Surviving Academia

Disclaimer: I have never shared this with a wide audience, let alone strangers. It wasn’t until just recently that I felt it was time to share this with some of my close friends, while only a small handful of my family were aware of what happened. If you are a friend, familia, or a colleague, my apologies if this is the first time you are hearing about this.  For those of you who are reading who are strangers, I ask for grace and kindness because I am sharing an incredibly vulnerable part of my life. While I prefer to talk about this with people individually, I also understand that there is something incredibly transformative with sharing your vulnerabilities in spaces that do not allow for it and finding love amongst those that need to hear your testimony.  TW: self-harm and SA

Published on April 21, 2023

I have tried to be open about my mental health struggles, but I was recently asked by a student for grad life advice because I “survived academia” but the truth is that I didn’t. 

If you don’t know me, I am currently a postdoc at Stanford. I defended my PhD in June of 2021 in Environmental Sciences at UC Riverside. I am happy to share that I am starting as an Assistant Professor this upcoming fall at the University of San Diego where I will be starting my own soil biogeochemistry lab.  It has been approximately 4 years since I self-harmed and I have always known that at some point I would need to share this… but I have never known how or when. As a grad student and postdoc, my life for the past few years has been in limbo as I try to land a (hoping-to-be-) permanent job as a faculty member. The thought of “waiting till tenure” to share my mental health struggles seems daunting— other people like me are hurt by this system right now. And now that I have landed said job, although I do not have the protections of tenure on my side, I think it’s time.  I don’t know who this will reach but my only goal is that if any other person is struggling in academia and feels the same way I did (and do, to be honest), that I help others feel not so alone. I promise you, you are not alone. 

So here’s the / my background: I’d like to think of myself as joyful, fun, and daring on the exterior, but I have struggled with major depressive disorder, anxiety, and PTSD for a large part of my life. Some of this stems for childhood trauma that include surviving sexual abuse, but my mental health steadily declined while in graduate school. But it wasn’t until graduate school that I had the resources needed (i.e. health insurance) to help with both diagnosis and treatment of my mental illness. I was about 3 years into therapy and psychiatric care when my eldest brother relapsed from his drug addiction and came back to live with my mother. I, the only daughter in a Mexican family, was tasked with carrying out the many needs my family required of me. This included the daily phone calls from my mom asking me to talk to my brother, getting my husband to buy and install a new bathroom door when my brother punched a hole through the last one, and being the family secretary/paralegal/lawyer/etc., just to name a few of said requirements. Lots of “the cops were called”, yelling matches, and “you need to fix this”. 

The last time my brother was deep in addiction, it spanned for about 6 years in my childhood. This time, my mom was just tired and helpless and leaned on me, albeit excessively because I was an adult and played “la unica hija (the only daughter)” well. I had to be there for my family. With the university and where I lived just 30 min away, being a ‘local’ to grad school was a double-edged blade. I was just close enough so when things were stressful for me, I could quickly find refuge with my family, but at the same time, when things were stressful for my family I could and would be there even when I didn’t want to be. It was around this time that I was planning on taking my qualifying exams and I couldn’t put it off any longer. It was also this time that I was so stressed and broken that I separated from my spouse and partner of nearly 12 years. Yikes, right?! 

 Well, here’s an even messier situation and timeline: I took the first part of my qualifying exams (written exam portion) and the evening after completing them I was sexually harassed by a faculty member at the department holiday potluck in front of four other male faculty. Not one word in defense or shared disgust was uttered. After reporting what happened, I heard back from the Title IX office about a week later and was informed that the “isolated incident of a statement of a sexual nature... does not rise to a prohibited conduct.” It was a few weeks later when I got word about my qualifying exam results: a ‘conditional pass.’ My committee felt that while I was really strong in the soil chemistry portion, I had mediocre responses to the other sections of my exam, deciding that I needed to make additional efforts to show that I had a strong foundational knowledge of my research area. One of the most hurtful parts is that I realized that a person I viewed as a mentor was not only in favor of assigning me a “fail” but had urged my committee to fail me entirely and not allow me to take the rest of my qualifying exam so that I could master-out. I had not done well in the graduate level course for this mentor and the qualifying exam score was the proof that I didn’t belong.

It was three days after I got my conditional pass that I intentionally overdosed. The morning it occurred, my mother and I argued over her disagreement with my decision to separate from my spouse and this only added to the massive fuel that had accumulated. I felt like I had failed in ALL areas of my life. As a daughter, as a partner, and as a student. 

I had to compartmentalize my life so much that I saying the words “I might be getting a divorce” and “my brother relapsed” came with an incredible amount of shame. How am I supposed to share these parts of my life at work? Especially in a place where I already felt I didn’t belong (very white and male), sharing the vulnerable and broken parts of my life was not an option. In parallel, my family had already thought I “made it.” I was going to be “la doctora”, so to share that I was essentially barely holding on by a threat was also not a possibility. In those moments, I couldn’t see my future and I felt alone. The words and thoughts that repeated in my head were a combination of “failure” and “disappointment” but the one that stood out the most was “IMPOSTER.” I couldn’t understand how everyone around me just knew how to do grad school. How were people able to afford rent? I was doing Postmates in the evenings, took out student loans, and relied on tutoring jobs while my spouse also worked multiple jobs and yet we were still overdrafting nearly monthly. No one else seemed to have any money issues like I did because no one else shared that the admin office forgot to submit their reimbursement, so they’d have to wait even longer for a repayment they desperately needed. No one else shared that they attended an out-of-state conference with ~$40 total in the bank so they had to rely on miso-soup packets that they brought from home and free coffee at the meetings to survive through a 4-day conference. No one else shared they were repeatedly mistaken for janitorial services when working. No one else shared that they had any other external life problems that included being problem solvers within their families. No one else shared the constant worry the current presidential administration was imposing on them as their people were labeled “drug dealers and rapists” and the overwhelming weight of targeted violence. No one shared how difficult it was to pursue a career in which a reflection of yourself was not widely represented.  

Finding my Joy

I continued on and made do with what I had but I shifted my focus on my assets as opposed to my deficits. I decided to stop pausing my life because I was in graduate school. Exactly 11 months after, I became a mother. I started to say no to things that I wasn’t capable of doing alone (although this one is hard). I got my Ph.D. I got a job. I am going to be a professor. My brother, now sober, welcomed his first child into the world and is living a healthy, wonderful life. I have experienced so much joy. None of this could have happened if I didn’t just try to hold out for one more day of life. For one more opportunity to prove that I am here for a reason, and I want to make the best out of this one life that I am given. And I matter in this space and so do you.