fine with it being just an excuse.
Emily:
I mean, I think I can. Yeah, I definitely relate to that. I mean, so many people have told me to quit my day because I've been quite ill through this process. But my I mean, I never thought that it was due to the PhD. I sort of I know that it's deeper than that, and I feel like it's important for me to continue and kind of learn how to manage what comes up for me because I honestly feel like it's going to be an issue no matter what I do. And so, yeah, in the same vein, like I can totally understand where you're coming from, but I
Andy:
And I don't think that's the case for everybody, right? Because the incidence rates of mental health problems are quite high among graduate students. The way that academia works, right, where there's a culture of overwork and there's, you know, you work as a graduate student, you work with one supervisor usually. And if that supervisor is not supportive in the ways that you need, then that can definitely at least exacerbate or drive significant mental health problems, right?
Emily:
Yeah, for sure. Like, there's definitely research. Yeah, definitely. Research within academia indicating that there are a number of different risk factors for developing mental illness because of the structure of the system. Yeah, for sure. I will acknowledge that. So did you know, I guess, about your family history before you entered academia?
Andy:
Well, so I was diagnosed as an undergraduate. Okay, so I guess I was sort of in academia at that point. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So it's one of the things where so gramps growing up when I was born, he couldn't come out to visit because we live too far away. Mm hmm. And so, you know, you can't leave your little cul de sac that you live on and there's no way you're going to get on a plane. And so he didn't meet me until we flew out there to go to their their house. But that always seemed like a normal thing when I was a kid growing up. Was that, you know, gramps doesn't leave the cul de sac, and so he doesn't get to come to dinner or lunch or something. And we only go with, you know, Grandma Sal. Hmm. And it took a long time before I realized that that wasn't. That wasn't normal. Hmm. And and that that was that was definitely a sign of a problem, I mean, he'd never been diagnosed with anything, but that's pretty textbook case. And we all sort of sort of knew that that was that was a problem.
Emily:
So, okay, so you sort of found out when you were in your undergrad, was that your your first or your second undergrad?
Andy:
So I went to the Wisconsin failed out, went to a community college for a bit and worked full time and then went back to the University of Wisconsin. And so when I went back and I can't remember if it was my parents encouraging me or or the school strongly encouraging me, but I ended up in therapy then, and that's when I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety and social anxiety. Okay.
Emily:
And so I know you said, you know, you sort of managed to make it through a lot of the earlier stages of your career. So I guess undergrad, PhD, a few post PhD positions without telling anyone about this. I I don't want to focus too much on that area because I think it's important for us to talk about how this has impacted the the later parts of your career and sort of get into how it's impacted your family. But I guess briefly, I mean, that would have been incredibly difficult to go through. You know, those very stressful periods, you know, kind of hiding all of this, like, can you comment on that a little bit?
Andy:
It's gotten worse as I've gotten older. And so it became harder and harder to to hide it. So the generalized anxiety is just like a baseline kind of kind of thing for me, where if I try to call myself down and manage my stress level or go to bed at a certain like I stop working at like eight, then my stress levels and the anxiety like is OK. It's much harder to hide the social anxiety side of it. And so doing networking at meetings and stuff was just the hardest thing because the physical sensation of being unable to make myself stand up and go over and talk to somebody that I really respect because I might say something stupid or, you know, any number of the things that any of us have running through our head is really, I'm on video right now, and I'm my body language is changing. It's harder to hide. And so I think supervisors and stuff would recognize that I had a hard time with networking and that kind of stuff because they would see I was always that kind of person that would, you know, stand in the corner. And With the wallflower is the term more than just that level, though, and it also is a fairly. Macho science in terms of the physical sciences, right, it's the one where we go out and we look for rocks and we carry around sledgehammers, and
Emily:
I love the body language with that.
Andy:
Oh yeah, sort of arm going back and forth. Yeah, and there are people that say, you're not a real geologist, if you don't go out and look at rocks and you're not in the field. I don't look at rocks. I, you know, if you give me a rock, I go, Oh, that's too bad. The fossils are gone or they've gone through tiny genesis. So there's also this culture of macho ness or like super masculinity. My PhD advisor certainly wasn't like this, and if I if I had talked to him about it, it totally would have been fine and he wouldn't have been a problem. But there's just this pervasive nature of the science.
Emily:
Hmm. Just you pick up on the stuff that's around you. Like, I know we have this culture of overwork and that kind of thing within academia. And even though no one is like specifically telling me to work ridiculous hours, I still feel that. So I absolutely know what you mean. You know, you would have just picked that up and felt like there were these expectations of you, even if no one specifically ever said, You have to do this, you know, it just would have been something that you sort of felt, yeah. If you find this episode valuable and have some spare change. Remember, you can support the podcast at Buy Me a Coffee Dot Com Forward Slash VOA podcast. Thank you.
Andy:
I mean, it's also it's a private kind of thing, right? Having having a mental illness is not something that you necessarily want to go talk to everybody about current situation accepted
Emily:
When normalizing that. That's what we're doing.
Andy:
Yeah, yeah. It's also so during graduate school, it was decently managed. I would get migraines from the release of stress. Sometimes that was sort of an acute situation. And outside of meetings where I was needing to contribute. I it was it was sort of sort of OK, looking back on it, I'm sure that the people that I worked for knew that there was something right because I would go to go to meetings like with prominent names, and I would never be able to say a thing at all because I was very worried about saying the wrong thing or something that they disagreed with, especially with the social anxiety I'm very sensitive to. Like a hierarchy. Ok. And this is not something I. Want to care about, and it's not something I intellectually care about, but it's something that like the anxiety that I have cares about if someone is above me an academic rank, I get worried about saying the wrong thing in front of them. So as a graduate student, right, you're much lower on the rung. And so if you're talking to like one of the most prominent people in your field, being totally quiet and reserved and shut down is absolutely the way, the way that I was. But then you're talking to my my supervisor, who I got along very well with and knew pretty well, like I could have a conversation and could contribute scientific thoughts. And he knew that I was actually contributing scientific thoughts, but I couldn't do it outside of that situation.
Emily:
So you? Obviously, you know, managed to perform at the level that academia sort of requires to stay within the field and progress within the field, and I don't doubt that that was extremely difficult, you know, trying to manage all of this quietly, you know, behind the scenes.
Andy:
It helps having a spouse who is very understanding and will act as like a no, you really can't do this behind you.
Emily:
That's definitely something I want to talk about in the next episode, too, because at what point of your career were you at when you met your wife?
Andy:
We were both an undergraduate. We got married during my master's. And so, yeah, she actually she moved to Wisconsin when I was finishing my undergrad because after I failed out, I had to take a little bit more time to finish then than everybody else. And she finished on time. And so she moved out to to be with me, and then we stayed there for my master's. Yeah. So we've been together since we were 21 or 22.
Emily:
Yeah. So she's really been there the whole way through. Yeah, that's definitely something I'd love to touch on in the next episode.
Andy:
So, me too. I like talking about her.
Emily:
I'd love to hear more about it. So. So, OK, so you got through and kind of started to progress into more senior parts of academia. So, so how did the anxiety impact you personally as you kind of got further into your career
Andy:
Like cold emailing people for four postdocs or two to try and work with somebody is just so incredibly difficult. I still have a problem just writing an email to somebody that I thought maybe I could collaborate with. It's it's very, very hard, but I convinced myself to do it every once in a while. And so that that helps going on job interviews is incredibly difficult, and I don't actually know what the the way that job interviews work in Australia. They work differently in the UK, too. But job interviews in North America are basically two day all day affairs. Oh wow. You've flown out and you spend yeah, you spend all day going and having individual conversations with people you've never met for 30 minutes or so and you have lunch with somebody and then you occasionally. Sometimes you get a break in between your last meeting and then dinner and then you go to dinner with people.
Emily:
Well, it's
Andy:
Exhausting. So those are incredibly stressful. Also, you know, commonly includes like a job talk, which is usually like a 45 minutes, 50 minute and then questions kind of process.
Emily:
You indicated before recording that you had this job interview when you were going for tenure track, that was kind of really a turning point for you. Would you be able to talk about that?
Andy:
Sure. So I have had a couple of job interviews for tenure track positions, but one came up right prior to the pandemic. So I ended up starting out tired. And one of the things that affects my anxiety quite dramatically is my sleeping. Mm hmm. So it's already really tired and started off this interview, and I really. Really likes the place, one of the things with academia is that you move all over the place, right? I worked in Texas, I've worked in Washington, D.C., I've worked in England and this place seemed like the kind of place I wanted my my family to be able to sit down and settle. And it just seemed it had the right kind of vibe as a city, which is a weird thing, but it felt like home, OK, felt like a place like I grew up. It was the right kind of size. It's spectacularly beautiful. It was. They put me up in a really nice hotel. All the faculty that I talked to were really, really nice and friendly and very welcoming to the point where they felt supportive while I was going through the interview process, which is not always the case. And I, when I get anxious, I tend to speak sometimes haltingly.
Andy:
At least it feels to me like I speak haltingly and my I can. My thoughts get kind of jumbled and I can also kind of when I get really anxious, I kind of freeze. And so, you know, I went through day one and had conversations and talked with folks and then at a certain point, so there was dinner and then there was day two and I gave a job talk. And, you know, I thought things had been a little bit weird, right? And I thought that, you know, I said the wrong thing here, and I know I said the wrong thing there, and I answered this question wrong because I could tell that that person made this slight face that I could interpret as being like, Oh, clearly, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Hmm. And so I gave my my job talk and the first question came out. It was the kind of question that, like, is a really interesting question, and it's the kind that we don't really have an answer to, but you can kind of speculate about it. So it's like, All right, show me what you've got kind of question. And I could totally answer the question now.
Andy:
But at the time, I had just finished talking and I hadn't taken a drink at all, and my mouth was completely dry and I was I. As soon as I stopped talking, I just instantly, like all of the stress from everything, just hit me all at once. In a big wave. I could feel my face just go completely flushed, and I started sweating profusely and I just froze. And I remember getting the question and stopping talking for a bit, squeezing out like one or two fragments of sentences, words. And at the end of the question, I went, Oh, I'm sorry. And that was the the end of my my question, and so I was pretty convinced that that didn't go very well. I finished the interview process and I was completely convinced that it had gone incredibly poorly to the point where, like, I wouldn't have hired me in my mind. I knew how it went from the way I perceived it, and it was a disaster. And then I flew home and flying home across the, you know, both a continent and then an ocean really doesn't, you know, lend oneself to a good space in
Emily:
Any kind of time to think, Oh yeah,
Andy:
Especially when you can't sleep. And so I hadn't slept in a very long time and got home and just collapsed towards my wife, you know, bawling tears like collapsed onto the ground and basically had like a. But I don't know. I wouldn't want to call it a I would probably call it a breakdown. It was bad. I felt really terrible. It was bad enough that like several days after, I know we were sitting at the kitchen table and she touched my hand and I burst out into tears. Which is not a normal response when someone touches your hand. There were times when we would be talking, and one of the things that I have trouble with when the social anxiety gets really hard, which is really easy to do when my generalized anxiety is up higher is that I can't meet someone's gaze like I can't look at someone in the eye because like, there's just some sort of physical. I can't make myself do it. And I was not able to do it with her, which I've known my wife for over a decade, and that was really a hard to experience for me.
Andy:
The kicker is I got that job. One of the things with faculty positions like this is that, you know, pretty commonly who you're up against. And I know the people, I'm up. I was up against for this job and they were exceptional scientists. And so the really demonstrates to me that I cannot self perceive accurately if I thought that was such a disaster. And I still got that job. It must not have been an actual disaster. And there's something about being a physical scientist. We're trained to try to remove bias, right? We're supposed to. We're trained to be objective. And obviously that's being completely unbiased as a fallacy. But we have some training in it and we're supposed to be able to access that like objective look. But I can't do that for to me, right? Because I have these, you know, I have a mental illness. And so I'm just it's not possible for me to do that. And so that's really hard. It felt really destabilizing to realize that I can't be objective about the things that I'm experiencing.
Emily:
I would make you question everything that you've ever thought about anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andy:
Right? It's real. Messed up. Yeah. So that was the beginning of the pandemic for me. So that was so weird.
Emily:
We were dying.
Andy:
Yes. Yeah, not great. Luckily, I got in and out of the doctor, so I went and saw a GP got on some meds and they got me to some therapy and that kind of stuff, which has been helpful. Not the first time I've gone to therapy, but it was very helpful. Time to go to therapy. Yeah.
Emily:
And yeah, yeah, that was a lot. Thank you for sharing that, Andy, because yeah, I I don't know what that was like for you. I have experiences from my own life that I can, I guess, empathize with how that could have felt. And I know this is possibly the first time you've spoken aloud about that with someone maybe outside of your family or maybe one of the first few times that you've done that. So, yeah, I appreciate you doing that. And yeah, just thinking about, I mean, having someone touch your I can relate, I guess, to having someone sort of touch your hand or say something nice to you and bursting into tears. Because for me, if I'm very, very anxious, then the the negative thoughts are very intrusive. So to have someone kind of counter that with something positive and something, you know, friendly. It just it kind of clashes with what's going on in my head. And so it seems to evoke this like very negative emotional response because I'm just like attacking myself in my head. So like, I don't believe any of the positive things or gestures coming from other people.
Andy:
Yeah. So in the the United States, in the Midwest, there's sort of like a cultural stereotype that is giving someone a compliment always gets deflected. Hmm. And that's just like a persistent cultural thing. And that's definitely something I picked up having having grown up there. Like someone says something nice. You have to explain away that that can't possibly be the case, or you have to explain why it's not really you. That's doing this sort of thing. Like, there's got to be some other explanation that is, you've got to be as humble as possible, right? Okay. Not necessarily most healthy way to be.
Emily:
No, no. Surely that would have compounded, you know, the impacts of the anxiety as well. Always interesting to see how, like environmental and genetic factors kind of interact. Yeah. But so that yeah. So that kind of highlights what we will talk about in the next episode in that you have learned to challenge these kind of intrusive negative thoughts that you have about yourself and your abilities with, you know, real, tangible, I guess, data and information from your life. So I guess in this such a scientific way to approach it, it really was. I think that's what we do, though. So this is a really good example. You know that you got this job. And so now I guess you'd be able to better challenge when you feel like an interview has has not gone particularly well, you know, if you get into that kind of experience again. But we might talk about some of those examples in the next episode because I'd really like to touch on academia and family. And I know, you know, this is probably a bit of a longer episode because I think this is really important to talk about because I really haven't talked about the potential impact of academic structure on family members on the podcast before. And I know that that can have a huge impact, like just from conversations that I've had and stuff that I've read. I know obviously there's unstable income and that can impact things like, you know, sending your kids to school or university or getting a mortgage, you know, stable home for the family.
Emily:
There's often a lot of lack moving to where the jobs are. I know about interstate and international. Long term relationships. You know, so many examples of how the structure and the competition and the the funding structure can impact people and their families. So we don't have a huge amount of time that I do really want to acknowledge this. So you said before recording that you've got a young family, you've obviously mentioned your wife, Susannah, and you've got two young girls as well. And you feel that having to move constantly for academia has destroyed is the word you used your wife's ability to get a job. And it's impacted your older daughter's sense of what a stable home is, and you know, that's it's difficult for me to communicate the impact that that has on me reading in such a short space of time. And I'm sure that hearing that back is quite emotionally challenging for you as well. This could be a much longer conversation, and we could touch on a lot of different elements, sort of aside from mental health. But I'm going to attempt to focus this so that we can sort of touch on this a bit at the end of this episode. So good luck. Yeah, I know, right? So they're they're big questions, but I've I've attempted to come up with sort of two questions that can help us touch on this. So the first was what are the key parts of academic structure that you feel impact the mental health of a young family?
Andy:
So some of it is what you've already talked about. So having to move every couple of years. So my daughter moved to four different homes. By the time she was four, she lived in Massachusetts. She lived in Washington, D.C., she lived in Texas, and then she lived in the United Kingdom. And we did our best to give her a sense of home. But that sense of home was like the artwork that we put up on our walls and it was us. And it wasn't the physical location that she was, which is how both my wife and I grew up. Her principles would come to us and say, Oh, Jane acclimatized is super fast. You know, the first day she was acting like she'd been here for years, which is really great and it's really wonderful to hear. But it's because she's had to because she's she's used to moving so frequently if she doesn't instantly acclimatise and it's really tough. Her principal here actually said that she was her principal, was a military brat and said that Jane reminded her a lot of being a military family where you have to move and move and move, move, move. I mean, that's it's good and bad, right? It means that she doesn't have that sense of stability, but she also is able to jump in any situation and just be totally fine. She's super highly adaptable, amazing kid. But also, I mean, we had kids when we had kids because that was when my funding was for a longer amount of time. We had Jane, when we land an NSF grant, was landed. Yeah, and that was like, OK, we can have kids now because we've got health care for three years. Yeah, and we know you've got a paycheck for three years. We had Alice when we knew that I was going to have a job for again three years in the UK, and it was like, Oh, we can do this now. And so it it has affected the timing of when we when we had had our family.
Emily:
That's crazy. I mean, totally understandable. But yeah, just my immediate reaction to that. I was like, crap, like having a job dictate major life decisions. And I mean, that sounds really naive because obviously, like you have to get a level of like financial stability before you can do things in any job, in any industry, but just that level of control just feels. If there's something about it feels wrong to me, I don't know.
Andy:
Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I'm an American, so we're used to health care dictating a lot of things. Hmm. Ok. Yeah. But also, I mean, there's there's an additional amount of mental anxiety that I feel because of all these different situations that have happened. Like, we keep moving and it keeps not being a good situation for Susanna to get a job because like either we're going to move in nine months and there's like not enough time to really get a job. And that time that would we could afford to then have daycare because the kind of job you can get for nine months, it pays less than daycare or, you know, trying to get the kids to have a house and not just be renting a crummy apartment that's filled with cockroaches like we had in Texas or all these different kinds of things like there's there's an amount of. It comes down to guilt that I have frequently felt about how we keep moving forward. My job, what we were done moving.
Emily:
Yes, I know and that's yes again. Congratulations. And it's it's a positive note, I guess, that you've managed to land this tenure track job and it's had such a positive impact on you and your family, which, hey, don't know imposter syndrome here?
Andy:
No, no, no, no, no. It's not imposter syndrome. It's getting a tenure track job in academia is so incredibly unlikely these days that there's a giant chunk of it that comes down to luck. The fit right, the fit is is really important. There are too many people who want tenure, track jobs, and there are too few tenure track jobs because they keep decreasing.
Emily:
Mm-hmm. I am aware of that for sure. And it's the same in Australia. Yeah, just. And you know, that's just another thing that can impact mental health of people and families within academia, just knowing that it's so unlikely to get something stable. I am interested that you bring up guilt because to me, I didn't want to assume that that was the emotion that you would feel doing this. But I felt like that's that's what I would feel that that that feels very relatable. And it does lead us quite nicely into this final question, which is, I guess, the impacts on your own mental health, knowing that you're choosing to stay within this industry that can have these kinds of impacts on your family. And I that's a that's a hard, hard question, and I apologize for asking such a hard hitting question. But if you're comfortable answering that, I think that could really be relatable for a lot of people.
Andy:
I don't know what else I would do. Ok, I'm. I'm really. The impostor simply goes away when I talk about teaching, but I'm really good at teaching and my values say that I am and I've had thoughts where, OK, if this doesn't work, I'll go and be a high school science teacher. And that'll be that'll be fun because I really like teaching. I enjoy doing research. I love doing research. But like getting a job in research is really tough. But getting a job, being a high school teacher would be, I think, easier. That sounds terrible,
Emily:
But I know what you mean, though. It's just and and it's hard to know, like once you go into it and like, I know you would acknowledge if there are any teachers that are listening to this. There's like a lot that you sort of don't know about that at this point, but it's possibly a narrative that you've kind of crafted for yourself to kind of reduce some of that. This is mean projecting again, I apologize. But to to maybe. Well, ta ta ta feel comfortable in the situation that you're in. You know, like you, it might take away some fear that would come up if you were to leave academia.
Andy:
I think I just never let me myself think about leaving. Basically, when I thought about becoming a high school teacher, it was because I was living in Washington, D.C. when Trump got elected and was working on the National Mall and would watch them set up for the inauguration. It was like, OK, maybe I should go do something that would be more effective at like helping my country. It was not really about. This is a backup plan. It was about trying to do something more effective, more positive, you know. Also, Susanna has never let me consider fairly much leaving. Every time that we've gone through this, we've constantly talked about and this is it sounds kind of sexist to say this, but we approached my career as a team effort. So every time I would apply for a job, she would read through my cover letter and go, OK, yes, this is. This is fine. It reads reads correctly. Or You made a mistake here. Fix this one. It's really easy to accidentally put the wrong school in the headache. But we also always talked about, OK, are we going? Am I going to try to apply for this? Am I going to try to apply here if I get this job or we actually going to take it? What are we going to do if we can't find funding at this time? And so it's always been a conversation between the two of us about where we're going to go, where we could go, where we'd be OK to go for a little while.
Andy:
And then, you know, should we move all the way to the UK or something like that? So it's definitely been a conversation between the two of us, and that doesn't mean that I don't feel guilt because I absolutely do about, you know, taking away long term friends from the family or. It's hard. But it always felt like if we could just keep going for a little bit longer or a little bit longer, it would it would actually all work out. And. Did. Which is great, but I'll feel also feels like that could have gone entirely the other way? Right? It's that kind of like, Oh, you can keep going, keep going. It's like gambling, right? Keep buying it and keep buying it and keep buying in. And then either you crap out or you hit a jackpot.
Emily:
I mean, to me, that sounds like a really healthy partnership. And I guess this just brings up the the importance of Susannah in in your life. You know, the fact that she has been so supportive of you and you've been able to have these conversations kind of taking your academic career and you know, the impacts of that into account in in your lives and trying to help that kind of fit in with what the two of you need and what you want to do. So I think, yeah, I'd love to talk a little bit more about Susannah, I think, and the family support you've had in the next episode, because it sounds like that's been a really crucial component in allowing you to get to where you have. And yeah, I. I just, yeah, I just want to thank you again, because it's really a window into quite intimate parts of your life, and I know I sort of asked some hard hitting questions in there as well, and I'm sure it's quite difficult to reflect on because they're kind of related to like big life decisions. So, you know, you've just started feeling comfortable talking about some of this. And like I said at the start, I feel really privileged that you've come forward and been willing to chat to me about it. And yeah, I'd just like to finish up and I guess wrap up by again saying, congratulations on getting this tenure track position because it's obviously something that you've been working towards for a really long time.
Emily:
And I'm really, really like, I don't know you very well, but I'm just really, really thrilled that it's worked out for you. So well. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the next part of your story. Just a reminder to our listeners if they'd like to get in touch with Andy. He's available on Twitter @macromicropaleo. And as he mentioned at the start of this episode, he's also written up some of his experiences for a blog created by geoscientists for the general public to share science and personal stories. So that's called time scavenges, and I'll put a link to that particular blog in episode description to you listening. Thank you for listening close to the end. Stick around for details on how to share your own story, and I really look forward to having you back with us in a couple of weeks to see the next part of Andy's story. He'll talk us through some of the support resources he's discovered, as I mentioned, including challenging his negative thought patterns with examples from his own life before now. Before you go, we have some support resources and information for how you can share your own story. If this episode brought anything up for you, there are mental health resources and emergency numbers available for various countries www.CheckPointOrg.Com/Global. For information found in this episode, refer to the episode description or visit the podcast section of our website, www.VoicesOfAcademia.com
Emily:
There you can also access the full transcript of this episode made available by our lovely voices of Academia team member Daniel Ranson.. This podcast was written, hosted and produced by me, Emily, with support from some very special people in my life. You can find me on Twitter at @EKing_Sci for science, but I'm part of the larger voices of Academia team. We have a website, a Twitter account @AcademicVoices and also share stories in blog form, with the option of them being anonymous. If you like this podcast and want to hear more stories, please leave a review. Subscribe! Tell me what you think on Twitter and tell your friends. The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and most other major listening platforms. You can also follow the Voices of Academia blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Just head to our website www.VoicesOfAcademia.com
Emily:
To sign up. If you have a mental health or wellness story to share, we absolutely want to hear from you. Whether you're a team leader, research assistant, postdoc, student, ex-academic or any other type of researcher, Follow @AcademicVoices on Twitter. Visit the link in the episode description
Emily:
Or visit our website www.VoicesOfAcademia for details on how to share your story. It's time someone gave you a voice.
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