The Affair

Breakthrough

I‘m in love.

It’s a toxic relationship; if I’m being honest, it demands everything.

My attention, my energy, my focus, my weekends, my summers, all my days and all my nights. This love is the first thing I reach for in the morning and the last thing I think about before I fall asleep.

It never asks; it simply takes. It keeps taking from me when there is nothing left in me to take, and still, it finds a way to take more.

Also, he is cruel and calculating; it keeps giving me just enough in return to make me stay, a brief moment of certainty, a flash of understanding, not a lot, but enough to make me feel all the sacrifice worth it.

The problem with a love this consuming is that everything else has to learn to live in its shadow. It changes what you notice, what excites you, what keeps you awake at night, what you daydream about. It follows you everywhere, into coffee shops, onto subway platforms, into the shower; it’s in every conversation; when you talk about something else with your mouth, you are sure to still be thinking about it in your head. It’s everywhere; it moves within you, present in every cell and all your deepest layers.

You tell yourself you’ll create boundaries, you tell yourself you’ll be present, focus on yourself this time, and then it whispers a new possibility into your ear, and there goes your Sunday afternoon. There goes another piece of yourself you swore you would keep.

And you know, you can only blame yourself, because you know exactly what it’s costing you, and you stay anyway. You fucking suffer, but, despite everything, despite the frustration, the obsession, the uncertainty, despite all the times you wondered whether it was worth it, you cannot imagine walking away. It’s your life now, and whatever it takes, you accept it.

So I don’t know if you've already guessed it, but I’m not talking about a guy here. I’m talking about the consuming, toxic love of my life, my research.

A dissertation is really a love letter.

A love letter you write on summer Sundays while everyone else is outside enjoying the city, the ocean, each other, and their lives.

A love letter written in your own blood.

A love letter to a question you refused to stop asking, even when your best answer for years was, “I just fucking don’t know.”

You wanted to understand. You were obsessed with your research topic. You were caught between two states: writing your thesis or thinking about writing it, while trying to fight the guilt of wasting time not working on it. Everything else is considered time-wasting. Literally, every second you spend with something else is filled with guilt.

You wanted to know it so badly that you paid for the answer in thousands of invisible hours. Early mornings, late nights, rejections, doubt, exhaustion, draft after draft after draft.

And eventually, after all the sleepless nights, all the revisions, all those moments you nearly walked away, one day you find yourself sitting alone in a coffee shop in Brooklyn, staring at a glowing screen, refreshing it, rereading it, checking it one more time just to make sure, because after years of living with uncertainty, it feels almost suspicious when something is finally right.

But no matter how many times you look, there is no mistake this time. Every single piece of the puzzle, even the tiny pieces nobody will ever know existed, has clicked into place.

The masala fries beside you have gone cold. You’ve been eating them for weeks now every day, because you don’t have time to cook for yourself and they’re the cheapest food nearby, and also because they keep you full, and you can eat them slowly, so they buy you a few more hours at a coffeeshop table that has actually become your office, your laboratory, your refuge, your second home.

Around you, there is only silence, and yet somehow, you can hear the music.

Outside, Brooklyn keeps moving, taxis pass, people fall in love, break up, walk their dogs, answer emails, rush to meetings, completely unaware that anything remarkable has happened. The world goes on exactly as it did yesterday, but yours never will, because after all these years of not knowing, you finally know.

The joy is overwhelming; it’s nearly unbearable; it makes you want to call someone, hug someone, tell someone, but there is nobody to share it with. This kind of obsessed love makes you extremely lonely, to be honest.

The thrill of your realization boosts your determination, and you feel more than prepared to handle what lies ahead. You still need to write papers, books, give speeches, share ideas, have conversations you don’t want to have, go to places you don’t even want to go, persuade people, convince people, and secure funding. Long way to go, still.

But for the first time, you can see it clearly: one day this answer will belong to other people too. One day it will leave this screen, this coffee shop, this tiny corner of Brooklyn, and find its way into clinics, classrooms, decisions; it will find its way to people’s lives.

The world outside has not changed yet. But now you can hope it will.

The best way to support my work and to add salad next to my masala fries is to become a paid subscriber. Join us, Nora, in New York is rising in Health Politics right now. Much love,

Nora and Eliott, the Aussie