Posted on July 17, 2024

Move the needle every day, towards your own vision, not someone else's. You cannot fail unless you don't try.

If that needle is putting underpants on rats, that is your dream and don't you dare let anyone tell you no.  

I opened one of the AAAS's ten daily email updates. The AAAS is serious business, a secret club akin to the Royal Arch Masons in Freemasonry (the link goes to my dad’s books). No. I am lying. It is a professional society. I was going to update you with the latest breaking news, but I can see that this blog post is a sentence away from devolving into a diatribe.

TOO LATE.

There are “professional societies” you should join in science and medicine because it means you are important. Just kidding. I belong to a few that I enjoy. I find this one rewarding because I receive a journal subscription, and I volunteer for committees that review submissions and proposals for meetings and casual publications. It’s fun. I review the sections for medical sciences, neuroscience, and political science.

I later realized that professional societies are often a scam. There is a professional society for dog sitters. DOG SITTERS. It costs more to join than the American Medical Association and the Society for Neuroscience combined, and they even have a certification test. So, you must pay the dues, then purchase and take a course, and presumably study for an exam that is hundreds more in testing fees to become a professional dog sitter. I have owned dogs and trained them for two decades and I’ve taken dog first aid, and anything else seems like common sense knowledge to me. But hey, I don’t make the rules. I used to dog sit and train, and people would pay me three times as much as someone who was certified simply because I am a responsible adult. I suppose this is a lot to ask these days. I became sidetracked there. Back to the AAAS.

I’d meekly request they simmer down the email blast, but then I’d be paying them hundreds of dollars in return for a forum of people who won’t talk to me. Alas, I have the incorrect letters after my name. I don’t actively practice what the letters after my name tell me I should, and I no longer care to spend my time torturing, planning the torture of, or writing about the torture of rodents. D(rat)!

There was a group that rejected me on LinkedIn for the same. Wrong letters! I was not doing life right with my letters, either, so who was I? I was convinced these people were right because I’d never experienced anything outside the bubble of academic medicine or science. I would just click on things. There were options to follow. Connect, connect with a note? Social connecting parties, endorsement of skills parties…this was stupid, guys.

I clicked incorrectly one of these times, and I received a note of rejection from some group, with a feeble attempt to shame me for trying to break into this prestigious…internet mix of PhD students…because, damn it, the MD, residency training, and four years of PhD-level classwork and research program I chose to master out of made me worthless? I did get a laugh out of that one. But, at times, it was hard. It was really hard.

It is embarrassing to admit that a virtual platform filled with people I did not know once made me feel as if my self-worth teetered precariously on the precipice of their opinions. Their opinions were garbage though I did meet some wonderful people, too.

When I first tried High Stakes Facebook, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was told that I had to “optimize my profile,” and “use ACTION VERBS.” This roughly translates to “Create a word salad. Do not sound like you. Learn this falsehood, this witchcraft, exquisitely intermixing a precise formula of bland terms, quantifiable results, and POWER VERBS appealing to “recruiters.” Waft this intoxicating perfume of pontification towards “recruiters,” but in this way only. They will not understand you and be rude to you, but you just have to keep doing the same thing over and over because this is in no way the definition of insanity. The outcome? I would finally be hired for my “dream job in the industry,” where I would make $200,000! (Don’t go to those guys in the link. They are being sued for being a scam. I went up against them with the BBB for a refund. Though their lies were marvelously entertaining, I was not sad I wasted their time and made them very mad, I wasted my time, too. Avoid.)

Rewind. What?

So, these people told me I had to pretend to be someone I was not until someone took pity on me and hired the person I was pretending to be for a job I did not want. I am baffled it took so long to realize that if I failed to be authentic from the beginning, staggering through the charade I fabricated would last indefinitely.

Normal me would have laughed at this plan until I sprayed milk from my nose because hiding behind a computer screen is how I have been hired…never. Pharma has always felt slimy and wrong to me. By training, I am a pharmacologist and physician, so I can see their tricks.

It took three years to let that go and even realize something was wrong. This was NOT the normal me; this was brainwashed zombie Dr. Newel. This scenario was impossible! I don’t even drink milk!

The longer I played the game, the more I would be engulfed in flames, but it wasn’t my fire. I detest the grocery store fire logs. I am the type to wield a hatchet to split logs of wood. I chose the manner that worked for me, and I needed kindling that nurtured my strengths rather than reduced them to ash.

This blog post took a turn for the personal, yet I am not afraid. There isn’t a need to hide. If you wander across my eclectic jumble of truths, you can agree or not. It is your choice, as this is mine. The moral being, as my one-time mentor, whom I had the honor of knowing a long time ago, said, URUBU.

You are you. Be you.

AND…

MSFA!!!!! Make Science Fun Again!