As a graduate student, Josh Silberg begins to question whether he's cut out for science.
Josh Silberg has researched everything from humpback whales to whale sharks to rockfish—he just couldn’t decide on one creature to study. After earning a Master’s of Resource and Environmental Management from Simon Fraser University, he joined the British Columbia-based Hakai Institute as the Science Communications Coordinator. Now, he gets to share all sorts of coastal science stories through blogs, videos, and the occasional poem. In his free time, he can be found photographing wildlife, hiking, or searching for creatures in tide pools. You can follow him on twitter @joshsilberg.
This story originally aired on May 5, 2018 in an episode titled Identity.
Story Transcript
University bureaucracy has a cruel sense of timing. I was 25, I was standing in my apartment in Vancouver the first year of my master’s degree, and I just picked up my mail and tossed it onto my IKEA table, that black IKEA coffee table that every single university student has. I noticed peeking out from the stack of flyers was a letter. I had a feeling I knew what was in that letter.
So I picked it up and I opened the envelope. I ripped it open really, really slowly. Inside was a single piece of paper. The Simon Fraser University logo was on top.
I opened it up really slowly and I read it and it was my worst nightmare. I'd been accepted to the PhD program.
I cried, and not because I was happy but because I couldn’t even decide in less than an hour what I could eat for lunch at that point in time. I didn’t know how I could make such an important life decision. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to finish my master’s let alone a PhD.
I just threw that congratulatory letter on the ground and I retreated under the covers of my bed and I just holed up.
A few months prior, I was on cloud nine. I had started a master’s program and I couldn’t imagine why anybody wouldn’t want to do this to the point where I didn’t even want to do it for two years. I wanted to do it for five or more. I wanted to stay there forever.
I whizzed through the first two semesters of classes and I found myself on a tiny float plane heading up to one of the most beautiful places in the world, the Great Bear Rainforest on the central coast of British Columbia. I sat on a driftwood log looking out over the Pacific Ocean. The moon was lighting it. Everyone else had gone to bed. No one else was around.
There were calm waves lapping up at the shore. It was an idyllic, almost tropical-looking white sand beach stretching out for a quarter mile on both directions. And I shivered and I didn’t know what to do. This was my childhood dream and I was terrified.
So when you wake up in the morning, when you're up there, typical day starts at about 6:00 a.m. You get your stuff onto the boat, you put it on there, we go out to our next research site which is a towering forest of kelp.
The three other researchers would pick up their fishing rods and they’d tie a lure onto there and they’d toss it into the ocean. And plunk, plunk, plunk, whiz, whiz, whiz, you let the line go out. It goes slack. It hits the bottom.
I just winged it. I had actually never been fishing before in my life, before starting a master’s that had to do with fish. I just thought it was a cool project. I didn’t even have time to second-guess. I just kept going. And that’s a really, really tough place to be. But, you know what? Your instincts sort of you have the fight-or-flight. It just kicks in and you just do.
By the end of each day just before dinner, we’d come home and we’d have a cooler full of fish to dissect. Things were sort of getting worse and worse for me and there was one particular day where I realized I had a big problem.
We laid out the fish one by one on this wooden table and there were fillet knives, there were tweezers. I put on my impostor mask and I gave instructions to the other people. We needed backbones, we needed ear bones and we needed some muscle tissue. Each one of those would go into a little vial and that glass vial was about half the size of your pinky. Each one would have a label on it for each fish that I would have assigned it.
By about 9:00, we finish that up. We hose down the table and everyone else went off to the beach to catch the last of the sunset. I hung back and all I could think about was them commiserating around the fire about how incompetent I was. “Who was that guy that they let into university and the university probably regrets that.”
Then I went about my nightly routine back in the laboratory. Each vial had to go into the freezer and I would put it into a box, and each box had about a hundred vials that could go in there. I put each one into the box one by one and I thought, “Okay, I'll organize this by what species of fish are there. No, that’s not right. I'll do it by what site they're at. Uh-uh. No.”
I second-guessed, I third-guessed and then, “No, my first guess was right. No, maybe not.” I just got totally lost in the fog inside of my head.
And I faffed about and I faffed about and I just didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. Untold hours went by of me switching these back and forth and back and forth. I remember staring at this cream colored lab bench and just zoning out for I don't know how long.
I snapped out of it and only one thought came through the fog. I slunk down on the chair and that was, “I don’t think I’m cut out for this. At some point, everyone’s gonna see me for the fraud that I am. All my previous successes, chalk that up to fluke and privilege. They're gonna figure it out sometime and there's gonna be some repercussions.”
I finally went to bed around midnight. I was too exhausted to even dream. Pretty much the second my head hit the pillow it seemed like my alarm went off and, at 6:00 a.m., it was time to do it all over again.
For about five minutes I lay there and I thought, “You know, I could feign a physical illness. No one would get mad at me for not doing a day of research because I had the flu.”
But I was sick, I just didn’t know it yet.
So flashback to my apartment and I’m holding that letter, that letter that I dreaded the most. At that moment, I read those two sentences over and over again.
“Dear Joshua,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to the Doctor of Philosophy Program in the fall term. On behalf of the committee, I wish you continued success at the university.”
Continued success? Who was that person that applied to do a PhD? That was so unfathomable to me. I don’t even know if I should be here at all, let alone excelling and moving on in this.
I hid this from almost everybody. To me, I was failing my family, my supervisor, myself. But outwardly, I was getting straight As. That downward spiral was completely silent and that fog is invisible. Except to my girlfriend, because when you live in a one-bedroom apartment you can’t really hide.
So she started noticing I was changing, that I was different. I was oversleeping, I had stacks and stacks of sticky notes with task lists that were completely… nothing was crossed off on them. And I cried, I cried a lot. Every night I cried which is not very typical for me.
At some point, I still didn’t realize anything was wrong, but that PhD letter that was the breaking point because I knew the university was going to need an answer and I couldn’t hide anymore.
At that point, I called my parents back in Calgary. I happened to be going back there for my best friend’s wedding. She was getting married near there and we’d already booked our flights. I sat on the couch, my family home that I grew up in, and I just broke down.
I spilled everything. My feeling of failure that I was just letting everybody down. I still didn’t really understand what was going on. How was I going to tell my supervisor I couldn’t do a PhD? That was my biggest fear.
It was at that point that I went and got help. I went and talked to a doctor and therapist and I exhaled for the first time in months. Because it had a name, I was depressed. When you put a name on something, there's a power to it. When I was playing around with those vials back in that room, I didn’t understand that at all, not in that moment. I still don’t understand what I was doing there but all those irrational thoughts, when you give it a name, there's a power to that and there's a catharsis that came over me.
So I immediately thought, “Okay, now, I can get better.”
How do you get better? You take a pill and you talk to somebody in therapy, and then you're better. Right? That’s how it works. No, that’s not how it works. That’s, unfortunately, not how it works. Even when you know what it is, you still don’t get better.
So through a combination of all of these different things over the next few months, slowly, slowly that fog started to dissipate and I could think a little bit clearly, a little bit more clearly.
I’m really lucky because none of my worst fears came true. Everyone around me was super supportive and empathetic. The stigma that I had heard about before, which still exists, I didn’t experience personally.
I still read that letter every so often and I've underlined the words ‘I wish you success at the university’. I realized it wasn’t the right time for me to do a PhD, but I've never second-guessed that decision.
Thank you.