On Listening to My Gut
I bought a couple of self-help books twenty-five years ago, and they helped me navigate my course through troubled waters. As I get older, I’m discovering I have more in common with my parents than I ever thought possible.
I started keeping a journal when I was fifteen as a place for my philosophical thoughts. It’s mortifying to look back at the notes now, on topics like the mind-body dichotomy, nudity, sex, personal growth, and friendship. I only wrote ten notes by the time I was sixteen, and then had an epiphany four months after turning seventeen. My handwriting, which had been like my paternal grandmother’s—curvy and carefully crafted—became suddenly sharp and uneven. I wrote,
I just discovered something that I feel is profound about my life. I have been living the life of the bowling ball instead of the player. I crash through every pin and take it all personally instead of watching and taking what finally comes out. It might be tough to transform myself into a human from a bowling ball, but I am set upon doing it.
I marked the change in the notebook margin with a line and arrows pointing up to “Me pretending to be perfect,” and pointing down to the words “being myself.” I don’t remember what triggered that awareness, and can only speculate that the stresses of applying to university and dating a woman who was clear from the start that we were simply friends who kissed and held hands had left me in emotional tatters. Maybe hormones also played a role.
Some counselling might have helped, but writing a few sentences in a notebook would have to suffice for a high-schooler who felt life was too short for talk therapy. I remember seeing a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Bolles on my father’s bookshelf and taking it as a sign of weakness.
My next journal entry was also my last, written two years later during my second year of university:
So much has happened since I last wrote here. Here I am, a college sophomore, trying (hoping) to better my performance in academics. Trying to find some friends, maybe a girlfriend. Last year was traumatic at best and a disaster, realistically. But that’s just one point of view. When I was happy, I was happier than I had ever been. When I was down, I felt the worst that I had ever felt. My encounters with women made me want to become a homosexual (except I don’t like most men either).”
I later discovered that bipolar disorder ran in my mother’s family, so it seems to me that I went through a cycle and recovered without medication. Despite little queer visibility in my world at the time, apart from the AIDS crisis, I questioned my sexual orientation and decided that I could only trust my instincts.
The next major decision in my life was choosing a graduate program, so I used my computer skills to calculate the best choice for me. I had to decide between neuroscience programs at the State University of New York-Buffalo, Colorado State University-Fort Collins, and the University of Southern California, and I assigned weights to factors such as location, reputation, cost, and personal interest, then scored each program on each factor. It was too complex a decision to rely solely on my instinct—I needed objectivity. I didn’t realize at the time that my instinct influenced each subjective weight and score, and Los Angeles would always come out ahead, no matter how I played with the numbers.
My mother went the self-help route that same year when she longed to find more fulfilling work. She compared her job at the time to “spinning straw into gold” from the German fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, and bought her own copy of Richard Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute. The exercises guided her into public service, where she found rewarding employment and camaraderie in the late Democratic senator Paul Wellstone’s office.[i]
Five years later, I had to choose where to do my postdoctoral studies, and I wasn’t satisfied with my options after interviewing in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and Seattle, Washington, and receiving an open offer from a lab in Atlanta, Georgia. I wanted to leave animal research behind and focus on studying the human brain, but there weren’t any labs at my school that could provide me with enough experience to do a postdoc in that field. My graduate adviser believed that the big lab in Seattle would prepare me better for a faculty position, and he wasn’t wrong.
The movie Sleepless in Seattle and grunge rock were big at the time, so I went with the flow.
Five years after that move, I faced another paralyzing decision: where to become a professor. I spent months flying around the U.S., invited to interview at twenty-two universities. The first few offered me positions, including professorships in Ames, Iowa, and Kansas City,[ii] but I dreamed of more prestigious and less landlocked places, having spent ten years on the West Coast. Along the way, my heart was broken by UC Davis when budget issues led them to cancel the position before they could fill it, and it came down to New York City and Storrs, Connecticut. NYU offered a subsidized one-bedroom apartment and the same faculty salary as every other university in North America, despite the high cost of living. UConn-Storrs offered a relaxed, bucolic setting and a buyer’s housing market with four-acre wooded properties going for cab fare in NYC.
Sarah loved the sound of Connecticut, and I sensed that NYU would come with more career pressure than I could handle, despite my deep affection for the city. I didn’t resort to making a spreadsheet and using numbers to help make the decision, and went with the flow again. Soon, I was overwhelmed into clinical depression, torn between my loves of teaching and research, realizing I wasn’t capable of doing both (or killing animals).
It wasn’t until we moved to Canada that I faced a crisis that spreadsheets and instinct couldn’t get me out of. I walked into a toxic workplace feeling trapped as a temporary foreign worker and turned to the self-help section of a local bookstore. There I found Gutfeeling: Instinct and Spirituality @ Work by Peter Urs Bender.[iii] He was also an immigrant to Canada (from Switzerland) and recommended changing one’s name when moving to a new country. His Swiss given name was “Urs,” which means “bear,” and it would have set him apart from his Canadian colleagues with Biblical names. I didn’t take that advice seriously for another eight years, but I appreciated his way of incorporating spirituality into my decision-making. His definition of spirituality was a mix of energy, gutfeeling from the subconscious, and creativity, and I could get behind that.
The second book I bought that day became the one that changed my life—The Pathfinder: How to Choose or Change Your Career for a Lifetime of Satisfaction and Success by Nicolas Lore. It challenged me to think about my core values for the first time and to find career options that aligned with them. I spent days working through all of the exercises, which included drawing a timeline for my whole life, writing out what I wanted from life, and getting realistic about my current commitments and job requirements. It was clear that I had issues with supervision and needed some independence.
His advice helped me advance my career to two more companies, where I had more agency. That was until I hit my next crisis. I was worn out from travelling across Canada and the U.S. for Pfizer’s Canadian subsidiary, and a former colleague became my supervisor, eager to please the head of our medical division. It meant more micromanagement and sales than the clinical science I was hired to do—I just couldn’t force myself to do it. It wasn’t in my nature.
Then a farmer found my father dead in a field with a shotgun lying across his body, and I discovered he had been leaning on a religious self-help book called the NIV Men’s Devotional Bible. The essays it contained offered terrible advice for someone living in an abusive relationship, and the bad advice probably contributed to his death. Was I making a mistake using the secular equivalent instead of seeking out a psychologist or career counsellor? Maybe we shared that fatal flaw—an inability to ask others for help.
I looked back at my then-six-year-old career plan from Pathfinder and remembered that my perfect match was becoming an instructor rather than a research-based professor. A quick search turned up a teaching position for a PhD with a neuroscience background. I applied and spent sixteen years loving my time in the classroom again.
Teaching led me back to a better understanding of my gut. It hasn’t stopped me from overthinking nearly everything, including whether I needed to change sex and gender, but I’ve learned to let the little squirrel in my brain fall asleep on the running wheel so I can hear my gut talk. Research backs up that approach because we make the most accurate decisions when we take a break from information overload and let our unconscious mind work through the data. Experts make better decisions when they trust their gut because they’ve built stronger connections between their experience and their emotional intelligence.
If you want to strengthen your brain-gut axis, an article from Healthline offers some helpful advice on distinguishing gut feelings from paranoia, anxiety, and wishful thinking—something I’ve struggled with. I can’t avoid every poor choice, like the traumatizing bungee jump pictured above, but with each mistake, I’m learning to listen to my gut.
What did you think? How are you doing? I’d love to chat…
[i] Was it a coincidence that she found work with a political science professor from my university?
[ii] I dodged a bullet in Kansas, given their history of anti-LGBTQ laws, including the recent ban on adult gender changes and bathroom use.
[iii] “Gutfeeling” was a play on words, with “gut” referring both to our gut and the German word for good.
[i] Was it a coincidence that she found work with a political science professor from my university?
[ii] I dodged a bullet in Kansas, given their history of anti-LGBTQ laws, including the recent ban on adult gender changes and bathroom use.
[iii] “Gutfeeling” was a play on words, with “gut” referring both to our gut and the German word for good.