When life throws you into unusual or unfamiliar situations, it’s hard to feel comfortable or confident in your skills. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers grapple with feeling like a fish out of water.
Part 1: When Neeti Jain dissects her first fish in the lab, she feels like she’s not cut out to be a scientist in marine ecology.
Neeti Jain is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the Yale School of the Environment. Her research focuses on justice-centered storytelling in environmental education spaces, and she works with natural history museums to evaluate object labels and gallery content to make them more diverse, inclusive, and accessible for audiences of all backgrounds. A Los Angeles native, Neeti has been making her way across the three coasts and now spends her weekends lurking around the underwater dioramas at the American Museum.
Part 2: As the new chief public health officer, Harold Cox feels out of his depth when their office receives a package with what appears to be anthrax.
Harold Cox likes to tell stories about tiny, goofy things that have happened to him. It seems that his whole life is filled with many tiny, goofy things. He has told stories on many stages, Including Moth, Risk, Riot and Massmouth. Harold is a professor of public health at Boston University school of public health.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
I have always had the freedom to choose what it is that I want to do and let me tell you that is not the typical immigrant experience. Normally, immigrant kids don't hear, “Well, you can just fuck around and find out.”
Animal science for me was the thing that I was most excited about, but it wasn't really the thing that I excelled at. No one was calling home to tell my mom that I won the science fair. And, every Wednesday in college, would call my dad and tell him that I failed another math exam. After enough of these failures, if you're trained in the scientific method, you start to think maybe you're the common denominator.
Neeti Jain shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in April 2023. Photo by Zhen Qin.
And my parents wondered and I wondered too what is the purpose of all of that struggle, especially if you live in the land of plenty. It should be so easy to find the thing that you're good at. What was the point of their hard work? The three jobs, the skipped meals, the broken backs if I'm just setting myself up to fail. Is it better to find success where it comes or do you do what you love even if you're not very good at it?
So I pretty ambitiously declared a science major at the end of my first year of college and convinced someone at the National Science Foundation to give me a research opportunity. I was so excited. They were going to pay me $8,000, which is more money than I had ever seen in my life. I felt like this was a sign from the universe that I was walking on the right road.
So I called up the graduate student that I'd be working with. I had to make my voice two octaves lower so I wouldn't sound so starstruck. And I learned that I'd be working in a marine lab learning about intraspecific variation in mosquitofish, which are a globally invasive species.
I've never worked with mosquitofish or with invasives before but I'm up for trying just about anything, so I was excited. I showed up for my first day at lab that summer and, honestly, if someone had to make a meme of that experience, it would be the video of Laura Dern turning her head to look at the Brachiosaurus in Jurassic Park.
There was a towering mold of a gray whale skeleton outside the lab and waves crashing against the shoreline and the smell of salty brine mixing with the redwood musk in the air. I could feel that this would be the summer of Neeti. Finally, a moment to come into my own, to figure out whether I could do this science thing.
So the graduate student that I was working with took me to an inland lake where we would get field samples of the mosquitofish. I had such a good time scooping all these little fish with this little net into a jar. I wasn't allowed a pet as a kid so this is a real treat for me. And I wanted to catch some big fat ones and some cute little rainbow ones.
Then we were driving back to lab and I was sitting in the passenger seat of this graduate student's truck and looking at the jar in my hands, watching the sunlight refract in the water. And I go, “Hey, these fish don't look so good. They're all kind of floating at the surface.”
And the grad student goes, “Yeah, they're in formaldehyde. They're dead. You're gonna cut them open in lab and figure out their stomach contents.”
All of a sudden, I got the sinking feeling in my stomach because my excitement basically led to my choosing which would live and which would die. So that's great. Cool, cool, cool, cool.
I get to lab. I take out the scalpel. I slice into the first little fishy and it turns out that it was a pregnant mama.
Fun fact: mosquitofish don't lay eggs. They give live birth, which is a very fun, sexy fact for them and a very unfun, unsexy fact for me to learn in this moment.
So, all her little fishy fetuses come spilling out onto the table and staring at me with their big, betrayed googly eyes. The graduate student comes back into lab and sees me crying all over his fresh fishy sample. We decided to take a break for the day.
That was when I learned that this project would be this every day, every week for eight weeks, for the entire summer until I could get enough data on the feeding habits of mosquitofish to do future research on invasive species eradication.
Neeti Jain shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in April 2023. Photo by Zhen Qin.
I should say I am not squeamish. I used to work in a poop lab at a zoo. Once you've picked enough small mammal bones out of lion excrement, it takes a lot to knock you down. But there was just something. There was this moral ambiguity to this project that I really couldn't resolve. For one thing, I was raised in the Jain faith. Jainism is a religion that is based in the practice of non violence. I am not really sure about religion or how it fits into my understanding of science, but day after day of dead fishy eyes was really, really starting to get to me.
And the other thing is I was really confused about the ethics of invasive species removal. Because given how much ecosystems have already been disturbed by human intervention, it's not exactly clear to me what our role is in deciding which species persist and which don't and whether or not these interventions are ever even successful in restoring species richness.
So there was this dissonance between what I was doing and what I believed in and I really struggled with that. I cried every day that week. I cried on my way to lab. I cried at lunch time. I cried on my way back to my dorm room. Finally, at the end of the week, I worked up the courage to talk to my faculty advisor and tell him that I was really struggling with the nature of this project.
I asked him if I promise to get all the dissections done by the end of the summer, which is what I committed to, if I could maybe work on another project just a couple days a week to balance out the murder just a little bit.
And this advisor, who was my first evaluator giving me the first real test of my merit, he looked at me and said, “This is what it means to do marine ecology. If you're not comfortable with it, you're probably not cut out to be a scientist.”
In that moment, it felt like he had confirmed the nightmare. That I was some kind of imposter. That I had oversold my knowledge and my ability to do the work and that someone made a mistake in admitting me.
So I called up my dad. I told him to pick me up that weekend and we were going to figure out how to return the stipend and go home.
I could see so clearly that this was the crossroads. This path was going to be such a thicket of trees with so many stumbles and so many falls. It would be so easy for me to do something else, to pick up a track that I had forgotten about, to try to find the success that I could see people around me finding.
But I didn't feel ready to go home so I went back to my dorm room. I told my roommates what happened and these incredible, badass, won't take no for an answer women told me to march my ass to the program coordinator's office and ask for another option.
One of my roommates coached me on the phone while the other one handed me the car keys. It was a 16 passenger van with no windows, so I can't even imagine how ridiculous I looked hunched over the wheel of this car, sobbing as I'm crawling down the street at five miles an hour. And I get into this program director's office and, before I even cross her threshold, I blurt out the fish and the dead mama and the dead babies and the crying and that you're not cut out for this, and she takes charge immediately.
Because she was the program director, she was able to work with me to see if we could make something work with the original lab and it just wasn't working out. So, she offered me a spot in her bee lab for the summer and that's what I spent the summer doing.
I wish I could tell you it was so easy, just a total dream. But, actually, all of my flowers died in the first week and so I had nothing to feed my bees with. So I designed artificial flowers and that ended up being the first successful set of behavioral trials in history ever run with native bees. I like to think that somewhere out there, those bees are telling their bee friends that they got to beta test the newest flower software update.
Neeti Jain shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in April 2023. Photo by Zhen Qin.
In hindsight, I realize that there is something so extraordinary about doing something and not knowing if you're going to come out on the other side. It makes you feel like you're doing something real. Like you're part of a species in evolutionary history that runs and reaches and keeps pushing despite everything in nature working against it.
And I want to take the feedback of the people around me. I want to grow where I have blind spots. But I will never, ever let someone tell me what I can and can't do. I am not going to be part of a system that keeps people out. I will spend the rest of my career making sure that nobody ever feels like science isn't for them.
Next month, I'm going to be walking across the stage with my graduate degree. The National Science Foundation totally came through for me. They paid for me to become a scientist, full ride.
And to the purpose, to the question of what is the purpose of struggle, do you do what you love even if you're not very good at it? The purpose of struggle, at least for me, is that it lights the fire every day. It seasons the taste of success and it makes me feel alive. And I'm my parents’ daughter. I think working hard is what makes something worth doing.
Thank you so much.
Part 2
When I got hired, I went immediately to talk to my 90 year old aunt. She was in her rocking chair and she was in a bedroom.
And I said, “Aunt Bee, I just got this brand new job. I am going to be the Chief Public Health Officer for the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts.”
My aunt leaned forward. She had this huge smile on her face and she said, “Uhm, uhm, uhm, that's my baby.”
I then said, “Aunt Bee, in this job I am going to talk to the chief of police. I'm going to talk to all the black pastors in town. I'm even going to have conversations with the president of Harvard University.”
Harold Cox shares his story at Turtle Swamp Brewing in Boston, MA in March 2023. Photo by Kate Flock.
My aunt stopped rocking and she leaned forward again. This time, she had kind of an inquisitive look on her face and she said, “Baby, that's nice but, well, what you do?”
My aunt was as confused about what public health is as most people are. It's very difficult to try to explain to people, so I tried a couple of other things.
I said, “You know, here's the things I'm going to be doing,” and my aunt listened. Then she put her head against the backboard and she closed her eyes and she went to sleep. She'd had enough.
She'd had enough but the question that she asked me, “Baby, what you do,” was a question that just lingered with me. And at the same time that that question lingered with me, I also started hearing a number of other questions that I was asking myself. “Well, what are you going to do? Do you really know what you're going to do? Are you good enough? Why did they hire you?”
And what I realized was that my imposter syndrome was coming up again. This is something I was very, very familiar with. The imposter syndrome, you know it's that thing where you're asking yourself, “Are you good enough?”
Sometimes, I'd ask myself that question so many times that it had become so debilitating that there were things that I would just stop doing. For instance, I didn't finish my doctorate degree largely because of imposter syndrome. But I was not going to let it get in my way this time. I wanted this job. I intended to do a good job in this job and I was going to do it. I was going to tap that bad boy down so it was not going to get in my way.
I was kind of beginning to think so what is this job about? The job in Cambridge had many, many different aspects, but one of the things that we did on a regular basis was to drill and to drill with our other colleagues for what we would do in case there was an emergency.
For instance, what would we do in case somebody put a harmful chemical in the water supply? What would we do if the train blew up and it had some kind of poison or toxic item in it that was now being exposed to the environment? How would we handle that?
We drilled on a regular basis. Now, we drilled so we could kind of figure out what we were going to do, but we also drilled because we thought something actually might happen for real, and it did.
One day, we got a telephone call from someone who said, “I just received the package and this package has some kind of strange, white powder in it. I don't know what it is but I really would wish that you would come and take a look at it.”
Now, we had actually been expecting to get these kinds of calls because somebody in another part of the country had actually taken the bacterium of anthracis and had put it in a white powder form and then put these white powder in an envelope, had addressed these envelopes and sent these envelopes to a number of people.
The thing you should know about this particular bacterium is that it can have very harmful effects for people who come in contact with it, and that's indeed what happened. There were a lot of people who got sick and there were a number of people who died. So we expected to actually hear from people, because people all across the country were on high alert thinking about where is the next package going to go? Where are we going to actually see this?
So we responded to this in the same way that we had practiced, with all of the people being very involved. It would be taken to the laboratory and we got a call a little bit later that day that said this was not anthrax.
The second time that we got a call, we learned that that was not anthrax. The third, fourth and fifth times that we got a call, it was not anthrax. It was not anthrax when we received a call and someone said, “There is anthrax all over this table. There's this white powder. We don't know exactly what it is but we think it could be something harmful and we need you to come right away over here to Dunkin Donuts.” It was sugar as expected.
I got to tell you, I was beginning to get a little tired of all of these incidents of white powders. We were all getting a little tired of it. And on this one particular day, I'd gone home. I'd had a really long day and I just was tired for the day. As soon as I got home that day, I got on my little device there. You know what that thing what I'm trying to say, my beeper.
On my beeper, I got a call that said, “White powder,” and it gave an address. The only thing I could do was just kind of roll my eyes and think, “Okay. Here we go again.”
I didn't want to go out that evening and I called the fire chief and said, “Look, Chief, I'm not going to come out to this particular event.”
He said, “Don't worry about it. We'll take care of it.”
Harold Cox shares his story at Turtle Swamp Brewing in Boston, MA in March 2023. Photo by Kate Flock.
A little bit later, I got a call from the chief who said, “The place that we went to pick this up was at Planned Parenthood. And because it was at Planned Parenthood, we are taking particular precautions around this and we're taking it to the laboratory right away.”
And, again, I roll my eyes and said, “Okay. Sure.”
A little bit later, I got a call from the laboratory and they said, “It looks like anthrax.” I froze. This was the first time out of all of the thousands of cases of white powder across the whole country that we'd actually had another case of anthrax and we weren't quite certain exactly…
I must tell you, I was not quite certain what we were going to do because I was scared. I was scared for the people that came in contact with it. I was scared for the fire and police folks who went to respond. I was scared for my city, because I had no idea what this was going to mean for us in Cambridge. And I was scared for me and for my other public health colleagues because, suddenly, we were going to need to respond in a very different kind of way.
At the laboratory, they said, “It looks like anthrax but we need to get confirmation that it is anthrax.” So they put it on an airplane and they sent it down to Atlanta to the Centers for Disease Control so that they could test it a little bit more.
At the same time, I was beginning to get questions and my colleagues were beginning to get questions. “Well, what should we do about the people who came in contact with it? The people at Planned Parenthood, the fire department, the police department. What should we do? Should people start getting treatment now? Where should they go? Should they go to the hospital? Should they go to their homes? Should they go to some other special place? What should we do with their clothes? Who's going to take responsibility for their clothes? What should we say to their families?”
And at the same time that I was getting those questions, I began to hear another set of questions. “Baby, what you do? Are you good enough? Do you really know what you're doing? Are you the person that can really take care of these people at this time?”
I tried to tap it down and I couldn't, because it just wouldn't go away. Now, I have these two sets of questions that are actually happening to me at the same time. On the one hand, I'm thinking about what am I going to do about these people who have been impacted by this thing? After all, people have died.
And at the same time, I was hearing myself saying, “Are you good enough? Can you actually take care of all of this?”
I didn't sleep well that night. In fact, I don't think I slept at all.
The next day, we got a call. It was a call we were expecting from the lab. And the lab said, “It's not anthrax.”
Someone had found a substance that looked very much like anthrax but it wasn't anthrax and it didn't play out exactly the same. Some of the harmful effects that we expected to see from anthrax we were not going to see from this particular substance. So we were able to call people and tell them that they could calm down. Everybody could relax except me, because I was still dealing with my imposter syndrome demons.
Harold Cox shares his story at Turtle Swamp Brewing in Boston, MA in March 2023. Photo by Kate Flock.
At that moment, I decided that I had to have a Come to Jesus conversation. Are you going to continue to live like this? Are you going to continue to ask these questions about whether you're good enough at the same time that you're trying to do your work?
And I decided I had to do something about it. At that particular moment, I decided that I needed to start working with some of my colleagues and some of my mentors to actually understand what my job was about and how I performed in my job.
I also needed to begin to think about how do I tap down the negative messages so that I can bring forth the positive messages about things that were happening in this particular community and that I was doing here.
I began to understand also that getting rid of anthrax and getting rid of imposter syndrome is not just a one time thing. It's not something you just simply say, “Okay, I'm done. It's over.” It requires practice.
And much the same way that we had to rehearse and had to drill for those emergencies, thinking about the imposter syndrome also requires for you to think about what you're doing and continue to practice on a continuous basis to push that down.
Now, some 20 plus years later, I still have imposter syndrome but it is well under control. I now know I am good enough. I know that I do belong in the settings that I'm in. And I also know that when people ask me what is public health and they say, “Baby, what you do?” I got an answer for them.
Public health is about protecting and enhancing the health of the public. It's that simple.
So now, I have something for you, now that I'm sure about what I'm doing. If you ever have one of those instances when you have white powder and you're wondering whether it is anthrax or whether it is sugar, call me.