To the one who never left
I write this in celebration of Amod, an incredible human being I have the good fortune of calling my husband. Wishing you a very happy birthday!
I was reading this post I'd written in 2021 about how who you marry plays an outsized role in your career and life. Looking back 5 years later, I find myself supporting this belief even more vehemently. Let me start at the beginning. I met my husband in late 2018, soon after I finished my Master's and was working at my first full-time job. We got married 6 months later, and 2019 was a dream come true. We were both in well-paying jobs, our parents and families were in good health, we traveled somewhere every month, ate out and shopped to our hearts' content, celebrated festivals with family, and much more. Life was perfect.
By the end of 2019, I decided that I wanted to pursue a PhD. This was a long-held dream for me, and being with my husband and hearing his PhD stories made me want that experience for myself even more. My husband first gave me the statutory warning about how a PhD would inevitably put me through some of the hardest times in my life, and asked me if I really wanted all of that. (I thought) I knew fully well what it entailed, and I convinced him that I did. After this, he happily agreed, and promised to support me through the PhD journey no matter what. Looking back, I can see how much uncertainty there was. My husband and I were at very different stages in our careers. When we got married, it was already 7 years after his PhD. He knew what he wanted out of his career, and that he wanted to be in India. I on the other hand, didn't even know where I would do my PhD or how long it would take, leave alone what came after that. And yet, he promised me a "no matter what".
We started looking at all the cities in the world that could work for both of us and planning out my applications, and again I was amazed by how willing my husband was to move across the world for me. As someone who had made that decision to come back to India years ago and didn't really like living abroad, this was a big deal. As they say, man proposes and God disposes. Covid happened soon after we made these plans, and we had to go back to the drawing board. I made yet another big decision, that I wanted to apply to the top university in India. No backups, no fallback plans. Even though the odds of getting in were so slim, my husband fully supported me, and I went ahead and quit my cushy corporate job, much to the displeasure of a lot of my close family. I worked as a research assistant in the same university, while preparing for my PhD interviews. But none of us had anticipated Covid, and it made everything so much harder. I had my day job, chores, interview prep and so much more to handle. My husband took on more than his share of chores, and even offered to help me with interview prep. As the months progressed, the fear of not making it, not having a job to go back to, and just the uncertainty of 2020 made me a bundle of nerves. I struggled a lot, and kept fretting over all my "weaknesses". I went through a grueling round of interviews, and was finally told that I got in. I was elated, but also scared. I was well aware of the tagline of this place "Hard to get in, even harder to get out."
The next 5 years were such a roller-coaster that I couldn't even have conjured it up in my wildest nightmares. As expected, gone were the weekends, holidays and festivals. Gone was the financial freedom to do multiple big vacations every year. Gone was medical insurance for my parents. Gone was any semblance of work-life balance. But I kept reminding myself that this was my dream, and everything else was just noise. We moved closer to my university, so that I didn't have to struggle through a dreadful commute, even though it did the exact opposite for my husband's commute for the next 5 years, another sacrifice he made in the blink of an eye.
In that first year, I struggled through coursework, having to adapt to the "everything online" mode, and not knowing my peer group. Despite his own hectic job and chores, my husband pored through my coursework with me, and I learned so much technically from him in that year. He also brainstormed with me whenever I was stuck on research, and he offered me a safe space to discuss and learn that was often absent in the extremely competitive, zero-sum game world I saw outside. It was a very rough and steep learning curve, and I often confronted my feelings of inadequacy and being an impostor. My husband was the voice of kindness during these times, and since I trusted his judgement, I also believed in his opinion of me.
A year later, I had done well in all of my courses, had gotten a decent start to my research and had even been awarded a prestigious scholarship that gave me a lot more financial security for the coming 4 years. I felt like I had gotten somewhere. And then, all hell broke loose. My dad had a massive stroke that left him bedridden and paralyzed. I was completely destroyed by this in every possible way. Suddenly, the PhD seemed a distant world, and I was lost in the day-to-day grief, sorrow and uncertainty of the ICU life. My husband had just started a new job that month, and he still spent every day in the hospital with me and my Mom. He helped in every way he could, but I still inhabited a different world. There wasn't much he could do.
And that's when the really hard phase started. A day before, I was doing well at almost everything, and after this, it felt like I had rocks dragging me to the ocean floor. I could not focus on work. All I thought about was my life and how it had been utterly shattered in one moment. For a month, I did not even know if my Dad would make it alive out of the hospital. At the time, many well-meaning people told me to take a year off or even quit. They realistically told me that this was too much for anyone to handle. But I was once again caught in uncertainty and the fear it brought. How do I know when things will get better for my parents? What if I take a year off and it turns into 5? What if I never get another shot at my dream? And so, I stubbornly held on to my PhD, refusing to quit, even though I wasn't making any progress. My husband left the decision entirely to me, and said that he would support me regardless of whether I decided to quit or continue.
Even though I had decided to continue, it wasn't a straightforward decision that I made and never looked back on. Instead, every few weeks or months, when my parents' struggled amplified or when work pressure increased, I agonized over this decision all over again. I resented the fact that I couldn't be there fully both for my parents and for my PhD. This is what I had wanted to throughout my life, and yet, in that phase, I wondered if it was worth it at all. I went into a depression that was dark as the depths of a cave, and no one could reach me there. Not even my husband. Every single day was awful. I cried, raged against the world, bemoaned my fate, and retreated into myself even further. I hated being around people and social events and celebrations were extremely triggering. All of this obviously had its impact on my married life too, and we lost any semblance of normalcy.
I recall the first time my husband tried to take me out on a vacation. I cried on the drive so much that he suggested we cancel the entire plan and go back home. So many firsts and seconds and thirds were like that. When we went to dinner. When we went shopping. When we went to visit his parents. I was drowning in my sorrow, and all of these had lost meaning for me. I felt like an empty shell. I wonder now what this was like for him. How did he feel about inhabiting this world of sorrow with me? He had no guarantees if I would ever come back out of it as the person he'd known, or if I'd change into a bitter and resentful human. But he always focused on the good, and tried to find solutions to my problems. He told me how strong I was, and offered me hope when I could find none. He supported anything that gave me the tiniest bit of comfort: When I told him I didn't want to be around people, he took me to dog and cat cafes so that I could find love in animals. When I found solace in long walks, he started finding ways to add more of those to our weekends. When I found peace in yoga and therapy, he encouraged me to stick with them. This was not a few days, or weeks, or months. It lasted a couple of years, and he stood by me patiently.
And then, in the end of 2023, I started seeing the light. And because I spent those couple of years in solitude, working through all the darkness instead of repressing it, I came out of the tunnel as a very different person. I was more resilient, and there was a softness to my outlook on life. All the introspection had shown me things I needed to change in my life, and I had been working on those too. No stress eating, no junk food. Exercise and movement and regular sleep. I started seeing changes, both mentally and physically. I uprooted our entire lifestyle. I wanted to walk everyday and everywhere - whether it was to grab a meal outside, go to a social event, or even on a vacation. I shifted to intermittent fasting and only ate two meals a day. Someone else might have hated me for this. But my husband not only supported me in this journey, but decided to learn from me and also make the same changes in his life. He followed me into clean eating and exercising, and he saw amazing results too. It takes a lot to be willing to change, and I couldn't be prouder of his flexibility to adapt.
It has been 3 years since then, and life has been full of ups and downs: My grandfather passed away. My dad has been steadily declining and we've been through more than a dozen hospitalizations. I finished my PhD and moved to an industry role. Such a roller coaster of joy, sorrow, hope, agony and everything in between. So much has changed, and so have both of us. There were so many moments when I probably wasn't easy to be around - I prioritized work over my husband, our vacations were always planned around my conference schedule, I wanted to do a hundred things all at once, I asked him to pick up all the house chores whenever I have a "crazy" week (which happens more often than it should), I have very strong ideas on many things and coax him into my schemes, and so on. Regardless of all this, he has always been amazingly patient and kind with me, whether it was waiting patiently for my endless workday to be over, or walking 6 km to a dinner place just because I said so!
It is said that there is a giver and taker in every relationship. I always thought I was the giver, till I met my husband. He has given himself so completely to me and our life that it sometimes scares me. He has loved not only the person he married in 2019, but every version of me since: the happy, the ambitious, the grieving, the difficult, and the healing. In the constant haven of his love, I found the strength to become a better version of myself. And so I say this today: who we marry shapes not only the course of our careers and our lives, but also the people we grow into.
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