Frank Stabile: A Garbage Can Ruined My Summer

As an undergrad, biologist Frank Stabile lands an exciting summer research position in D.C., but soon he starts to notice something’s not right.

Frank A. Stabile is an evolutionary biologist in training at Yale University. He is currently a PhD student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, where he studies the evolution of feathers. In particular, he wants to understand how birds evolved to develop feathers and scales at the same time. Before Yale, Frank earned an undergraduate degree in biology at The College of New Jersey, where he spent several years in the woods catching birds to study feather replacement. He has several other interests that probably take up too much of his time, like history, politics, literature, and birding.

This story originally aired June 30, 2017.

Story Transcript

So I’m here to tell you about the time a garbage can ruined the best summer experience of my life. 

To set the stage a little bit, this was just after my junior year in college and I am heading to Washington, D.C., with my family.  It’s late May.  Really nice, sunny Saturday.  And I’m super excited because I’m moving to this dorm room in George Washington University.  I still really can’t believe it, but somehow I got a summer research position at the National Museum of Natural History. 

I’m sure most of you know about it or have even been there, but in case you haven't, the museum is kind of a big deal.  It’s super famous.  It is.  It’s just the way it is.  So it’s super famous.  It’s like the most visited national history museum in the world because of its immense collections, awesome people who work there. 

I’m this young scientist who already was super into museums and now I’m going to work at this museum, so my mind is already, like, blown.  And on top of that, I love Washington, D.C., just as a city, as it is.  You should go there right now because I think it’s great.  Now, I’m this late teenager who’s going to be living there for two months, so I’m super excited. 

And because my family is a little crazy and really close, we all just piled in the car and we drove to D.C.  So we go through all the logistics, paperwork, getting the keys, whatever.  They helped me unpack all my things in the room and we kind of meander around the national mall a little bit, then they take off for the motherland in Jersey. 

So then I’m in D.C. alone, and the whole time I’m mostly excited but I've been feeling a little stress too.  Right?  I mean, it’s a move.  I think most people feel stressed during a move.  My stuff is all boxed up.  At this point, nobody in my family has lived this far from Jersey.  It’s not that far, but whatever.  It’s far enough for my mom to be upset. 

So my stuff’s packed up, everyone is touching it and it’s not good.  So I decide, even though I’m in D.C. and I’m alone and I could go check out the GW campus or go to Dupont Circle or do any number of things, I’m still feeling kind of stressed about all the stuff being touched by my brothers and stuff.  So I figure I'll just stay here that night and finish unpacking, get settled, get comfortable, and that’s what I'll do tonight.  Then after that I'll feel less stressed and I'll go do things. 

But the next morning I woke up and still kind of felt stressed so I was like, you know what?  I'll just do that again today, and the day after.  I was like, that’s fine.  I used the first couple of days of this internship to unpack pretty much and get settled and make the room okay.  But that’s fine.  We still got two months. 

And I still wasn’t doing all things I needed to do.  So my roommates moved in, I met the other students in the program and, before we know it, it’s the first day of the internship.  So we all walk over together to the museum and it’s like you're passing the White House on your way to work.  So you can’t beat that. 

And we get in and it’s a ton of introductions, a ton of policy.  It’s a lot all at once.  But it’s also super exciting.  I meet my mentor, who’s this really great guy.  Lucky for me.  I get my ID card with my face on it and it says Smithsonian and I’m like freaking out.  But it’s a lot and, like anything else, after a little while, it went from overwhelming to kind of routine after a couple of weeks. 

I was waking up every morning, kind of speed walking to the museum because people in D.C. walk really fast.  I don't know why.  They just do, so I did that.  Then I’m working long hours during the week and things are going well.  It’s a lot, it’s a lot of work, but the kicker is that every Friday we get this special kind of behind-the-scenes tour of the collection, which is amazing.  One week I’m holding like a moon rock and a Mars rock, and then the next week I’m looking at bones that Teddy Roosevelt collected.  It was just super surreal.  It’s like living in this dream world for nerds, I guess. 

But at the same time, so that’s the work routine.  That’s going really well.  But the other side, the home routine is starting to get a little weird.  Basically, what’s happening is that every time I come back from work, on the way home I stop at this chain restaurant called Potbelly, which doesn’t exist in Jersey.  So to me, it’s like this amazing five-star restaurant. 

So I’m getting all these sandwiches at Potbelly, going home and eating, and that’s what I’m doing, my kind of daily routine, though, I guess, that’s not the weird part.  The weird part is after that.  So I’m sitting in the room and, again, that whole move-in time I’m thinking if I just clean this room, if I settle in, I'll feel okay.  But the problem is I never felt okay.  Even every day after that, every time I came home, I felt that stress.  I felt that the room, just something wasn’t right about it.  I was thinking about how to explain this.  I think probably the best way is via example. 

So I was kind of going into this circle around the room of cleaning and organizing and making sure everything is just so, because the room was wrong.  It was like a fact of the universe that the room was wrong.  One of the things I noticed right away, which I think all universities hire the same really sloppy paint people to paint the rooms in between years, because there's just paint on everything.  All these little paint flecks.  I really got bothered by this so I figured I will just take this flathead screwdriver that I had for some reason, and just kind of get the paint off all these cheap furniture.  So that became part of my cleaning process. 

And that helped a little bit, but it still didn’t feel right.  The room was bothering me every night after work and I was using pretty much all my free time, even though I’m in Washington, D.C., to make this room just so.  So it gets just a little bit weirder, and this is where the garbage can comes in. 

So one day, I just started noticing the garbage can, which is like you never notice a garbage can.  I’m noticing the garbage can.  It’s not so much the can itself as the stuff that’s in the can, like literally the trash.  It’s just something about the way the trash is sitting in the can no longer sits right with me.  I’m really bothered by it. 

So I actually spend, I’m spending several nights rearranging paper towel rolls and stuff in this trash can to get it just so.  A few nights go by after work and I’m like this is really annoying, but I finally have this aha moment.  Like if I just cut the trash into little pieces it would be really nice and homogenous and then it won’t bother me. 

And it worked.  It was great.  The scissors were great and I cut all this trash into little pieces.  I cut the paper that wrapped my sandwich up into little pieces.  I had a system for the potato chip bag that I bought every day, was I cut the bottom off, cut that into pieces, then I have like a sleeve left, cut the sleeve into halves, the halves into strips and then the strips in little pieces.  So it was working great.  And every night, I’m coming back and this is more or less what I’m doing. 

And I kept thinking, I remember thinking over and over again, if I just get this done, if I just do these things, then I'll be able to go do… I wanted to do stuff.  I wasn’t happy to be doing that.  I wanted to go do those things.  Just these things had to be done.  These are like the first steps towards the rest of my time, the rest of my life in D.C. 

But that feeling never really came, actually.  Believe it or not, I spent the whole summer doing that.  As a result, I missed out on a ton of stuff.  I only ended up going to about a third of the spots that I wanted to go to.  I never made it to the Archives, or to the American Museum.  I think I only went to two restaurants besides Potbelly.  Just not good.  It’s like going to McDonald’s and two other restaurants in a new city.  It’s not really what you're shooting for. 

One night in particular, I remember I was in kind of suite with several other people, other roommates, and they threw a party in the suite.  So we’re talking like two feet away from my door.  That did not extract me from the room.  I was still in that room even if there's a party going on right there. 

I remember walking to the bathroom and being like, “Yeah, have fun, guys.  I need to go chip paint off of the bed.” 

So that was how the summer ended and, not surprisingly, things didn’t really get too much better after that.  So I returned home still feeling like this is annoying, but it’s more so annoying that I just have to do it.  It’s like a fact. 

And I go home, finish up my college degree.  I graduate, move to New Haven, and all the while these things are not going away and increasing.  As I get here, I’m finding I’m feeling increasingly depressed, increasingly anxious, and these behaviors that feel like facts, the fact that the room is wrong, has just remained true for those however long, how many years. 

Eventually, the excuses that I was throwing at myself like, “It’s fine.  You're still going to work.  You're still getting things done.  You still go out sometimes.  That’s good,” those things started to fall away.  I started missing meetings and I started not getting that much work done. 

And the people in my life started noticing and it kind of went from being like a joke to like maybe you should go do something about this. 

So finally after a good amount of reluctance, I started shopping for a therapist, which is always fun.  There's no Yelp for therapists.  You kind of just have to try one and see how it goes. 

Eventually, I found someone who’s really great.  And almost like maybe the second session she was like, “Yeah, maybe you've got some issues.  You have obsessive-compulsive disorder.”  Definitely.  No doubt.  A hundred percent.  Coupled with mild depression and anxiety, which usually kind of lurks behind these things.  So it’s like, okay, that makes sense. 

So what do we do about it?  Right away she's like, “Let’s start something called cognitive behavioral therapy,” which is this really great approach where you basically attack the behaviors and the thoughts that are bothering you.  But you don’t do it like tomorrow I’m just going to be fine magically.  It’s much more of like an incremental thing where you say next week I want to reduce the behavior two or three times, or something to that effect. 

So I’m happy to say now that it’s been about a year or so and it’s gone pretty well.  I’m definitely much less depressed and anxious, though I still have OCD.  It turns out it doesn’t go away.  It’s not like, I guess, having a cold. 

So I still have OCD.  It’s still my core problem.  I dealt with it this morning, I'll always deal with it, but now I’m aware of it and I’m working on it. 

And the one big thing that hit me recently was that only now do I look back at that summer and see the litany of red flags that were just waving in the wind right at my face.  At the time, none of those things felt abnormal.  They felt annoying, but they didn’t feel like the behavior itself was the problem. 

So I look back and I see all that, and I guess going forward, what I've realized is that I just need to be hyper-vigilant in that way.  I need to watch out for the red flags when they're hitting me in the face and do something about it, constantly work on it, constantly go to therapy and constantly make sure that I can push towards the life that I want to lead.  Because I think we've come pretty far as a society, I think, when it comes to mental health, but it’s still super stigmatized.  It’s super easy to normalize.  I mean, it was super easy for me to normalize all those behaviors. 

So I just come away from this realizing how vigilant I need to be and that my mental health and happiness are worth something and I should work towards it, because I definitely, definitely don’t want to spend another two months staring at a garbage can when I could be staring at the Lincoln Memorial. 

Thank you.