I am working at the uni again as a software dev, I like the team I am in, I like having an office that overlooks a baseball field.
I had the goal of charming a group of grad students on my floor and thought I would have a hard time explaining myself having bombed out of the academic track.
What amazed me was that most of them felt afraid of being bound by the decisions they have made and aren’t sure if they can or want to follow the professor route. They were really inspired that I was able to do all those random things over a long period of time, work for startups, work for big cos, do maintainance programming, make a neural network search engine before neural networks were cool, etc.
I started seeing that my career went in a straight line and I was getting very positive results.
Now there was a postdoc that I wound up anti-charming and I let the evil come out, I told a story that combined five lines that were interwoven about my personal suffering, the suffering of a well known person in my field, not feeling safe to raise issues with the methodologies we were using, thousands of bad papers written, a community that is just getting to grips with this.
I hurt him pretty bad and he hasn’t talked to me since. I wanted to apologize to him but he left the country. I wasn’t able to ensorcell anybody at all for a long time because I felt guilty.
I am now looking at problems that date back to feelings of hostility I have that came on right when I entered high school that are screwing me up still today. I am working super hard to get better results but if I don’t fix those feelings I am going to get effects like I had with that postdoc.
That bums me out pretty badly. But I want to change. A war against hostility sounds like an oxymoron but it is what I am up against. I know if I can beat it I can get what I want.