thank you for listening to my story.

“And at some point, it was 7pm. I dropped off the flow antibodies in the cold room and walked into lab to dump the slushy ice down the sink. I placed the bucket down and like gravity had taken over in the horizontal plane, I found myself walking around the lab till I ended back at my desk. I was finally alone. So I stopped holding my breath and I let it all out. I let myself feel the pain and it was the hardest thing I have ever done. And sometimes I regret it you know. I regret letting myself be in pain, torturing myself for people that within a year or so, may not matter anymore, and burning away at the branches of the people who loved me (and for people I foolishly believed ever loved me). What haunts me now, is when I look back at that time, it was just…it was just so easy slipping into that place. The coldness, the brokenness. I’m a girl who is compassionate frankly to a homicidal level, the victim of this crime being myself. Suicide was never going to be an option, not even that would’ve freed me—that was the worst part of it all.”

I’m trying so hard to be strong, to tough it out, to get through this rough period that is supposed to be rough. But it’s so hard.

In my head, I was screaming at those white walls. In reality, it’s 1:38 pm and I’m sitting in my friend’s lab, sobbing into her pink sweater because I’m so scared about my future.

And whether or not I’ll have one.

Because being FGLI isn’t just an identity I tick off on a box to get extra financial aid. It is my life. It has defined the way I live, the way I see the world and how I interact with it. It’s a unique paradigm with many nuances and subtleties that I’ll never be able to fully explain.

My fellow academics, you cannot argue to dismantle the classism in academia, while using classist and racist arguments.

I don’t have a beautiful conclusion or statement to write at the end of this blog or advice I can give to others right now, because I don’t know what to say about myself and these feelings. All I can say is this. Being FGLI, yeah it sucks in so many ways. And it can be so lonely at times (almost all the time frankly). But i’m not ashamed of it. I will never be ashamed of it. I’m so proud to be FGLI. But I also wish that being FGLI didn’t have to feel so lonely.

Sometimes, I just wish things could be easy.

You’re entitled to say no. No matter what anyone tells you.

My PMDD is simply just a part of my life, just like my depression and my anxiety. Just another crossword I’ll eventually solve and move on to the next one.

I love being in STEM. I love being Black. But being Black in STEM, despite accomplishing things that two years ago I could’ve never dreamt I could accomplish, is still really difficult.