So, yeah, I ran across an article I wrote a while ago, and re-reading it over (like you do) I found myself thinking about how much I enjoyed writing it and how I found the subject so inspiring. And I loved it so much then that I wanted to talk about it now. So I thought I’d haul it out of mothballs, and periodically haul out other work I’ve particularly loved, to indulge in some nostalgia. Maybe it’ll inspire you to look at the work you’re doing and find things to love about it, even when it seems a little dry, a little weird, or a little small.
The work: An article about an HIV researcher
It was an article for the 2018 issue of Insight, Southern Research’s annual look back at its accomplishments over the past year so supporters (and potential supporters) can understand the organization’s work and why it’s so very important. I’ve written a lot for SR, really, and even wrote rather a lot for this specific issue of the publication, but this article did stand and has stood out for me: a look at the work of Susan Schader, Ph.D., an HIV researcher at Southern Research at the time who’s making great strides in solving some of the most formidable, persistent challenges in the field.
She’s pretty awesome.
(I think everyone should get the chance to sit down with a scientist and talk non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors from time to time.)
Why I loved it:
It’s a 1,200-word article for an annual development publication. Like… why?
She was just so passionate about it.
I love talking to people who are passionate about their thing. That’s probably the biggest reason I love writing articles like this — the people who get articles written about them, or have videos made about them, are usually passionate about their thing, and I love talking to them. It’s impossible for me to not get caught up in their enthusiasm. As I talked to Dr. Schader, she was so passionate about her research that I also became passionate about her research and found myself learning more about HIV research than I’d imagined I would have, because I was hanging on her every word. The world needs more people who are passionate about things — even things that aren’t world-changing, but particularly things that are world-changing, like Dr. Schader’s work — and talking to one of them was inspiring.
I learned new things.
HIV has been a tough nut to crack for researchers, even as they’ve been able to nail down many other viruses of its type. I’d been aware of that, but I’d never known (or really taken the time to wonder, if I’m honest) what was so tough about it. In my interview with Dr. Schader, she explained one of the biggest challenges: HIV’s mutation rate is kind of astounding, it can hang out in cells all dormant and essentially camouflaged, and you have to essentially freeze it in place and eliminate any latent reservoirs to get someone actually cured cured. It’s complicated. Her explanation didn’t take a small amount of time. There were hand motions involved. Most of information didn’t go into the article — I don’t even know if you could pick out the spots where it even provided background that informed anything in the article — but just knowing it made my understanding of the topic that much richer, which in turn made my work that much deeper.
It was about more than just science.
Dr. Schader’s challenges in combatting HIV aren’t just scientific — they’re sociological. She talked about some of the work earlier in her research on the subject, and how in the region she was looking at, women often don’t have a lot of sexual agency — they don’t have a lot of choice about when and under what conditions they have sexual contact. They often don’t have a say in whether condoms are used (and the choice made for them is often “no”). And they might not have access to medical care for a regular course of preventive drugs. A vaginal ring gives them the ability to protect themselves in a way no one else can control. So that part of her research had nothing to do with which molecules work on what receptors — it was about the life experience and needs of people. She got to look at the people she was serving not just as patients but as human beings, and that’s what made her work so effective.
Love what you do. Search for the love if you have to.
The saying that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life, is silly. Obviously, loving your work doesn’t make it not-work. My interview with Dr. Schader was kind of exhausting — piggybacking on someone else’s professional passion takes energy, and the interview went over time by probably an hour because she kept talking and I kept eating it up. (She didn’t get to talk about her work a lot to non-scientists, in non-sciencey settings, so sharing her work with a more general audience was exciting for her. I loved it.) Any work you do, in any field, has the potential to leave you feeling wrung out even as it fills your bucket.
But that also leaves the possibility for you to find something that fills your bucket in work that leaves you feeling wrung out. And for me, learning new things and working with passionate people consistently gets the job done. It’s challenging, and it tricks me into thinking something that might not seem exciting is actually exciting. (I mean, if Dr. Schader is that jazzed about the potential of a microbicide vaginal ring, it has to be pretty awesome, right?)
If you find yourself faced with a topic that might be a little dry on the surface — medical research, Human Resources, industrial coatings — you can almost definitely find something to get excited about if you dig down deep enough. (Almost definitely. There absolutely are topics that are dry all the way down, and for those, you just have to slog through.) Think about the people involved with the thing you’re writing about, think about your audience and what they’ll be gaining from your work. Make a list of all the things you didn’t know before you started the project that you know now. Dig up any minute detail about what you’re writing about that makes it different from similar things, and allow yourself to make a huge deal of it in your head. Get overly excited about it, and you’ll find you can carry that through to the rest of the work and make it to the finish line.
Of course, I didn’t have to dig for something interesting with this article — as noted, it was all right there. But I’ve had to dig, and sometimes dig deep, and it worked, and I encourage you to dig. If I was able to get jazzed about the solubility of a revolutionary new pea protein, you can find something to love about what you do, too.
(Probably.)