What Doesn't Love You Back

There was a man in my lab who was three years ahead of me. He should have graduated the year before, but his work had not been enough, and now he was stuck. No funding. No income. No clean way out, because leaving meant four years spent for nothing.

I tried to console him. I was no good at it. Then I said something I had not planned to say.

If it were me, I told him, I would walk away. Why give this place another year or two of your life waiting for them to find the money, when you could be out there living?

He looked at me as though I had missed the point. Maybe I had. He wanted comfort, not a verdict. But the words had come from somewhere true, and I heard them as plainly as he did. It would be another year before I understood that I had not been talking to him at all.

I was talking to myself.

I had wanted to be a doctor of engineering since I was a boy. Not the medical kind. The other kind, with the letters and the title and a thesis on a shelf. If I am honest about it now, I wanted the proof more than I wanted the knowledge. I wanted to be able to point at something and say: there, that is what I am worth.

So when I was accepted onto the doctoral programme, I was overjoyed. It ran through Cambridge, the university I had wanted since before I really knew why. The first year was a degree in itself. I earned an MRes in Gas Turbine Aerodynamics and graduated from Wolfson College, Cambridge. Then the cohort was split across three labs. I chose Cambridge. They sent me to Loughborough instead, to study combustion.

That stung. I will not pretend it didn’t. But I went, and combustion turned out to be a country I was glad to get lost in.

I worked harder that first year than I had worked at anything. I read organic chemistry and combustion theory late into the night to close the gaps in what I knew. I built a model to predict what came out of a live flame. I ran test rigs I had no business being trusted with so early. My supervisors were good men, generous with their time, and the lab was full of people who thought the way I did. By any honest measure it was the best place I could have been.

At the end of that year you submit a report that decides whether you go on. Mine came back with the kind of praise you remember for a long time. The assessor said it was the best he had read in years.

I tell you this so you understand what kind of story this is. It is not the story of a man who failed and called it a choice. I was good at it. I could have finished. That is the part that matters.

Then the world shut its doors. The lab emptied. The work moved into a spare room, and the people who had made the place what it was became squares on a screen.

I kept working. The hours did not change. But something beneath them did. I would sit with a problem I once would have chased for the pleasure of it and feel nothing pull me forward. I began asking a question I had never thought to ask. Why am I doing this?

I told myself it was the isolation, and some of it was. But the truth was quieter and harder. The thing that had carried me this far had started to die, and I did not yet know what it was.

By the third year I knew.

When my work was praised, it meant nothing. When it was criticised, that meant nothing either. I nodded in meetings and accepted whatever was said and felt none of it reach me. For most of my life, praise had been the fuel I ran on. Now the tank was empty, and I was still driving.

That was when I understood what I had been doing. I had not been chasing engineering. I loved engineering, but love was never the engine. I had been chasing the moment someone would finally tell me I was enough. And I had built my whole life around a thing that could only ever say well done. It could not love me. It was never going to love me. A title does not call to see how you are. A thesis does not hold your hand when you are afraid.

I married around this time. I had put it off, the way I had put off everything that was not the work. And somewhere in that season — I will not pretend it arrived cleanly, because it did not — something in me turned towards God. Not as an argument. Not as a conclusion I reasoned my way into. More like a light coming on in a room I had been sitting in for years without knowing it was dark.

I do not have words for it that would satisfy anyone who was not there. But I can tell you what it did. It rearranged my priorities without asking my permission. The things I had ranked first slid quietly to the bottom. The things I had made wait stood up and asked why they had been waiting.

I would find the words for it later, in a verse I had read many times without ever truly hearing it.

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

— Matthew 6:21

My supervisor offered me a way to keep both. Stay on as a research assistant, work on hydrogen combustion by day and write the thesis at night. It was a kind offer, and I was flattered by it. But my heart had already left.

There was a job near home, at the company I am still with. Less impressive on paper. The work I actually wanted to do. My wife and I talked it through, and we chose home.

I would like to tell you I withdrew with grace. I did not. I moved back without telling the university, while I was still technically their student with six months left to submit. The emails came. Updates demanded, weekly check-ins. I did not open them. I worked my new job hard and left my old life sitting unread in an inbox, because I did not have the courage to close it properly.

When I finally looked, there was a warning in there. Discipline. Probation. Something with weight behind it. I wrote back one short message. I would return the laptop and the data. I was withdrawing from the programme.

And a mountain I had been carrying for years lifted off my chest.

I am not going to dress up the cost. I delayed the most important thing in my life for one of the least important, and there are nights I still feel the weight of those years. We could have started a family sooner. I chose to wait, for a thing that does not love me back.

But I have stopped calling it selfish, because that is too easy and not quite true. Wanting to be good at something is not a sin. The fault was never the ambition. It was the fuel. I was burning the wrong thing to keep the fire lit, and a man can only run on the approval of others for so long before he begins to feel the cold.

I think I had to lose the illusion to see what was beneath it. If I had finished, if the validation had kept working, I might never have looked up. The empty tank was a mercy. It made me stop the car.

I should be clear about one thing, because it would be easy to read all this as a man who fell out of love with his work. I did not. I still love engineering. If anything I love it more now, because I no longer need it to tell me who I am.

It was never the problem. I had hung a weight on it that it was never built to carry — my worth, my proof, my place in the world — and anything buckles under a job that is not its own. Take the weight off, and the thing stands up straight again. Now it is simply good work that I am good at and glad to do. That is all it ever needed to be.

I have a wife now. A child on the way. A faith I did not have before and would not trade for any letters after my name. None of these things care whether I am impressive. All of them love me back.

That, in the end, is the only test I have come to trust. Not whether a thing is prestigious, or difficult, or admired. Whether it can love you back.

Most of what I chased could not. I am only glad I found out while there was still time.