The Opening Act

One day I woke up entirely discontent. I didn't know why I was in grad school or what I wanted to do after. I didn't know why I was living in the suburbs of Chicago. There were only four things that made it worth getting out of bed that morning: my eventual wife and my three cats. So I didn't go to school that day. Or the next day. I stopped reading my email. I dropped out of grad school, and I started pursuing real dreams. Dreams of living a simple life in a beautiful place, of finding happiness in subsistence rather than in the accumulation of material wealth, of the kinds of adventure that most people only read about.

That would have been the easy way for it to happen. A little too good to be true, though, no?

What really happened is that I was sitting at home one cold winter Saturday with the eventual wife and three cats I mentioned before, looking at a brochure that had just arrived in the mail from REI.We looked at every page and then at the end asked each other, "If you could go on any of those trips, which would it be?" It should come as no surprise, since we were made for each other, that we picked the same one. It was a three week trip to Nepal centered around a trek to Everest Base Camp. Since we had already been toying with the idea of getting married in the fall (and I say "toying" because we had already set several other dates that never quite panned out for lack of planning; neither did this one), we decided a trekking expedition in the Himalayas would make a perfect honeymoon. So we booked it.

And that was the beginning.

We had a good nine months of anticipation (a full term pregnancy), and then in November we were off having what turned out to be an incredible adventure. Maybe I'll give some more concrete details later, but it was the rhythm that got me. The slow, steady progress that my feet would make in a day and the hours during which they did it left my mind free to wander and meditate on thoughts that would usually be drowned out in work and idle distractions. And then at lunch or tea or dinner, the group we were traveling with would come together and eat and drink and enjoy each other's company.

Three weeks later, we were back, and I went back to the research lab, but I couldn't bring myself to do any work. I would lose myself in thought and then eventually realize that I had been staring at a wall for an hour feeling the rhythm of the trek. Christmas passed; New Years' followed. I spent a few weeks home with worsening remnants of my Khumbu cough, a product of the high altitude that eventually accumulated some bacteria. It became more and more difficult to get out of bed in the morning. My desire to "grow up to be a chemist" was just about entirely gone, quashed by my dreaming side that longed for for trekking and adventuring and being in nature. And for writing. But it was the crushed side of me, the pragmatic, graduate student side, who had to continue to crawl out of bed in the morning, go to work, and collect a paycheck.

I considered transferring to a program in Oregon so that I could at least live in Oregon. Part of my misery, my scheming, dreaming side said, came from the depressing surroundings, the flat, open spaces, my distance from nature. I almost (insanely) did it, a move that would have separated me from the love of my life for perhaps as many as three years. I thought better of it at the last minute and switched research groups instead.

That's where I am now, but this is the beginning of a story, I hope. A story about a dreamer and a pragmatist sharing a body. A story about depression and what might lie at the heart of mine. And a story about getting from here - from life as a grad student in the 'burbs - to wherever the future lies.