In early 2014 I was working in a lab in the Northeast US as part of my undergraduate degree. It was the coldest winter I’ve ever experienced (I’m from London), and it was also the saddest I’d ever been. I was in a pretty unpleasant lab environment, and my normal routine was: get up, go to work, come back to my flat to eat lunch while crying to my partner over Skype, go back to work, come home, watch 4-5 hours of Netflix and then go to bed and repeat.
There are two moments I remember that started to help me get out of this state I was in. I can’t remember what order they happened in, but one of those moments happened randomly in the middle of yet another Gilmore Girls episode (I still can’t watch this show because of this period of my life). And it was that I spoke to myself very harshly, and this was maybe what my parents (and sisters and friends and teachers) had meant by the phrase “you’re too hard on yourself”.
The other moment was when this song came up on shuffle on my iPod one day in the lab. This song was from my partner’s collection, so it was unfamiliar to me, but something about the line caught my attention and put a tiny smile on my face for the first time in a while. This song is super super cheesy, and when I’m feeling mentally well it kind of makes me cringe, so I feel a bit nervous sharing it. But when my mental health is bad this song is such a big comfort to me, and a reminder to be nice to myself. So if anyone ever needs a gentle reminder of that, then maybe Waves by Luc and the Lovingtons may help (Spotify, YouTube).
Me being a total tourist with a nose as red as my hair in New York in December 2013.
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About me: I’m Michaela Agapiou, a Story Collider producer and recent PhD graduate. My research focussed on a single protein in the testes of fruit flies. Podcasts, and in particular, stories kept me company while dissecting a ridiculous number of flies for several hours a day during my PhD. I’m also bi/pan, almost always cold, British, Cypriot, Hong Kong Chinese, and I like to have an identity crisis every other year.