Don't ask for permission

On the transformative power of regret

Photo by Ani Adigyozalyan on Unsplash

I never felt like I had permission to be imperfect.

My most vivid recollections from childhood were in middle school when I had to bring home tests with a grade of less than 100% for my parents to sign. (96% was a failure to my dad.) It wouldn’t have been a problem if I could have gotten my mom to do it, but it was almost impossible to get her alone without drawing suspicion from my dad. I dreaded his cold judgment about anything less than perfect. “Why did you get this wrong? You didn’t study enough. I’m tired of wasting my time on you,” he would say.

So I learned how to forge his signature. I had a couple of 100% tests that he had proudly signed stored up to practice. I remember practicing by tracing them on the windows in my room, blinds up, my forbidden activities on display for any of my neighbors to see. I was nervous about that. Would they say something offhand to my parents when they got home? I had no other option. The window in my parents’ room was blocked by a huge table. My window would have to be fine. Maybe the neighbors would think I was just drawing.

In those years, I wished for a lot that I had no control over. I wished for my teachers to not require signatures on tests. For my mom to do more than tell me in private that my dad was being too harsh, as if talking about my shame were itself shameful. For my mom to leave my dad and take me somewhere safe. For my dad to be different.

What I could control, I did not think to value: my opinion of myself and trust in who I could become.

Throughout my time as a graduate student in biostatistics and my pre-tenure years as a college professor, I continued to put others’ opinions of me on a pedestal. In the wake of one of the most perspective-shifting events of my life–getting divorced from my husband after a 13-year relationship, I’ve come to see how my longing for external validation warped my personality in ways that I’m working to reshape.

As a graduate student, I agonized daily over whether I had actually taken a step closer to getting my work published, whether my advisor was proud of me or whether he regretted taking me on. I wanted permission to ask him about what he really thought about my work. I needed to know that he was proud so that I could step away from my work before my stress was at its peak. But instead I often worked until bedtime and on weekends. More than once, I received clear indication that my advisor truly valued my work. At tea time or in the hallways, my department chair and other faculty members would occasionally mention what he had said of me in department meetings: that he was thrilled about my work, that I was making great progress. As reassured as I was to hear this feedback, it only reinforced my belief that working as much as I did was paying off and that if I slowed my pace, I would lose his praise.

My boyfriend always understood when I said I needed to work. He often kept me company by playing a game next to me. I was grateful for the solidarity, but it surfaced my regret in a potent way. I could see the simple daily joys that I was missing in order to assuage fears about my adequacy. But I had to get my PhD. And I did.

In my pre-tenure years as a college professor, I’ve craved permission in so many respects. For my courses, I’ve routinely overpromised and then actually delivered. I’ve worked hours past my normal bedtime and woken up hours early to create lessons for a class that I was only starting to gain expertise in.

During my second year, I developed a new upper-level course in an area of statistics called causal inference. I wanted to push myself to branch into an area that fascinated me but one that I didn’t study as part of my dissertation work. This was years before I was reasonably expected to have contributed this course to the curriculum, but I felt an urgency in this pursuit so that I could pivot my scholarship to an area that intrigued me. It was rough. Even though I spent a good portion of the summer preparing materials, I quickly got to a point where I was learning the topics that I would be teaching the week before and finalizing lessons minutes before class.

Those lessons were bad.

In my haste, I created activities that quickly tunneled into the weeds of technical knowledge rather than scoping to the garden of core understanding. It was obvious that my students were struggling. When I popped into their Zoom breakout rooms to help, I caught the end of their confessions to each other. “What is even going on here?” was the chorus. I tried to pretend that I hadn’t heard and just offered to help them through the exercises as warmly as I could muster.

On those days, I wanted permission from my students to just abandon my lesson and admit that my lack of expertise had led me to create an activity that just wasn’t landing. I wish that I could have modeled for them vulnerability in having partial knowledge and instead showed them my process for learning that day’s topic. At least that way, they could have reflected on their own methods for learning difficult ideas.

When I finished work on days like this, it was hard to quiet the whispers of inadequacy that surfaced as I replayed the debacle of my class over and over. I would tell my husband about it, and he would reassure me that I was doing my best, that next time would go better. But I was never convinced. I would give a small smile, squeeze his hand, and respond that I should probably get started thinking about how to make up for the disaster by ensuring that the next lesson was solid.

What came to pass in our marriage probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. My husband told me that he wanted more in our intimacy, and that we needed to get help. In tears, I agreed that we would see a marriage counselor. In that session, I admitted how hard it was for myself to feel at peace with my body in that way with all the stress that I was experiencing. I could see how important this issue was to him, and I wanted to improve our situation. But I became even more anxious about this yet another lack in me.

Through some hard discussions, my husband and I reached a resolution that we thought would make us both happier. But something in me remained unsettled, so I sought refuge in all that I thought I had: my career. Teaching aside, I had my research to build up. Publications. That’s what I knew was safe in the tenure process. So I said yes to projects in areas that I was beginning to find less meaningful. My dissertation research centered on statistics surrounding molecular biology data, and I was beginning to doubt the true impact that findings in this domain could have on medicine in practice, at least within my lifetime. But my PhD advisor connected me with some physicians doing research in this domain. Unlike my forays into causal inference, this was a safe project, and it was on my front step. So I opened the door. I convinced myself that the results we would provide would be more likely to generate true impact soon, and even as my disillusionment resurfaced, I pushed it back under water.

What did I actually want? I wanted permission to care for my soul and take time to find the right projects that were meaningful to me. Even if that longer amount of time meant that I wouldn’t be producing research papers at the rate that was typical for my field. I wanted permission to not care about producing research papers at all as long as I was creating something that would be useful to others. Instead I played it safe and did work that was traditional.

And I did get tenure this year. 

When I think of the applause that accompanied the several speeches lauding my teaching, research, and service accomplishments, I feel hollow thinking about all the ways fear contorted me into someone I’m not and how this facade has continued to be lauded in my silence.

As a teacher, I feared losing respect as a non-expert. So I chased high standards for the amount of content I covered. As a researcher, I feared lacking the output required to be deemed successful. So I sought refuge in safe projects that failed to light a candle in my soul.

Mother. Wife. These deeply important parts of my life languished in the shadow of these fears.

As a mother, I feared losing my daughter’s love, but my fears about work stole the precious energy that I needed to show love when it was hardest. More often than I wanted, small things–messes, a delay in getting ready for daycare, my daughter exercising her newfound agency with “No!”–would leave me kneeling on the floor in anguish. Exactly the wrong model of coping that I wanted her to see.

As a wife, I feared that my husband and I would never be able to restore what our relationship once was. Our partnership was like a sand mandala on a protected stone of a windy beach. It was a seemingly Sisyphean task to maintain the shelters needed to shield it from even the slightest winds. The few months after the birth of our daughter formed a period of relative calm, where the grains of sand that we lay stayed where we put them. We were able to find beauty in the life that we had created.

But as my maternity leave ended and my pre-tenure research sabbatical began, all of the fears surrounding my career resurfaced. I needed to get tenure. So that our move to Minnesota would not have been the wrong one–it required us to be far from my husband’s family, and moving here had been a sacrifice. So that my colleagues wouldn’t regret hiring me. So that I would never have to tell my parents that I failed. So that my daughter could be proud of me one day.

With all of these fears, I needed so much from my husband and was able to give so little back. When my sabbatical started, I was still taking care of our daughter full time because we had decided to wait on daycare until I returned to teaching in a year. My husband’s firefighting schedule required him to be away from home for long periods of time, so I spent a lot of time alone, taking care of my daughter while attempting to inch my research forward. By the end of the day, I had accomplished so little and was exhausted, so when he came home, I greeted him not with warmth but with desperation. I needed him to not only spend his day off helping me but also to show me that he loved me in the way that he used to. All while the only act of love that I could show him was to repress my stress.

And it would blow up.

One day he was helping me get our daughter to nap. We needed some time for connection and had made plans to cuddle on the couch playing a video game if naptime went well. I waited tensely for him to emerge from her room. Would she sleep? As I heard her door softly creak open, I held my breath. I imagined my husband coming up to me and whispering “Success! Now we can have fun together!” The door closed quietly and he came up to me grinning, “I love that girl so much!”

I felt like I had been punched. Angry tears flooded my eyes. “What about me?” I cried. My husband stared at me, flabbergasted. “You’re angry that I said that I love our daughter?” I felt even guiltier about my outburst now, but the months of stress juggling motherhood and my career had withered my confidence to a husk. And this outburst had just blown a gust across the mandala of our marriage.

Gusts led to gales, and gales led to hurricanes. After multiple hurricanes, we decided to stop trying to rebuild.

The day that I got the tenure announcement, my husband and daughter were there. At my college, bagpipers come in and surprise the faculty members receiving tenure with an iconic Scottish tune, and colleagues secretly invite spouses to join in on the surprise. With the pipers finishing their tune, I looked across the room at my husband holding our daughter. He had dressed up to honor me–he was wearing the same dress shirt and tie from our wedding day. In that moment, I looked at our sand mandala and softened my gaze at the calming blue sands dashed against the rocks. He gave me a small smile that gently squeezed my hand. Silently, we took brooms and swept away the remaining sands. 

What can change the nature of a woman?

I regret trading my capacity to love myself and those closest to me for the external validation of a career that I had forged in an unsustainable way.

I wish I had listened to the voices in my head over the years pleading for me to take off my mask, to do things differently, in a truer way that was more gentle on myself and in alignment with who I am.

I’m listening now, and color is bleeding back into my life.

I’m increasingly doing more of what feels right for my students instead of adhering to rigor at all costs. Like canceling content for the day when I know they’re tired and having them talk to each other about their 12 Favorite Problems. Their smiles and warm laughter bring verdant greens to my canvas.

With those greens, I’m able to be more gentle with myself in my teaching. When I leave a lesson with a long list of things to improve, I write them down, close my screen, and reassure myself that learning did indeed happen. And having a list of improvements means that I’ll look forward to teaching the course again.

Looking forward is a mindset I’ve also channeled toward my scholarship. I’m scheduling time for projects that bring me joy–like curating my favorite newsletters, experimenting with the layout of information that would traditionally be structured as a textbook, collaborating with my colleagues–my friends–on curriculum development that we find meaningful.

With the peace that I have cultivated in my work, I can be more present and reflective with my daughter. I am able to fully drink in the beauty of her running from spot to spot on the playground (not walking as an adult would), the urgency of her play a delight that rarely gets clouded by thoughts about work or other things that I “should” be doing. Where her willfulness or strong emotions would have depleted me in the past, I am able to take a breath and calmly validate her feelings before asking for a hug.

I’m dedicating time to my new partner and reflecting on our partnership. I work towards ensuring that we’re showing each other love. A number of times this year, I have had work ahead of me in the evening to be ready for class the next day, and every time my partner has been with me, he has hugged me close and said, “Do what you feel you need to, but remember that sometimes good enough is good enough.” And every time, I have chosen to be good enough, to do less than I would have, so that I could kiss him good night and tell him how grateful I was that choosing good enough allowed me to show him this love.

Fear of losing external validation in my career has been one of the most toxic aspects of my life. It’s hard to know how many years of joy were lost for me and my former husband because of this fear. But on the other side of loss is peace, and what has helped me cross this bridge is regret. Through letting myself deeply feel and reflect on my regret, I have been able to see the patterns of destruction that my fear left in its wake. While regret over my past has been my vehicle for change, I do not regret where I am now. In a place of renewed love, hope, and permissionless resolution to be unashamedly me.

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Thank you so much to

Chris Coffman

, Charlotte Grysolle, Beck Hayes,

Jessica Fan

, and Nicole Husain for their constant and thoughtful feedback on this essay.