Answers

There are days in my life in which I look back and only questions come to my mind: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the point of living every day? Why am I the person I am? Could I have been somebody different had my childhood and teenge years been different, or was I doomed to become the grown up I am?

Today, and almost every work day over the past month, have been these type of days. I find myself confronted with an environment I don't feel capable of mastering, and the more I try, and fail, the more I feel overwhelmed and not suitable for the assignments I have been given.

For those who know me it is not new to hear that I don't show myself the way I am, and that I am an overly sensitive person, who can be almost destroyed by anyone. My age has not provided me with the wisdom to block people from hurting and destroying me, which gives me the only option of hidding behind a facade that shows me as a stronger person than I actually am. It is thus no surprise thatI also reapply this strategy from my private life in my work life.

Up to now I feel I have been successful: almost 5 years into the job and still most of the people around me don't know how I am, while I have been able to deliver my job as expected. True, I have not made many friends, but the few I've made I treasure, and I still feel lucky.

In the past weeks, however, the rules of the game have changed. I struggle at work, as I get requests like "be more friendly" without further explanation. I fear I have never learnt to be friendly, and I have no idea how to react to the request. If I ask what is meant, I get an " I don't know, just more friendly", which is just as puzzling. I get that my facade shows a self confident strong woman that does not exist. The engineer in me is real, but the woman who goes to work does not. And the friendly woman my new colleagues are looking for I have never met.

Questions and questions keep coming to my mind, and I spend all my free (non crying) time in trying to get answers. Maybe I would know how to be friendly if I had had the opportunity in school, maybe I was never supposed to enter the industry and my destiny was in getting a PhD and spending my life in a lab looking for some nanoparticle, maybe the people I went to school were right and I should not have insisted in living a normal life, finishing school in a regular school and going to college, or maybe, just maybe, the person who went to university, the relaxed woman who let most people see her the way she was, the woman who had friends and a social life, and was happy and proud of herself was real, and has not yet found her way over the Atlantic.

I do not have questions, and the last weeks at work have brought me back to the edge, and set me for the nth time in my life in front of a crossroads: do I face what's coming to me, and try to master it 'til I drop, or do I get a doctor's note, mentioning an upset stomach 1 day after coming back from South East Asia, which will get me straight to the "Tropical Illnesses Hospital" and keep me locked there until I go home on vacation at the end of the month? I am scared of escaping, Marco's words still hunt me ("Escape is never the safest path"), but at the same time I am scared I can't master ths situation one more time, and give up on myself after all I have fought over the last 15 years...