Under normal circumstances, I would not do this, but I felt the following entry from my “physics process” blog qualified as x-posting material. Also, I wanted to explain my absence from the blogosphere.
If your Queen never takes a risk, she will never realize success
Well, I’ve been on hiatus for a while. Perhaps the last entry signaled a bit of a wind down of my emotional faculties. The truth is that I am fairly thin-skinned, and until two weeks ago, I was running on three years without a vacation (well, without a vacation that actually included not working and/or visiting a member of my immediate family who was mortally ill).
I allowed myself to be bullied out of the last vacation I tried to take, which is maybe a good thing. Maybe I needed to understand that I was so lost that I couldn’t even find the cojones necessary to insist that I be allowed to take care of myself.
So I took two weeks off where I didn’t discuss, read, or think about physics in any real way. My god have I Loved them. Not necessarily because I did anything particularly different — still a lot of reading, a lot of TV, physiotherapy, etc but because I could do it and not feel like I was supposed to be doing something else.
I didn’t want to leave myself out in the cold for my return to work though, so I decided my vacation would be partly devoted to picking up the game of chess. I figured it should hone my focus, my problem-solving skills, my patience, and my intellectual stamina. In the end, I spent more and more of my vacation on chess. Whole days became about playing on the Internet Chess Club or taking tutorials from Chessmaster: Grandmaster Edition. Indeed, I have discovered, with pleasure, that my focus is better, that I have more patience, that I can spend more time thinking about a problem and I know my weaknesses when I am doing it.
What was somewhat unexpected was how much it would teach me about myself and my life. I learned that I had a hard time playing the game because I was afraid of losing pieces. If I lost a piece, how could I win the game? Terrorized at the prospect of failing, I was incapable of beginning, much less winning. Failing to recognize that there would always be a next game, I held myself back from trying. As I pondered how I could get past the opening in chess, I realized that these anxieties were running my life. Not just my chess life — my real one too.
That wasn’t always the case. I remember a time when I believed in myself enough that I took risks. I skipped about two years of math in high school without really batting an eye. Actually, I skipped a year of school to start high school early, never worrying that this was the wrong decision, that I couldn’t do it etc. I saw what I wanted to do, and I pursued it hungrily. A lot of people put that down to intelligence, but I think I am one of the lucky ones: I loved to learn. I loved to read. I loved my math classes. I loved studying history. And I loved making the system work for me, molding it to fit my needs.
I’m not sure if it should be called a mistake, but surely there was some error, some naivete in thinking that a life in the academy was all about a life of learning. Because I confused the two, I began to see the academy’s standards as my own. Problem solving was no longer about a certain joie de vivre. Suddenly I was applying to Harvard and thinking about being good enough. Problem solving became about success.
I’m not good at that kind of problem solving, it turns out. In fact, I suck at it. I’ve never liked competition, and a life built purely around competition? What a nightmare for someone like me. My passion since I was ten, physics was no longer a source of excitement. It was my terror. Physics was such a pain, such a job, such an anxiety driven process that I found it impossible to find a path to enjoying it.
Along the way, in an effort to try to make this life style congruent with my spiritual and physical existence, I made concessions. I allowed myself to believe that hard work wasn’t enough. In an effort to protect myself from the dungeon of failure, I stopped trying. My ganas evaporated as a last ditch effort to fit in with a world that frankly wasn’t built by or for people like me.
As I head toward my 26th birthday, I’ve found myself panicking about how my late teens and 20s have been spent so far. I was looking in the mental mirror and only faintly recognizing the person in it. Sure she had the temper and the passion for social justice. But this was a girl who had stayed with a guy who had hit her when she was 18, something the 16 year old never would have approve of. Now she was terrified of making people who are assholes angry. She was worried about what the racists might think if she told them to shove their racism you know where. And she was letting people tell her that if she took a mental break after a long year of emotional trials, she was somehow approximating failure.
In essence, I was losing the chess game. I was staying crouched in a defensive stance, begging the world as I once begged a boyfriend: please don’t hit me again. Instead of building a strategy to maneuvre through the muck, I was allowing it to hold me captive in the corner. In my paralysis, I had forgotten that I once didn’t mind a challenge so much.
Thankfully, I came to enjoy chess, a game I once hated because it was boring but really hated because I had no idea what to do. I’ve come to enjoy the slow, difficult process of learning new tactics. Just today I finally began to understand how to checkmate with just a king and two bishops. As I have come to enjoy these challenges, I have felt the flickering of something distant and low in energy, but familiar: taking a problem and shaking it until I got an answer and really, really thinking it was a cool thing to do.
Ironically, I’m still trying to figure out what makes chess special. I’m not just reading books about how to play chess; I’m also reading books about the past and present of chess culture. I’m still not sure I entirely understand tournament chess and why anyone would want to experience it. I probably fall into the Waitzkin camp on this one. But I think that this must be an extraordinary game to have helped me complete the picture in the mirror so clearly.
Tomorrow will be my first day back at work. I admit to being terribly anxious about it. But at least now, finally, after all these long years, I remember and truly understand the goal: to enjoy a process of discovery and the fantastic ways the pieces can be put together.
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