How to isolate yourself because you don't feel good enough

I have been silent for a long time and today I want to tell you why. I will talk about how I've been isolating myself and why. 

The last two years had been difficult. I decided to leave my PhD program at UC Berkeley and jump into post-quantum cryptography. I was exhausted, close to being burned out. It was the right decision, things turned out okay, but dropping out - see how I internalize the negative narrative? - can mess you up. I've only ever heard encouragement and gotten a lot of support from everyone around me. But, because of the impostor syndrome, it feels like a big failure and that by leaving Berkeley, I am losing out. I am losing so much that my life will never be as good as it could have been.

This is, of course, absolute nonsense. But things did not improve when I left Berkeley. I changed fields, sort of. I still work in number theory and play with elliptic curves (topic for another time, perhaps?). But, suddenly, I found myself in a quantum algorithms group. And among cryptographers. I did quite some self-study before starting, but I was far from ready to understand the seminars or have any idea of what people would talk about over lunch. And whenever I had some questions that felt basic to other people, they just referred me to this one set of lecture notes...

You can imagine how this made me feel. I left my relatively safe space in Berkeley, where I could be anyone who I wanted to be. And I was suddenly this new person at the department that I did not know with a very mismatching background. And I was teaching right from the beginning, I could not find housing in the city, so I had to commute from far, the paperwork at the start was far from smooth and took time to figure out.

Did I feel at home at my new institute? I don't think so. I did not have enough time to adjust to my new place and was still trying to get around the invisible walls that I put up around myself. When corona hit, I did not have the safety net yet, it was difficult to find people to reach out to. I have managed with some, failed with others. But the more you isolate yourself, the less sense it all makes. To give just one absurd example. I worked hard to catch up with all stuff that I thought I should know to belong to the group. But then I simply did not talk to anyone about any of these things for months.

You can't blame others for not reaching out to you. But if you don't, especially in this online world, people will not notice. If you interact with someone online, it takes a lot of energy to reach the human being behind the face on the screen. And the people who did not show up are so abstract nowadays that you don't even care anymore. And what about the people who showed up in the beginning and then stopped coming? In real life, you would notice the empty chair. But online meetings are all such a blur that you can show up suddenly after three months - and most people will not notice anything. 

Funnily enough, I have been such a misfit all my life. I usually find my way around, sooner or later. For the athletes, I was the weirdo mathematician. During my undergrad, I was among the weird mathematicians, but I always had to run off to my workouts. Then I moved abroad and moved several times, changing communities, meeting new people, losing contact with the old ones, over and over. Despite all the stress, I found myself in Berkeley, thanks to the I-House and the TAC workouts. Everyone in there was coming from a different place, it was easy to live free of assumptions.

So why am I making assumptions about myself now? I was not hired to be a cryptographer. I was definitely not hired as a quantum algorithms expert. My job is to be a number theorist who can learn enough about cryptography and quantum algorithms to do something cool with it. I am now focusing on doing things my way. I am organizing a reading group to force myself to discuss the things I am learning with other people. I am setting up my own social events, giving new chances to things I thought would not work for me. 

Like writing this blog: I am missing conversations about many topics now. Once I started talking to people, it turned out that I am not the only one. So I want to share with you. It already makes me feel less isolated. I hope you will, too.