C (2:49)

Because this is the academic life, we like to hear a bit about how people found their pathway through higher ed. Did you know that you wanted to be a professor? And did you know that you were going to have such a passion for science?

A (3:02)

No. No to both. So I was actually in high school. I really deeply disliked math and science. The way that I was learning science felt like this kind of collection of facts that didn't seem to be related or relevant to me. It was kind of something to take in and then regurgitate. I actually had a big dream of being an investigative journalist. And so I went to college thinking that was what I was going to do. Um, but I. I studied some philosophy of science in college, and I got really, kind of. My understanding of science really changed. And I realized that it's actually really creative. It's about asking questions. It's about all of these things that we don't know, that we're curious about and that we want to explore. And so I tell students a lot that I'm always kind of surprised that. That this was my path because it. It's definitely one of those things where I didn't plan for this, and then I found it kind of, I guess, like through a back door, essentially. Yeah, unexpectedly. And I think that's maybe some of the beauty of college, of going to college and taking classes and studying things that you don't know, that you. You know, that you might expect, you might find out, you really enjoy or have your worldview turned upside down. And. And then in graduate school, it turned out in graduate school, I really love doing research. And after I defended my dissertation, I. I was like, oh, no, is this, like, the end? And it turns out that professor life feels very similar in many of the good ways. And so, yeah, I've. I've been in academia since, oh, my gosh, like, a really long time. Now.

C (5:04)

That brings us to your book. Your book is called Everything is Fine. I'll Just Work Harder. Confessions of a Former Badass. Let's see. What inspired you to write the book?

A (5:15)

So this felt like a story that I had to tell. I felt really like it was. It felt like it was in my body and essentially kind of like I needed to birth this. I was kind of jokingly for a while, telling friends that it felt like a book baby. And it really. It really did. It. It was this story that I needed to tell that kind of came pouring out of me. And writing, making this book, it's hard to use the language about writing the book because it's a graphic memoir, so it's art, it's comics. But making the book really satisfied something very deeply in me.

C (5:54)

And you had been making comics for a while before this, is that right?

A (5:58)

Yeah, I've been making comics really since grad school. I was making comics just for myself then and kind of like diary comics. And then through the process of trying to have a baby, I started to make comics that really integrated the science that I was reading about reproductive technology with kind of autobio comics. And it became this kind of way to help myself cope with all of the uncertainty, with the, like, the total lack of control in the process that I had. It was really, you know, this whole process that's kind of like both awful and wondrous, and it's like a combination of science and luck. And so really, I feel like my comics practice kind of cemented then. It's when I think comics became really integral to. For me in a way that before, it was just more like a kind of a way to play.

C (7:03)

And this book is a graphic novel. Had you been a consumer at graphic novels, how did you find your mentor text to help shape yours?

A (7:15)

Ooh, good question. So I had really, like, I was calling them hashtag book goals through this process. I. I love graphic memoirs. I love graphic novels. One of my dear friends jokes that I like books without words, which is true. And. And I. I would say that, like, comics and graphic memoir and graphic novels do have words, and they actually have. I think what's so awesome about them is they're so flexible in how they can be set up and designed and. And the stories they tell. And so I had several kind of book goals in mind. There is a book called let's see. So Teresa Wong's book Dear Scarlet was one of my book goals. It's a graphic memoir about Teresa Wong's experience of postpartum depression. And that. That particular book goal was a book goal really, because of how, like, both simply and vulnerably, she was able to tell this story with really simple illustrations. Another book goal for me was Aaron Williams graphic memoir called Commute, which is this sort of reckoning with what it means to be a survivor and told through the lens of a Single days, commute to work. And it's a really blunt and direct and kind of powerful takedown of shame. And then there were several others. Tessa Hull's book came out as I was kind of finishing up working on my book. And that. I mean, that book, if you haven't read that book, it's. It's received the Pulitzer. It's amazing. It took her 10 years to write. It's such, like, a tour de force. And that book definitely felt like a big influence for me, too.

C (9:22)

When you describe this book, what's the elevator pitch?

A (9:25)

Overworked professor basically has this kind of trigger that happens that brings to light this prior trauma, and they go to therapy and have a transformative experience that really kind of like, turns their life upside down in the best possible way.

C (9:44)

The story takes us through typical days for you, and we get this clear idea early on that you are very distracted on purpose. So we'll see things out the window, but you aren't seeing them. We'll see how busy you have to be. Your partner makes bids to spend time with you, and you can't make that time. And as we go through the book, we start to understand why you are burying yourself in work. Do you want to share a bit about your story? Yeah.

A (10:19)

So I think what's, like, wild about this is that I think that this is how trauma responses show up for a lot of people and that we don't even recognize them. We don't see that this need to be constantly doing, constantly fixing, constantly acting in some kind of way productive, being useful as a trauma response. And it shows up in these really mundane ways that I've tried to illustrate in my memoir. Things like just the overworking, the like, constant, essentially, like, might describe it almost as, like, hyper vigilance of what needs to be done, staying on top of a to do list. And I think that is, like, so common. And I mean, because. Because we live in this, like, capitalistic society where productivity is, you know, praised, and it's kind of how we earn our keep and how we get by in life. That that mentality is like, really usually, like, it helps, it helps us, it affords us to be successful. Right? But at a big cost. Like, I think at a big cost.

C (11:40)

And that kind of pervasive external validation of you get so much done or, oh, you're so productive, or you're so efficient. It keeps many of us from interrogating what's going on inside ourselves that we want to be that busy or that we can force ourselves to be Be that occupied all the time.

A (12:03)

Yes, and exactly. And I think you get on this essentially like a gerbil wheel, kind of like the COVID of my book, where you can't get off because it's self reinforcing. The more you do, then the more you have to do. And you've never satisfied something because internally your worth is you. You don't have a sense of internal worth. It's all based on this external validation that you'll never get enough of. And that's kind of the, the like, terrible, like very sad part of it to be able to hop off that and to recognize, like to slow down and to notice, oh, maybe there's a different way to be.

C (12:45)

And in the book we see that it becomes untenable for you. You can't keep living the way that you had. But the idea of going to therapy also gave you great pause because I think, as many listeners can relate to, it's not just if you can find a therapist, it's if you can find one who's the right fit for you with the right specialty. And if all those things don't line up, some people are wounded by the time they spend with the wrong therapist.

A (13:17)

Right. That's very true.

C (13:19)

And so you make the decision that you're going to pursue finding the right therapist for you.

A (13:24)

Yeah, and I think that's key. And I think people, I mean, I think finding that fit, finding that, the rapport, and also recognizing that it takes time to develop the rapport, that's hard.

C (13:39)

You take us through so many of the sessions and we see you there and then we see how you're feeling afterwards. We see the difficulty in making the decision to keep going. Can you talk to us about what you wanted to share with your readers in taking us through such a personal journey?

A (14:01)

Oh, gosh. So much so, I think. So first I would speak to the fact that. Because you're referencing the part of the book where the character is really struggling with wanting to continue, like not wanting to continue therapy because therapy is hard. And I think that is such a real thing, especially when, you know, people often go to therapy. And at least for me in the past, my experience was I'd gone to therapy to sort of like extinguish the immediate fire. And then once it was done, that was good and I would quit. So I never got to go kind of deeper into the things that might be kind of underneath, like sparking that fire in some kind of way. And so that part, I think it's like just such a real Feeling of recognizing the work that it takes to. To go to therapy, because it's not just going to therapy. It's like the work in between sessions and the work of, like, looking really hard at yourself and like, seeing the things that you feel great about yourself, but then also seeing the things that bring a lot of pain and actually being with. Feeling the feelings. So I think that part is very real. And I wanted to make. I wanted to essentially kind of like validate that experience of that so common of. Of people wanting to leave kind of when it gets really hard, because it's really hard to show up and face those parts of yourself sometimes. I think the other big message I wanted to share was that that these kinds of journeys are possible and that they really change. They change us. And I think they change not only us, but I think it has a domino effect. So I. I don't. I didn't really write about this in my book, but I can say personally that I've seen kind of changes, these sort of ripple effects all through people that I know. And I think every. Everyone doing their work on themselves, we kind of like, we. We don't change in a vacuum, right? We're changing kind of relationally and we're changing with each other. And I think there's something really powerful about that.

C (16:22)

One of the things that I noticed as I was reading along was all of these feelings are coming up when you're in therapy. And having come out of academia, I. I know that we can just stay so busy and have so much of other people's work to think about that for many of us, when we have time to sit with our feelings, we're way out of practice to be kind about it. And for many people, they haven't really developed the tools along the way for some of the bigger feelings, because all of the praise and validation came from avoiding a lot of the messy parts of being human and just digging into being productive. Like, okay, I am having this awful thing that I need to deal with, but sure, I can. I can get all this done for my advisor, or I can get all this done on this editing project that I'm on, and I can worry about my actual human needs some other time down the road.

A (17:13)

Yes, like a hundred percent. And it's funny because I was just saying to a friend today, like, we're so good at making spreadsheets, and it's so much harder. And I think also academia allows us to really live in our brain and to live, like, in this intellectualized space instead of necessarily in our bodies. And that's something I tried to portray in my book too of like how my body often got really lost even in terms of very basic needs, like working so much that then I'm like, oh no, I need to go to the bathroom. And like I've. How have I been here doing this thing for four hours? But I think that's so common. And when we can actually take that step back and it's hard feeling your feelings actually dropping into your body, being with your nervous system, especially if it doesn't feel very safe in there, is. It's really hard in the beginning, but it is such has so many rewards, I think when we kind of allow those feelings and the growth that comes from that.

C (18:21)

One of the things that we see in the book is that the therapist didn't just sort of leave you to the Pandora's box and say, well, now you know, you have all these feelings, good luck. But was to really model for you a level of radical acceptance of whatever you brought to therapy the therapist could handle and that you deserve to be able to radically accept and love yourself.

A (18:47)

Radical acceptance is really interesting. And yeah, I would say like, definitely that was modeled. And I think radical acceptance is. I think we sometimes have this like really simplistic understanding of acceptance and of accepting ourselves. But it's also like accepting the things like essentially it can be as simple or as complex as saying something like, it's okay that I hate this thing and like really allowing the unpleasant. And then of course, like, you know, you can take action from there or you can decide not to. But like accepting the reality and accepting. I think the hard part of it is that it's about accepting that often we have very little control. And I think in academia sometimes we want to think we have like this power or yeah, a lot of like ways to fix or make things better. And in some ways that's true, but in some ways it's like really reckoning with like actually my power is constrained and limited and that this is like where I can actually act and make a change. And primarily that's like, that's like within my own sphere of myself and like recognizing the ways that sometimes we want other people to change and then that's not possible. And the ways that like that kind of continues to bring us grief and pain when we can't accept those realities of like the way things actually are.

C (20:40)

The book takes us into what appears to be post traumatic stress. You had had a traumatic event in college and had carried it forward with you and hadn't had the kind of support and help that you needed. And it takes us into how much self blame and shame that you carried. And one of the things that your therapist helped you safely explore is how that kind of self blame is a means of trying to regain control when the world isn't safe or predictable. We can say, well, at least I know how to control me. I know how to see myself in this situation and I take all responsibility for all parties and all situations. And that somehow feels like then we've made sense of the world when it shifted so badly when this trauma happened.

A (21:38)

Yeah. Yeah. So that's. I think that's part of that. It kind of goes a little bit into the acceptance route. Radical acceptance part too. Right. Of like, if we keep thinking we can just change these things or control this thing, it offers us a lot of safety. And so the. Yeah, the self blame is another kind of like, angle on that of essentially like trying to make our world safer by taking on this unwarranted blame and shame that it's. So it's really weird juxtaposition of like, we're making ourselves feel safe but also feel just awful. But we're protected from some of the, like, uncertainty and some of the, like, big, big grief of like, really recognizing our lack of control when we do that.

C (22:35)

The book takes us through a big chunk of your journey and we start to see when you are seeing what's happening outside the window when you decide you're going to leave work early, when your partner asks again, can we go for a walk? And you say yes. Can you talk to us about the journey?

A (22:59)

Yeah. So I mean, I think the fascinating part of this. Well, so one of the, I think interesting parts of writing this graphic memoir is that it's still a story. Right. Because it has to. I have to create a narrative. There's this narrative arc where there's kind of like act inciting action and then a rise and fall and like a completion and. And a fairly kind of tidy. Ish. I didn't want it to be too tidyish of an ending, but it still is an ending. And in real life it's so much messier. Like, humans are messy and journeys are messy. And there's that whole saying that healing is not linear. And so it's definitely more messy than in a. In a book and even memoir. It's interesting because it's not exactly autobiography. It's still. It's still storified in some kind of way. But the journey, yeah, the journey is complicated and I think that, like, essentially, it's almost like the learning and some of the learning is really unlearning. So unlearning of, like, really deeply rooted paradigms and ways of being allowed me to open up into new ways of being. And I think that as I unlearned and then learned healthier ways, that it all kind of compounded. And so there. I think there were several things that I've tried to illustrate in the book that were really important for me to kind of unlearn and learn. And those were things like radical acceptance, compassion, just this whole idea of slowing down generally and of really trying to be in my body in a way that I don't think felt safe before.

C (24:47)

The back of the book are our resources and references. You did research for the book. Were you doing research when you were in therapy as well, when therapists would suggest different things that you might want to try or bring in concepts for you and you can dive deeper into them because it seems like research has been a place of comfort and enjoyment for you.

A (25:10)

Oh my gosh, yes. I'm a giant nerd. I love research. I don't know if I like doing original research or reading other people's research more. Maybe even there's something really like, that brings me such satisfaction too, of, like, reading stuff and then summarizing it and putting it into, like, a understandable way for a more general public. But yeah, no, throughout the process I was reading, like, I got really fascinated about emdr, eye movement desensitization, reprocessing, therapy. And because it just seems so, so bizarre.

C (25:51)

It.

A (25:52)

It really, I mean it. When you start to understand how it works, I think it makes so much sense. But from the outset I thought, this is really bizarre. I'm going to look at this little, like, little tracking light, this or. Or someone's finger moving. There's different ways you can do it, but it's essentially this bilateral stimulation via like, some sort of movement or tapping or even holding these things that vibrate or tap. But before, like, before I fully got into that research, it just seemed so wacky, like, so, so bizarre. And so for me, I think reading about it and doing this research was really helpful. And it also, I don't know, I think there's something like, I just. I'm a big nerd and a big learner, and I love nothing more than like a 3:00am, like, deep dive into some, like, Google Scholar.

C (26:56)

We talked a few minutes ago about when you were making comics to work through a lot of the complications that around getting Pregnant. And, and as I was reading this, I was thinking about the functions of art itself and in storytelling itself as acts of healing. The memoir takes us through the importance of the therapy work that you did towards healing. But I was thinking that the writing and art part were perhaps equally important in that journey.

A (27:26)

Yeah, so I think, I think it's, I think it's been really interesting to, you know, as a, as a biology professor, I write in this very structured, kind of formulaic sort of way to write academic papers. And so that's kind of like this format that I know very well. And comics are very different. There's sort of some, like with academic papers there's some structure to it. There are elements like there's panels, there are, there's gutters between panels. It's that space between the panels. But then there's just so many ways to break the rules in making comics. Like you might not make panels at all. The art may just be kind of like more free flowing on the page and a gutter might represent a second or it might represent a year. There are, it's like there's these rules that are made to be broken and. Which is definitely kind of in contrast to academic writing. And I think the, for me with, with making this book, it was clear from the get go that it was not going to be a book with words. It was going to be a, it was going to be comic, it was going to be graphic because I wanted to show, I wanted to show these really mundane ways that trauma responses show up. And I wanted to show like what dissociation looks like and what kind of hypervigilance looks like and, and what is this overworking look like. And to me, the rhythm that comics offer, that art, it offers something visually that I think would be really hard to convey in the same way with a lot of words. I think there's something really powerful about the visual for that. And then I, I love drawing and so that part of it was like just really satisfying for me.

C (29:29)

Can we talk a little bit about your journey as an artist? Are you self taught? Did you take formal classes? How did you hone your craft?

A (29:36)

Yeah, so I really took most of it is self taught and I would say that over time and currently actually my style is changing. I think kind of styles change as they need to change. And I think that's one of the beauties, beautiful things about conics is that you can make comics with stick figures. There's a science comic that's really popular, xkcd and it's all stick figures and then a lot of text. There's a comic that is just little blobs. I believe it's by Alex Norris. Yeah, there, there's just so many ways to do this. And so for me, I took a couple of formal classes, but it was more about kind of comics and graphic memoir storytelling than, than drawing per se. And yeah, I'm trying to think if I took formal drawing. No, not really. It was really, it was really also doing this like in community with other cartoonists. So I did reach like a point of, in, in the process of creating this book. It was super lonely for a while because, you know, when you decide to do something like this, the only person who's going to make you do it is you. And I got to this point where I thought I really need other people's eyes on this. I need other people's feedback. I need people to tell me like, what is working, what's not working. And also I felt like I needed sort of the motivation or like the camaraderie of other people essentially in the trenches of making some kind of work like this. And so I joined Sequential Artists Workshop, which is abbreviated as Saw. And Saw was. Saw was like also life changing. It's a whole community of cartoonists and graphic memoirists. And that really helped me to be able to like both go deeper and also step away from my work as needed. I like, I just credit Saw with so much and it made the experience feel much less isolating. And if it felt like instead I had this like lovely community of people who are like minded and trying to work their way through this, their own stories that they felt really compelled to tell.

C (32:08)

And we get a glimpse of that in the acknowledgments at the back. And you thank them for asking hard questions in soft ways and for being community with you and for. It sounds like in some cases being beta readers, you're looking at things and giving feedback.

A (32:25)

Yes. Yeah. I mean really, really between Sequential Artist Workshop and my critique group, which grew out of Sequential Artist Workshop, I feel like I, I don't know if I could have done this, completed it without that kind of feedback. It was so essential. It's in some ways it's like a little bit like having peer review in academia, but it felt, it felt more gentle. Maybe there's not like reviewer number three, but yeah, that process really, really, deeply helped my, my book.

C (33:07)

You mentioned a few moments ago about the ways you would use art to depict not only feelings, but the difficulty that you had had in connecting with Your body and feeling grounded in your body. And in many of the images, we see your head kind of like a balloon, and it's kind of floating off on a string.

A (33:28)

Yeah, yeah. So essentially, I mean, I think in those, I'm trying to communicate a few things. I'm trying to communicate the way that we are so disconnected from our bodies that we're often just like, really in this place of intellect and not actually grounded or dropped into our bodies. And I think that that is a form of dissociation, and that's a form of, like, not fully being present with ourselves.

C (33:59)

The subtitle of the book is Confessions of a Former Badass. And in the book we see downsides of being a badass. I think many people are afraid that it's the badassery that is what makes us successful at our jobs. And if we stop being that part of ourselves, it's just all going to fall apart.

A (34:21)

Oh. I mean, that is. I think that's, like, something to reckon with. Right. Because I think that when we do this kind of work, then after you make these big changes, things aren't going to be the same. And I don't think, you know, there's a philosopher. I think I forget if she's at Yale, Laurie Paul, and she talks about transformative experiences and. And one of the defining characteristics that she talks about is how you can't know who you're going to be afterwards. You can't know what if you're going to like this experience or not. Because she kind of. She kind of talks about this in terms of, like, making big decisions in your life. But I think this is similar with therapy, too, is that you might go into this and then you may come out a totally, you know, not a totally different person. You're fundamentally yourself, but things you value may shift. The way that you show up and that you are in the world shifts. And so I think that, like, I would want to validate people's fears that that may be the case. And. And also, like, I think it's a dialectic. I think it's a. Like a. Yes, and. And. And maybe that that's not a bad thing for things to shift.

C (35:45)

The book is divided into chapters. You can take it bit by bit. You can stay up till really late at night, like I did, and just read the whole thing in a gulp. What is your hope for readers when they sit with the work?

A (36:00)

Oh, gosh, it's so funny because so many people have told me that they've read it in a gulp. And I appreciate that because I read books in a gulp sometimes, too, and. And then, oh, gosh, the artist in me is like, that was so many years of work, right? So I think I really want people to take away. I hope people see themselves in ways. I. I wrote this book really, like, from a place of wanting to do this as, like, an act of care for myself, especially for younger parts of myself and who didn't feel seen. And in doing that, I somehow managed to give myself this really big gift. And then in it being published, it feels like it's actually not for me anymore. And so I hope that it, like, touches people in ways that help them to feel seen and. And that help them to, like, feel supported or kind of willing to reckon with their own sort of similar journeys.

C (37:11)

And finally, what do you hope listeners will take away?

A (37:14)

I think really for all of us academics, I think we're in, like. It feels like we're in a bit of a hard moment. There's a lot going on in the world. There's a lot going on in academia. And I think one thing that's in my book and that I'm trying to practice and that I hope readers would take away is this way of maybe if we can all kind of just slow down and what would it look like to just kind of notice where we're at and maybe start to question this idea that just working harder is the solution?

C (37:57)

Thank you so much for being here today, Professor Gormali, and sharing about your book. Everything is fine. I'll just work harder. Confessions of a former badass. I'm Dr. Christina Gessler. You're listening to the Academic Life. Please join us again.