Collapsing the Wavefunction

An end to two years of magical thinking

“Freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose”

— Janis Joplin, “Me and Bobby McGee”

In the darkness, the only thing I could perceive was the roar of the waves from the Mediterranean Sea outside my window. Despite being on vacation in Sicily, I had been jolted awake in the middle of the night by a nightmare where I received yet another rejection email for my latest job application. At 3 am I checked my inbox to see if this one was real. No new messages.

Most days for the past two and a half years have consisted of a similar routine: Wake up. Check my email for any job news. Get out of bed. Make coffee. Doomscroll about daily horrors like deporting people to a gulag without due process or the pointless self-destruction of American science. In between writing and contract work, refresh Gmail a few thousand times. Go to the gym, eat dinner, watch TV. Fall asleep and repeat.

The uncertainty was the worst part. The average length of a faculty search from announcement to decision can be 6+ months, and private sector hiring can take almost as long. Rejection itself is painful, but the repetitive cycle of apply, interview, wait kept me on a perpetual knife’s edge between hope and despair. Unless and until the final NO showed up, I couldn’t be sure whether or not I would be a university professor again, a manager in industry, a diagnostic pathologist, or remain an outsider chasing down vendors for money owed for gigs done months ago.

Call it Schrodinger’s career, simultaneously alive and dead.

(Image source)

The stakes were much higher than just a W2 income stream or benefits; we were essentially kept in limbo about the course of our lives for the past two years:

• Would we be staying put near our friends and family, or have to start over thousands of miles away?

• Did we need to spend time and money preparing to put our home on the market? Could we afford to buy a new house with sky-high mortgage rates?

• Would I be able to finish up my payments for Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) and discharge my enormous student debt, or stay stuck on the IDR treadmill until the late 2030s?

• If we stay, could we manage more brutal hurricane seasons and an increasingly hostile political climate in Florida?

And increasingly, as the rejections piled up, I wondered if my career had run out of juice. The only consistent variable between all of the different opportunities I was pursuing was me.

In early May, the wave functions of my remaining job applications collapsed into certainty: My services were not required. After more than two years of applying to dozens of jobs, everything had fallen through. The universe seemed to be telling me it was time to move on.

The reality that my days of being a pathologist may be over sunk in, piercing the veil of magical thinking I’d been draped in for the past twenty-six months. I went through the five stages of grief, from denial of my situation (This was just a few bad breaks, I’ll bounce back) to anger at perceived slights, unfairness, and nepotism. The bargaining phase lasted a while: Surely if I just market myself right, compromise on a few things, and don’t rock the boat too much I’ll land the right job. I even became superstitious, convinced wearing certain outfits or watches to interviews influenced my luck. Finally, I passed through depression and arrived uneasily at acceptance.

So, what am I gonna do? There is simply not enough contract and locum pathology work to go around (and the global and US economic outlook continues to darken), so I recently obtained my DVM license in Florida and will be returning to clinical practice, at least part-time. My initial focus will be on preventive care, but I hope to shake the dust off my old skills and get back to working ER shifts again. There is something electric about the adrenaline rush of those critical cases and big wins.

I enjoyed my time in practice, and on some level look forward to returning to my roots; after all, I originally signed up for vet school before I even knew what pathology or hematology were. Still, if I do end up pivoting away from my specialty training and research experience, it’s hard not to feel like I wasted over ten years of my life. The way to reframe it to myself is that I can still apply those skills to patients in practice, even if it’s on a smaller scale.

One day around the same time this was all going down, I sat at my laptop to free up space in Gmail by deleting tens of thousands of old messages (I’ve had the same account for over 20 years). As I was doing some keyword searches, I came across something unexpected: a Wordpress blog I used to write from 2008-2010 called “My Cat Ate My Homework” that I had completely forgotten:

Kinda cringe, but it’s earnest

The original posts were no longer around, but there was a broken version of the archived site and I had the email receipts from comments to certain posts. Snooping through these digital ruins was a fascinating journey back in time. It’s filled with medical puns and I wrote under the inexplicable pseudonym of Jackson (paired with enough biographical information that my identity is not hidden at all). A campaign button for Obama ‘08 is emblematic of the naive, can-do optimism of the late aughts¹. I linked to SPCA International, and to this day I donate a portion of my writing proceeds to local shelters.

I was able to recover the titles of 22 posts, here’s a representative sampling:

“Vets and Debt: The possibility of poverty”

“Growth At Any Cost”

“Triplix [sic, it’s actually Trilipix] and the Real Problem with US Healthcare”

“My bank failed today”

“Genetic Nondiscrimination Act Signed into Law”

These topics are eerily similar to what I would write about in this newsletter 15 years later, a level of thematic consistency that is sort of remarkable. “Vets and Debt” concerns the student loan crisis, especially as it pertains to veterinarians, and foreshadows many of the issues with income-driven repayment and PSLF. “My Bank Failed Today” chronicles when Washington Mutual went bankrupt in September 2008, two months after I moved to California and opened an account there. “Growth at Any Cost” critiques the capitalist assumption of infinitely increasing profits, despite natural diminishing returns and negative externalities. I even wrote about Big Pharma marketing shadiness and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (the latter of which would be referenced in several All Science posts).

Clearly, I have always been political, frequently spicy (one column was titled “Milton Friedman: Champion of liberty or douche-bag?”), and perpetually concerned about the intersection between private industry and the delivery of healthcare. I’m reminded of a line from a speech between between two seasoned ER doctors discussing why they haven’t quit yet in the season finale of HBO’s The Pitt:

Dr. Abbot: I think I finally understand why I keep coming back now. It’s in our DNA. It’s what we do, we can’t help it. We’re… we’re the bees that protect the hive.”

In some ways, medicine is almost an alternative lifestyle. It’s just who we are and what we do. Even for folks who manage a delicate work-life balance, you can’t simply turn it off when you go home. Everywhere I am, vetmed follows… Seeing a dog at the park limping that almost certainly has a torn cruciate ligament. Skeptically watching ads for pet medications on TV. Family members calling to interpret their cat’s test results. Reading news about DOGE sacking vets who do research and meat inspections. Getting texts from former trainees for advice.

Writing, like medicine, is also in my blood—despite my best attempts, I simply can’t quit it. To silence myself in the hopes of slightly boosting short-term job prospects would not be true to myself, and recent history has shown it also probably wouldn’t be effective.

So screw it!

I’m going to restart writing on Substack without caring about what people think. If the earth has already been salted, what do I have to lose? It’s a creative outlet I’ve sorely missed. During my hiatus, I even dabbled in writing under another pseudonym (I won’t directly link to it here, but it isn’t a big mystery). Finally, I’ll be turning paid subscriptions back on because frankly, I could use the money. While the vast majority of posts will continue to be free to all, I greatly appreciate anyone who chooses to support me financially.

1. It’s the stuff of memes by now, but it really is wild the number of disruptive “once in a lifetime” crises us Elder Millennials lived through in our short lives: 9/11, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the housing crisis and Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgence of war globally from Ukraine to Gaza and beyond.