From January blues to eternal hopes

I've never been a cynical person. But today, I came within a stone's throw of the precipice, inhaling the fumes of profound hollowness that comes with being a cynic. It was not a good place to be, to be sure, cowering under all the bad news cropping up around the world like mushrooms after a heavy rain. Usually I can handle the torrent, but today was not one of those days. Today was about being stared in the face by Hopelessness and Despair. By Questions like how one can sleep at night? What is the point of it all? Why try to make the world a better place when one's actions seem to barely cause a ripple in the ocean that's been caught in a rip of Bad News? Why not just end everything now, with the eager help of the oil and shale gas industries, of course? Am I not becoming a cynic??

Fortunately, I eventually managed to retard these destructive thoughts. As cliché as it sounds, my saving grace was meeting up with a 13-year-old child who I regularly mentor at a neighbourhood secondary school. Coaching him on geometry today made me realise not only that I've retained something from the mind-numbing maths lessons of my school days, but that - more importantly - if I give up on humanity, I will necessarily be giving up on people like him (he wants to be a graphic designer, bless). And so, while my mentee was grappling with the difference between a scalene and isosceles triangle, I concluded that it is because of the current existential crisis faced by all Earthlings that I must never give up the hope that life can and will continue to thrive on Earth. It would not only be unethical and a great shame for us not to at least try to make the planet a beautiful and habitable place once more for future generations; it would be mighty disrespectful to all those courageous souls in history who died fighting for a more just world (as well as those highly intelligent souls who invented the likes of geometry). 

And so: terrible events may happen all the time, but it is up to those who are able – like myself – to continue battling with a steeliness that's couched with the one emotion that unites us all – love. And whenever a crisis of confidence presents itself, as it is bound to over and over on this journey to salvation, it is imperative that we reflect on the sacrifices others made in order for us to be. Now that I'm studying biology, I am appreciating for the first time just how miraculous life is. There are possibly millions of ways that life can go wrong. A lack of an enzyme or protein here retarding normal development or a missing gene there causing cancer. And yet, statistically speaking, it's rare that nature, when left it to its own devices, gets it wrong. In other words, things often go wrong because we make it go wrong. So, on the flipside, we have the power to make things right again. At least, that's the hope.

2014 - a roundup

Wow, what a year 2014 was! It was a year marked by some of the biggest events of my life – ie. getting married and planting roots for shizzle in London – as well as one rollicked by some serious achey breaky soul searching.

And so it is with some sadness that I now turn my back on it.

You may have wondered why my last post on this blog was back in July. I take it as a good sign. Wedding planning notwithstanding, I. Got. Busy... getting my life into gear once more after many many months spent crawling about in the doldrums of uncertainty.

So here is my last 6 months in summary:

After my honeymoon in South Africa in August (amazeballs!), I began treading back into the suffocating embrace of the rat race. Didn't think I would did you? It certainly makes me cringe just typing this up as my visceral dislike of the rat race still stands unwavering. But eventually I felt I had no choice if I wanted to get unstuck. Fortunately, I have not gone the whole hog of selling myself into money-minded slavery (I am unqualified to do so anyway). I have instead chosen to enter into an arguably more competitive sphere: University. Yes, again. Twice again in fact.

This latest chapter began around May 2014 when amid the last minute panic and flurry of wedding activity, a soft (hopefully sober) murmuring in my head encouraged me to chart a new course in science. After all, as all my leisurely reading on nutrition, neurons and epigenetics seemed to indicate, I was already heading in that direction quite on my own. The important thing was it made sense. 

But which science?

I initially considered and then dismissed the notion of becoming a neuroscientist. I had had some acquaintance with neuroscience during my undergraduate degree. Unfortunately, as cool as being able to call myself a neuroscientist (all those pleasant eyebrow raises at dinner parties!), something deep in me recoiled at the idea. It just seemed too hard core (or should I say, hard-headed?) for me, a crypto lady of leisure. I'd also considered studying biomedicine since some programmes promised an introduction to everything that I found fascinating about the human body. The biology of aging? Check. Immunology? Check. Stress? Check. But then I looked at the career prospects of a fresh biomedical science graduate in the UK and nothing sounded more promising than a lowly lab technician in some chemical works. So instead, I decided to consider what I rightly or wrongly think of as the softer more glamorous option of nutrition science. Apart from my hapless experimentations with diet, during those heady dog days, what was getting me excited was all the new research on gut microbes and what diet and lifestyle do to them. I mean, did you know that your body is composed of 30 trillion human cells and yet is host to some 100 trillion bacterial and yeast cells? You have to wonder, then, what makes you human?

So to get me to the point where I can apply to study nutrition at degree level with my head held high, I enrolled at Birkbeck, University of London to do a foundation course in biology and chemistry – subjects I'd buried along with my dismal secondary school career 14 years ago. But now I was absolutely chuffed to be marching from age 30 to 16 without the aid of chemical peels and injections of young blood, a process that began when I took up playing the guitar. My analytical brain needed desperately to be reawakened. I'd spent so much of my life since 2012 working on my confidence by developing my intuition and physique that I had become 'shy' of doing dryer stuff like maths, even though I was never really bad at it. Perhaps like the feeling someone gets when they learn to write properly, I was surprised to find a new mode of expression in being able to solve problems in chemistry using simple algebra! It was another form of self-actualisation.

So I hope to finish the foundation course in June with flying colours and be accepted by one of the top universities in the UK to study nutrition science. 

Beyond that, I have no idea and may very well hit yet another existential block. Do I become a nutritionist working for the NHS (National Health Service)? Or a researcher in the cutthroat world of academia where I'm likely to be chasing grants more than doing actual science? Or will I have to forge a totally new path? Who knows. The possibilities. More first world problems!

Maybe my decision ultimately won't matter. I am now reading Naomi Klein's anticapitalistic manifesto This Changes Everything. Klein's unique ability to chip away at my conscience may turn me into a climate warrior who knows how to eat right. Whichever way I look at it, all of our futures are intertwined with that of our planet's.

Thrilling stuff. So there you are, 2015.