Never had I thought there would come a day when I would be typing the three words, “I’m leaving lab.” Those three words bring me back to that scene in Therapie TAXI's Chula where Zaoui’s girlfriend told him, « Donc on arrête là ? » (“So we’re stopping here?”) as he parked the car. Is this the end? Two hundred and forty words is quite long for a straightforward email, but it is not long enough to tell you the whole story: the experiments I’ve set up, the countless NMRs I’ve run, the days I’ve shown up at lab in the summer. Lab gradually became a part of me, and whenever I went for a walk on campus, I would find myself gravitating toward the science building, where the lab had become its heart. I fell in love with it the same way John Green described falling asleep: slowly, then all at once. The chem wing became my country roads, and my lab carrel became my humble abode.
Until one day, it was no more. I became Sergei Krikalev returning to Earth after the USSR collapsed: a man of no nation, a person of no lab. When he stopped showing up to my presentations and forgot to email me about lab meetings, I sensed the distance widening between us, which prompted me to write the email. We often talk about change as something that is thrown at us, but what are we supposed to do when we are the ones initiating it? Embracing change takes courage and bravado, especially when it means walking away from something that no longer serves you well. Part of it really felt like an abortion of part of my identity. How do you teach your feet to unlearn the path they have taken thousands of times? How do you get comfortable with the fact that your lab coat no longer has a home to go back to?
And how do you keep calm when you see that everything goes on without you—that publications still get published and the member slide erases your name as if it had never existed? And for a long time, you don’t. Embracing change doesn’t always mean not grieving what could have been. I still think about the version of myself that I would have become if I had stayed longer and the version that once existed. Sometimes, we change not because we don’t care, but because we care too much to let what once mattered to us deteriorate any further.