00:11
I think you are spot on with that example on not only you sort of risking your own emotional vulnerability in asking for help, but also that is equally an opportunity for your close friends to show up for you.
I hope people are not living day to day needing other people to show up for them in a big, profound manner. I hope we can just like, hey, what's up on a regular basis and time to time show up for each other, right? Not every day.
But if you don't ever provide that opportunity, so to say, you don't know who's going to show up and you don't know who wants to indeed show up for you until you try.
And different people will show up in a different way for different problems. And that's also at different times, right? We always have to think about the time axis of things.
Like maybe, you know, your best friend Mike will show up to you for most of the things, but right now he's like dealing with a lot of things and he cannot help you.
And maybe that right now is precisely the time you need help. And instead of Mike, you go ask help from, I don't know, Jonathan, like something. And that might work for that time being. And I'm trying to come up with a generic name.
I know. I saw the processing and I was like, it's hard. I don't have one.
So it's like that, right? You know, even if your most trusted confidant might not always be able to show up for you in a timely fashion. And that's something that we need to be considerate of others.
But I feel like these things you only learn through experience, like through the iterative process of showing up for somebody and also being shown up by people who you didn't expect or you did expect.
And like through that iteration, you learn what sort of your limit, what ways am I helpful for this particular person under this particular circumstances. And maybe the best way to show up sometimes is to leave them alone. And, you know, that's also one way to show your friendship.
03:01
The awareness of each person being individually emotional, having a certain amount of need, a certain amount of bandwidth while recognizing that you also need those things is really hard.
And I think, like you said, very, very succinctly that it is something you need to learn by doing.
You will feel uncomfortable. You will feel out of place. You might feel a whole bunch of things that you carry because of the ways that you've originally started to build friendships with people.
And it's hard to not even necessarily accept, except in some part, but that if you then were to ask for help and somebody is not immediately able to give it, it is fine, at least in the essence of that person is also going through their things.
And that's not an immediate end to the friendship, even if you feel disappointed, which is completely valid.
And I think, I don't know, I have a bad habit of not asking for help until I absolutely need to.
You are among many similar people. I think this is hard.
I think people kind of sway in one way or the other, but I tend to be. In research, I learned it fairly early on to ask for help at early stage.
That was something I learned during grad school, asking for research help. And that was met with excellent mentorship by my grad school PI and postdocs and other people.
People responded one way or the other. So I learned through this behavior that it's okay to ask dumb questions. It's okay to request help from other people who are equally doing busy things.
And so that barrier, the energetic barrier to do that has gone down significantly since the beginning of grad school.
But when it comes to life stuff, I think I, well, one, I'm fortunate enough to most of the time not have to deal with that much crisis mode for the past few years.
Until very recently, maybe, but that's not the story.
When that happens, thankfully, I now have people who I can share and understand, who are in the same kind of environment, who understands the dynamic and whatnot that I can share.
06:08
And I think I'm also doing a better job doing that now than let's say when I was like 10 years ago, it was really hard for me to open these things up.
But yeah, it's still harder, relatively speaking. It's a lot easier for me to come clean about my research struggles and research or work struggles than my life personal struggles.
And also you want to talk to different people at a different time. And that's also what I'm learning. I'm like, I don't always go to the same person for a similar topic, because I feel like I already know what he or she's going to say.
And then I'm like, right now, what I need is something else. I go for someone else.
Yeah, but it's a weird one. I think we need to learn through behavior and we're a dynamic being, they're a dynamic being, two dynamic beings in sync rarely happens.
Sounding a lot like the three body problem.
It complicates the problem in like orders of magnitude harder to solve.
And a lot of it doesn't come with solution, right?
No, we can only approximate solutions.
This is what we have, right? This is what you have right now. If you want to go and speak to this person, but they're not available and we hope to respect that, right?
This person takes care of their things. You can always do a variety of things to choose.
Hey, I still want to talk to you at some point. If you have the time, can we schedule this later?
They might even offer it if the relationship is that way, but you might want to speak to somebody else.
And maybe you don't feel you can speak to anybody. So you try speaking to somebody you don't usually.
And that's an opportunity to see if that goes somewhere.
These are hard, especially because of something you also hinted at there, which is the tendency or the ease of sharing work related gripes or issues or even successes.
I feel like I'm focusing on the issues.
It's easier to share those and it's particularly easier to share successes in general, probably because of the number of taboo on negative things.
I just had a recent incident on that. I should get going soon, so I'll keep it short.
But basically, a friend of mine, my grad school colleague, have finally got a paper in a shape that is publishable on the problem that he was working on basically since day one of the grad school.
09:16
And they're trying to publish in a very high impact journal.
And I got the draft share because I'm like, what, like eighth author on the list.
And I'm excited. I'm eighth on like 27 people on the list. I'm not too bad.
That's the nature of our research.
So I'm super excited. I'm so happy for him because I've seen him work his ass off for like five, six years on this.
So I immediately when I got the draft share, I immediately texted him saying like, congrats.
It's so great to see this finally see the light of day and whatnot.
And his response was like, oh, thank you so much.
Like, you know, it means a lot coming from you because you've seen the most struggle.
And, you know, and I think that's like also in a competitive field like academia, it can come as like a lot of jealousy or envy or something like that.
And, you know, it's not a pure congratulation sometimes.
Thankfully, we work in a very different problems, even though we were in the same lab.
So I was not a single bit jealous of him because I just know how hard that problem was.
And how many times he tried to change the topic of research to, you know, something a little bit more easier to digest and publish.
But he stuck with it. So I'm super, super happy.
But like, yeah, if it wasn't for his personality and the way he's working at it, I could have been super jealous that this is happening to him and not me.
And it would have been a very different experience, a little bit bittersweet experience, maybe.
So, like, very grateful that like that in this instance was not the case.
But I think life is complex and sometimes you're jealous of your friends, too.
Yeah, that neither of us are specialists in describing the emotional range of humans.
But from personal experiences, yeah, it's hard.
And you might be jealous and excited. Right. And proud of your friends at the same time.
Yeah. It like it doesn't mean that you feel all happy-go-lucky about feeling all those things at once.
But it can totally be fine. And then it can you can still demonstrate the one that matters to that friend.
Right. Like the pride of being like, this was so cool.
So it's great that you had that experience. That's awesome.
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, even successes are not always easy to share.
12:02
No. Yeah. Well, because if you, you know, share your successes too much, then you're, you know, gloating, gloating in a difficult position.
Yeah. Yeah. You're like, you know, too full of yourself or somewhat nuts.
So, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I think I don't know.
It's it's it's kind of very open ended questions and I hate to end this this way.
But strong ties and like friendship is definitely something that's more on my mind.
As of late, maybe because I have recently, well, less than a year ago, moved to a completely new city that I've, you know, never really lived and whatnot.
So. But. Yeah, let's keep talking about this time to time, because with Osaka as well, we talked about making friends as an adult being not trivial.
I think I did listen to that one. So, yeah. Yeah. Let's let's return to it.
OK. Yeah. That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening. And find us on X at Eigo de Science. That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. See you next time.
