Wussies

The Island

In Finland’s boreal forests, just above the Arctic Circle, the sprawling Lake Inari is peppered with thousands of small islands. Graveyard Island served for centuries as a cemetery for the ancient Sami, Lapland’s semi-nomadic reindeer herders. When the pandemic ends I will journey thousands of miles to spread the last of my father’s ashes around the island’s icy blue waters. Lakes were my father’s nirvana, a trait passed down over generations of Finnish ancestors, and maybe there he will find the peace that eluded him in death.

Three years ago the US embassy in Helsinki phoned our family with shocking news. A hotel maid discovered my 74-year old father’s body crumpled in a desk chair in his room. His colleagues had accepted his explanation that his stomach ailed after Korean food when he skipped his conference. An autopsy report determined otherwise. A simple surgery would have removed his ruptured appendix and saved his life. 

But my father had a history of not asking for help. He was a broad-shouldered, heavy drinking ox who rebuffed meddlesome doctors. A few years earlier I had to beg him to visit a hospital for a broken ankle flapping around after a lawn mower incident. He snarled like a bear when friends suggested an ointment for the pink fungus spreading like vines from his toes to his groin. I knew better than to try. 

Was there a flash of light in his final dying moments when he realized he should have sought care? Or did he drift into death oblivious that he was dying? Alone in his hotel room, poisons seeping within, did he finally learn if God exists, after concluding so in his recently published philosophy book, God? Very Probably?

The week before Christmas my mother, brother, and I hastily packed and flew to iced-over Helsinki to identify his body and arrange for its cremation and shipment back to the US. My mother picked up his ashes at Dulles Airport and we performed the American death ritual as best we could. My father would have been pleased by the three-day fiesta in his honor: academic symposium, memorial, and lobster party, in that order. 

When it came time to speak at my father’s memorial, I talked mostly about my early childhood, when I legitimately enjoyed growing up in the most eccentric libertarian family in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Family trips across the American West — and later the world — were wild misadventures where overriding my mother’s hesitations was half the fun. My father was larger than life, cruising past Chevy Chase’s mansions in his beat-up Toyota convertible with the roof down, dangling a gin and tonic on ice in his right hand and an unused seatbelt flopping on his left. Dare anyone to stop the shaggy-haired libertarian philosopher-king. My father filled the family dinner table with foreign intellectuals, pumped them with alcohol, and then jovially cut them down and explained why all their thinking was wrong. My friends were awed by my father’s bravado, strength, and sprawling personal library in our basement. There were at least ten thousand books. With a tanned, bearded face framed by shoulder-length dusty blonde hair, women sometimes mistook him for the actor Kris Kristofferson. I thought he was Zeus, all-knowing and all-powerful. Thundering whenever he felt slighted. I was a meek, tiny child who flew under his radar while he was preoccupied by writing and tennis. Only later in high school did I sign up for the high school track team and everything changed.

The Gift

My father was awestruck when his diminutive, squeaky-voiced teenage daughter suddenly could not lose a race, taking the state and county cross country titles as a rookie. My dramatic come-from-behind racing style made for nail-biter finishes and Washington Post headlines. My family was mystified when my 95-pound frame claimed the Maryland state cross country title in a final sloppy sprint across a mud-soaked field to pass the favorite. No one in my family ran except after tennis balls. My father referred to it as the “miracle”. Only later did my Finnish grandmother divulge the hidden roots of my success.

It had been six decades since my grandmother had cheered her father Onni as he raced the mile as a professional distance runner in Boston. Finns ruled distance running in the 1920s and 1930s. Paavo Nurmi, the “Flying Finn”, won nine Olympic gold medals. Distance running was a family affair and my grandmother also handed oranges to Onni’s brother Laurie as he ran the 26.2-mile Boston Marathon route from Hopkinton to downtown Boston each year. Back then the marathon was still just a gaggle of a couple hundred Bostonians. 

Finns claim to have guts, referred to as “sisu”, cultivated from youth by plunging their naked bodies into freezing lakes through holes carved in the ice between sauna sessions. The underdog Finns thrashed the Soviet army in the Winter War of 1939-1940, where temperatures plunged below -50F, emboldening Hitler to invade a seemingly weak USSR the following year. Instead the Germans became mired in a bloody eastern front that allowed the Allies to pierce the west. So we can thank the Finns for bringing down the Nazis.

But Onni died suddenly of tuberculosis at age thirty-two. Laurie burned his shoes in disgust and never ran again, blaming his brother’s death on a weakened immune system that had been compromised by Finns’ notoriously harsh training regimens. Onni’s wife Martha raised my grandmother alone, cleaning bathrooms in factories to make ends meet and settling in a fishing town called Gloucester north of Boston. Martha was still living there by the sea when I was born fifty years later. I called her “Mummu”, which means “grandmother” in Finnish.

One Christmas my grandmother gave me Laurie’s vintage 1920s diamond engagement ring that he purchased to propose to his soon-to-be wife Elsa. I also inherited something more sublime from Mummu and my grandmother. We all had an uncanny knack for finding four-leaf clovers. I have found thousands in my lifetime, also 5-, 6-, 7-, and 8-leaf clovers. I never find them when I look, only when I sense them when I’m busy doing something else, like running down a trail or riding a bike.

My initial rise as a runner in high school was virtually unsupported. My parents were so unaware they did not even buy me track shoes. I toed the line at my first state championship as the only runner wearing clunky Nike sneakers instead of featherweight spikes. Nor did I get much support from my team, which did not even have the five girls needed to compete as a cross country team. Old Coach Fleming mostly took photographs. Each race I was underprepared, undertrained, and looked like a deer in the headlights. At a state championship where I unexpectedly got my period and had no one to turn to, I shoved piles of toilet paper in my shorts and hoped for the best. But everything changed after I won the state cross country title.

The Self-Appointed Coach

Two weeks after I won the state cross country championship my father, my father signed me up for the Footlocker Northeast Regional Championship in New York City, eager to test me against stiffer competition. The only hitch was that I did not want to run it. I was mentally and physically exhausted after my my rookie cross country season and fighting a stubborn cold. I was looking forward to a healthy break after the state meet. My father, having never run a race himself, had no personal experience with the physical demands of distance racing .  

On race morning the Bronx barely cracked twenty degrees. My teeth chattered. One mile into the race my throat constricted and a strange wheezing sound emanated from my chest. Alone on the wooded trails of Van Cortland Park, I struggled to breathe. Frightened, I peeled off to the side of the trail until I weathered my first asthma attack. I slowed my breathing enough to finish the race mid-pack. When I got home I was feverish in bed with pneumonia for weeks, my longest absence from school. When I finally returned to the track I needed an albuterol inhaler prescribed by my doctor. The feeling of suffocation became a metaphor for how I began to feel about running — and my father.

My father saw distance running as my ticket to an Ivy League college (preferably Harvard). But one thing stood in his way: the doddering old Coach Fleming. While I was laid out, my father visited my high school athletic director to demand he replace Flemming with a young assistant track coach who had just finished second in the Marine Corps Marathon. Fleming’s light touch worked well for me, as I was already practicing soccer with my travel team 3-4 days a week. Chronically underweight and fighting off colds, I was a risk for burnout.

One night the ABC evening news aired a TV segment “Teens in Trouble” where I delivered a deadpan account of what exhausted teens face on a daily basis, logging long hours of school, sports, and homework under intense pressure. I spent the next day in the offices of alarmed school administrators. I fell on my grenade, promising I wasn’t suicidal, cutting myself, anorexic, or being abused. I was mortified when teachers took me aside after class to ask in hushed voices if I was okay. In retrospect this was my opportunity to get help. But no one was a trained therapist. No one knew what questions to ask. 

The Mistake

Warmer spring weather improved my asthma and the next spring I prepared to race the mile at the track and field state championships. I only needed to finish top-4 at regionals to qualify. May is hot and humid in DC and billows of steam rose from the black track after a morning rain. A few steps into the regional race I felt my silver chain bounce against my collar bone. I rarely wore jewelry but had gone to sleep wearing a Navajo necklace with five colored stones. I was tired after staying out late with friends the night before. Jewelry was not allowed, so I immediately popped into the infield and unclasped the chain before dashing back onto the track. A line of girls in bright singlets already bobbed away around the first turn. I chased after them, hopelessly behind. What an awful way to end a season. I fought back tears. I was still dead last at the halfway point.

But passing the last-place straggler energized me. I clawed my way back into the race. I wheeled around the final lap, weaving and bobbing through a thick pack of racers. I could hear my teammates Alpha and Maduba screaming and jumping on the bleachers. I dashed towards the finish line and barely edged out the fourth place runner, earning the last spot in the state finals. I threw up my hands as if I’d won.

A race official with a clipboard sidled next to me. His large belly protruded over his belt and a cap shaded his eyes. He told me I was disqualified. I was still panting too heavily to respond. My coach leapt into the infield to clarify the decision. I had worn the necklace for only a couple steps. The only performance affected was mine. But the official stood firm. My glare could have burned a hole through him. Like my father, he had clearly never run a race in his life.

I was prepared for my father to leap into the fray, unleashing one of the fits of rage he displayed on the tennis court. But he stayed put. When I approach my parents at the fence I realized my father’s anger was directed only towards me. He slipped into economist-speak, offering unrealistic solutions engineered for a hypothetical world. You know, if you had really been thinking you would have run back to the start line to take off the necklace. I furrowed my brow, not catching his drift. There’s a rule against wearing jewelry, but I bet there’s no rule against starting a race late. I looked away in disbelief. Actually, your mistake was taking the necklace off in the first place. Probably no one would have even noticed if you hadn’t drawn attention to it. The Monday morning quarterbacking kept coming, the whole drive home. Do you have a mental checklist that you go through in your head before every race? It was a solemn dinner at home.

The Downturn

Mistakes are teachable moments and I learned an important lesson that day: my father only showed affection toward me when I won. There was not even a flicker of warmth for gutting it out when the winds were against me. He trotted me out at cocktail parties to brag about my victories to his friends, beaming with fatherly pride. But it was exhausting to have to win races in exchange for parental affection. Behind the scenes he took little interest in my well-being. As a teenager I once called my father from a party asking him for a ride home because I had been drinking beer. He was busy watching tennis and assured me I was fine to take the wheel as long as I was careful.

My father and I had different views on racing. He wanted me to fix the unevenness of my quarter-mile splits, convinced I was being overly conservative during my third lap and intentionally shoring up reserves for the final fourth lap. He did not realize that even professionals run wildly uneven splits. He pressed me to lead every race aggressively from the front and hang on to the lead until I collapsed, even if happened mid-race. “Think of it as an experiment,” he explained. “To test your limits.” I had seen girls carted off in ambulances and was uninterested in being his guinea pig.

During my sophomore year, I got my period and my teenage body started morphing into adulthood, exacerbating the disconnect between what my body could do and what my father thought it could do. My self-confidence nosedived as I began to blame my fleshier body for my slower times. My father assumed my times were getting slower because I was choking and having psychological problems that many tennis players face under pressure. My father hired a sports psychologist to fix me.

My first encounter with a trained therapist was eye-opening. In retrospect, it would have been helpful to have more sessions with him. He was gentle and kind. He assured me I was not neurotic, lazy, or timid. But he did not manage to “fix” me, so I only saw him once. Over my junior and senior years, I became emotionally numbed, counting down the days until I left for college.

Fly Little Bird

When it was time for me to select a university, my father dragged me to every elite university in the country, whether I was interested in going there or not. I interviewed with the track coaches, even as I was counting down the days until I never had to run again. We trekked across each campus to find the main library so we could count how many political philosophy books he authored were in the catalogue. There was no pretense that the university excursions were not really about him. 

I decided I wanted to go to Amherst College, a small liberal arts college in a cozy New England town, nestled in the pine forests of the Pioneer Valley, surrounded by woodland and farmland. I could imagine being happy in the home of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, running on my own through the forests. 

My father made me apply early to Harvard instead. He assured me I didn’t have to go if I got in. When Harvard mailed my early decision letter in December 1998, my father did not wait for me to get home from school to open it. He snatched the letter and ripped it open himself. The single act summed up our relationship perfectly.

I did not end up going to Harvard, or Amherst, or any school on the east coast. I fled to the west coast to Stanford University. The school had the distinct advantages of (a) satisfying my father as elite enough, (b) being thousands of miles away, and (c) never recruiting me to run. I couldn’t wait to exchange track spikes for flip-flops.

Second Act

Kicking back and soaking up rays on the laid-back west coast was supposed to make me feel relaxed. A Stanford degree was supposed to make me feel successful and secure. Instead I felt listless. I had fled west like a frightened deer. It was time for me to be the hunter.

Everyone assumed I was having a nervous breakdown when I left Stanford after my first year. My stunned California friends had never heard of Amherst and thought it was a community college, confusing Maryland and Massachusetts (too many little east coast states). I didn’t bother explaining myself to anyone. I twirled Laurie’s ring around my fourth finger and for the first time did exactly what I wanted. The next year, I became the fastest distance runner on the Amherst track and cross country teams, finishing All-America at Nationals. I liked dashing through the woods.

Night at the Colobus

The next summer my father celebrated his 60^th birthday by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with me and my brother. A few days before our climb, my brother and I were playing the “flaming sambuca” game with friends. You dip a finger in sambuca to pass a flame around the circle. Whoever loses the flame must drown their shot glass. Afterwards we picked up my father and headed for the Colobus nightclub on the outskirts of Arusha. I did what any carefree 21-year old girl does at clubs: dance, let others buy drinks, try not to get molested. I was oblivious to the fact that my father spent most of the night brooding alone at the bar, feeling ignored and slighted. No one wanted to converse with him about politics. So he drank and stewed. By 3am he was slurring his words and could barely walk to the car. In the parking lot he erupted. I had treated him like an old man. I had not welcomed him into the circle of young people I was dancing with. I had made him feel “like shit”. I slunk into the back seat of the car and let my father take a turn screaming at my brother while we drove home. I never went from drunk to stone cold sober so quickly. I had witnessed his explosive eruptions at many friends and family members, but this was the first time it was directed at me. 

Years passed before I understood the source of my father’s explosion and how deeply he dreaded turning 60. The Kili climb was designed to prove his virility and youthfulness. But he was anxious. What if he failed? Such doubts had plagued him for some time. Unbeknownst to me, he had treated severe performance anxiety with alcohol and antidepressants since his twenties. As a graduate student at Princeton he was treated by psychiatrists for panic attacks. When he began teaching at city college in New York City, he drank scotch before lectures. He claimed alcohol calmed him better than any therapist. Until it didn’t.

Adulting

The following summer I landed a summer internship in Moscow at the US State Department. My father insisted on tagging along and renting an apartment in Moscow for the entire summer. I objected. Moscow is a rough city. He couldn’t even read Cyrillic. I was overruled. Fortunately, the US embassy’s many layers of security made it impossible for him to visit me unexpectedly. But I had recurring nightmares of my father drowning me in a friend’s pond scattered with lily pads in upstate New York. The sunlight at the water’s surface faded to black as I was pushed to the pond’s floor, with icy fingers around my throat, entangled in the long, thin roots of the lilies.

White Knight

I spent my early twenties globetrotting across Australia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe, carving my own path. But by age 27 I had settled in DC for a postdoctoral fellowship. Back in the family orbit I began to regress. Until I met Aaron.

Aaron and I dated for a few months before he announced there was a problem. He objected to my intoxicated father driving me home to DC after Monday night dinners at my parents’ house in Chevy Chase. I was dumbfounded. Drinking and driving was normal. In my earliest childhood memories I sit shotgun while my father drives on the Beltway with a gin and tonic in his hand. Even today, the scent of gin reminds me of breezy summer car rides. The Monday car ride was supposed to be my quality one-on-one time with my father. I relayed Aaron’s objection to my mother, but neither of us acted.

But Aaron stood firm and eventually my mother took the car keys. She could not risk driving away the first nice Jewish boy willing to put up with her moody daughter. Eventually I decided that Aaron was not being stubborn or difficult. I was just witnessing something novel: protection from someone who cared about me. A few years later my father passed out driving home from a DC party, drifted across the double lane, and crashed into a fire hydrant on the west side of Oregon Avenue. He was still passed out when cops arrived. Aaron was vindicated.

Aaron continued to contest my belief system. Our first summer dating we both ran the Highland Sky 40 mile ultramarathon in West Virginia. He won handily but I had stomach problems and dropped out after 32 miles. The next morning I forlornly flew to a work conference in California convinced I would never see Aaron again. I strolled along the beaches of Santa Barbara wistfully watching the pelicans dive, accepting that I had blown it. I wallowed in guilt and shame. I was stunned when I returned to DC to find Aaron’s demeanor towards me unchanged. I had not fallen off some pedestal. He was even more flabbergasted that I believed I was unworthy of him just for flubbing one race.

Over time as Aaron became acquainted with my father he began to grasp the roots of my curious outlooks. Whenever I started to disparage myself, Aaron would tell me That’s your father speaking. Disparagement came so reflexively it was nearly automatic. We referred to it as my brain chip. I set radically different standards for myself and my friends, whom I never judged based on their performances. Aaron helped me set boundaries with my father for the first time. He became a go-between. My father took direction from men more easily than women. Plus, my father respected Aaron’s knack for fixing all his computer and A/V problems. Moreover, Aaron was willing to engage in political debates the rest of the family had tired of. My father always needed “fresh blood”. 

At times I tried to repair relations with my father and broach some of the difficulties I faced as a teenager. How it felt to have my legs cut out from under me. How I felt he invaded my space. But he would brush me off, never wanting to revisit “water under the bridge”, the same way he never addressed his own problems with his father, which haunted him to his last breath. When I leave this earth I don’t want to be carrying that kind of baggage. Some people will think it excessive to travel thousands of miles to dump my father’s ashes in a remote lake at the ends of the earth, but they have no inkling of the distance I’ve already traveled.

Where’s the horse?

The pandemic arrived with a Slam! My skull crashed into the dirt at Rock Creek Park Horse Center at 11:23am on Saturday, March 12th, 2020, the same day NBA basketball player Ruby Gobert tested positive for the novel coronavirus and the entire country gasped. The two events appeared unconnected at first, but I have come to realize they were not. The horses were anxious. Barn managers were fretting about the new pathogen spreading invisibly through air and surface and bickering about how to manage the oblivious weekend crowds swirling around the stalls. Should they close the barn to the public? Should they set up barriers down the lane? Do horses even transmit coronaviruses? Amid the chaos a black mare who is usually mellow instead had a meltdown.

If you have ever ridden a mechanical bull, you know the sensation of being catapulted through the air in a direction not of your choosing. Mechanical bulls are gentler than the real thing, easing you into steady rocking and starting slow before growing wilder. In real life there’s no gentle transition. The black mare bucked harder than any creature I’ve ever mounted. I never saw it coming. The first buck shot my body out of the stirrups and up onto her long black neck, where my arms clung for dear life. But the second buck came instantaneously, and I catapulted backwards in a free fall. My butt hit the ground first, followed by my skull, its left back corner slamming into the dirt with a thud. The velvet helmet saved my life.  

Stunned, I rose to my feet while the other riders circled their horses. My instructor grabbed the frightened riderless mare by a loopy leather rein flapping against her neck as she cantered. My knees wobbled uncontrollably beneath me and my legs buckled. I slammed back to the ground and my instructor wailed Stay down!

What happened next is hazy. Apparently I tried to remount the horse. I was behaving like a drunk girl at a bar, insisting that I could drive while wobbling in my heels and bleeding from my lip. My instructor guided me to a picnic table where I sat obediently and repeated the same questions a hundred times while the EMTs headed our way. Did I fall? What happened? Where’s the horse? I don’t recall any of that.   

I never had a concussion before. The disconnect between my perception and reality was surreal, like I was on hard drugs. I snapped out of it just before the EMTs arrived. It felt like waking out of a dream. The EMTs performed a cognitive test, which I almost flunked because in my stupor I thought it was funny to answer Barack Obama when they asked me to name the president of the United States. Everyone laughed when they realized it was an intentional joke. Except the male EMT. He also attested that coronavirus was a hoax. I refused to get in a vehicle with him. Instead, since I had driven the family car to my lesson, my husband had to race the jogging stroller five miles through Rock Creek Park with our one-year old son strapped in. All the barn staff gave him a big cheer when he arrived with the baby, covered in sweat. When we arrived at Suburban Hospital the waiting area was eerily empty. The nurse told us there were coronavirus patients in beds. I never got in and out of an emergency room faster.

There was no time to process the trauma. A new coronavirus was flooding hospitals in New York City and it was my job to use genomic data to trace how SARS-CoV-2 viruses fanned out across the world from Wuhan, China, and invaded Europe and North America. Technological improvements in genomic sequencing had revolutionizd epidemiology and how we track pathogens spreading and evolving across time and space, but there wasn’t yet infrastructure in place to make it easy. Everything was a learning curve for me and the team of scientists I led at the National Institutes of Health.

Then my boss did the strangest thing ever, and neither the pandemic nor my concussion could be considered my biggest shock of 2020.    

A Lie Too Big To Fail

The saying “People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one” is attributed to Joseph Goebbels. But the idea is enumerated more thoroughly in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kamf. Hitler was an evil maniac, but he was also clever and controlled in the way he exploited certain weaknesses in human thinking.

“in the primitive simplicity of their minds [people] more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation….”

I had never observed this counterintuitive phenomenon firsthand. It was fascinating to watch it play out in my office. The more unlikely my boss’s story became, the harder it was for anyone to digest the possibility that it was a complete fabrication.

My boss is not an evil maniac. But he did find himself in a sticky jam when he had to explain to his colleagues why he was abruptly kicking out a productive female scientist working on a national public health emergency right after she had a baby, without consulting anyone about the scientific or diplomatic ramifications. At first he tried little lies. She’s not as good a scientist as Cecile. She’s not a good mentor to her postdocs. Her behavior is disruptive to the office. He was tossing spaghetti at the wall but nothing was sticking. No one was buying it. Feeling squeezed, he decided to go nuclear. She’s a harasser.

Bingo. The spaghetti finally stuck. His characterization of me as a harasser was laughably untrue. But the opposing story was even harder to believe: that he would simply make it up. Sure, he was a little erratic. Sometimes he blew his fuse at his more assertive female staff, including myself. He kept karmic “balance stones” in his pants pocket to try to alleviate those tendencies. He become oddly withdrawn and antisocial, canceling our division’s happy hours and annual pic. Everyone recognized that he was particularly strange towards me. I dreaded his routine of sending my other colleagues out of the room so he could scream at me alone, making me cry, threatening not to renew my annual contract, holding my employment like a club over my head. I felt vulnerable alone in his enormous office, decorated with chandeliers and 18th century paintings. He never complained about my scientific work, only my behavior, his cheeks flushed and hands trembling, trying to contain his anger. His visible discomfort unnerved me, spreading like a communicable disease. But I never accepted his distortions. I would leave the room quaking, but his extended rants left him more relaxed, his hands tucked behind his head and his lips gently curved into a smile like a man in a post-organism afterglow. Doesn’t it feel good to blow off steam? he would ask me as I scurried out the door. I had enough close friends in the office to assure me that any time my boss told me I was abrasive and disliked he was just gaslighting me. I accepted that he was detached from reality. But I never took him for a boldfaced liar.

The harasser story worked well for him because he could deflect all criticism, shifting the blame for my dismissal from himself to some unnamed HR bogeymen. In fact, he even got to play the victim card, pretending he tried his damnedest to rehire me but kept getting steamrolled by overzealous HR team from an unknown office. Our organization’s HR director adamantly refuted my boss’s story that HR had any involvement in his personal hiring decisions, but he was also an outsider and some people wondered if he was the one lying.

Every good lie has a sliver of truth. I had recently terminated a master’s student after one year because my postdoc had given up trying to train her. She was an odd duck who threw people off by meowing at them like a cat. But scientists are all weirdos and we would have kept her had she been a high performer. She had a bone to pick with me after being terminated and filed a complaint to HR about my behavior. It was all trivial. One of the complaints was that I invited colleagues to go to the DC zoo on the day the clocks change and the animals get fed later, causing them to be unusually frisky. She was offended by what she perceived as cruelty towards animals. All complaints against me were investigated, gathering testimony from my colleagues, and dismissed. Reason prevailed and our head of HR avowed that I had a “clean bill of health”.

But women suffer from the lack of transparency in HR processes that always gives management the upper hand. When there is no transparency, upper management gets to control the interpretation of the outcome. With no “clean bill of health” certificate to frame on my office wall, nothing blocked my boss from disseminating a rumor that I was in serious high water with HR. I vehemently protested and offered to show documentation that I had an unblemished HR record with no strikes. My boss responded by inventing an even more unrealistic story: that HR secretly “cut a deal” with him not to document any infractions on my permanent record as long as he agreed not to renew my employment. Conveniently, he had no documentation of this secret deal. I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain all documents related to the complaint filed against me, including witness testimony and HR interpretation, to officially clear my name. I am still waiting. 

One reason it was hard to understand why my boss was lying about me was because he had no motive. Outwardly he was a timid, cautious boss with no stomach for high-stakes gambles. Axing a productive scientist working under him made no sense when he got credit for my success. Moreover, he was playing with quite a bit of fire. As a new mother I could have sued him for sex discrimination under the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) law. New mothers are protected from job discrimination as stringently as members of racial minorities or members of LGBTQ. The onus would be on him to provide a compelling explanation to a judge for my sudden termination. Outside witnesses would shred any claims of scientific ineptitude or behavioral problems. The timing of the onset of his haranguing of me just after I started a family was even more suspicious. Why would he risk his neck to get rid of me? It was a big mystery.

Breaking Bad

Scientists have to dig relentlessly for clues to complicated questions. I systematically turned over stone after stone until I got his motive. I can’t spill the beans with specific details, but he fits a genre (“Breaking Bad”, “Fargo”) where the nebbishy middle-aged white guy dabbles in little fibs and minor infractions and is surprised by how much he can get away with, being the average Joe type no one ever suspects. He is highly evasive but red flags get shrugged off. Darker and darker misdeeds are required to cover up prior acts, creating a spiral effect, but he self-justifies, convinced he is protecting himself and his family. When the walls start closing in, he resorts to increasingly desperate moves.

My boss effectively exploited the pandemic and the evaporation of standard communication channels, supervision, and accountability. But he also was a victim of the pandemic, which drove anxiety and paranoia through the roof and triggered his erratic behavior, just like what happened to the mare. Both were motivated more by fear than aggression. Whatever my boss feared, the prospect of me becoming a Federal employee only heightened it, fundamentally changing our power dynamic and removing his one lever of control over me, my tenuous employment status. First, my boss tried to control me using tactics that worked in the past on women: threats, lies, intimidation, yelling, gaslighting. But they only worked to some degree. An inquisitive person like myself, with unflinching honesty and a nose for liars, simply became too big a liability to have around.

The tragedy is that I was never an existential threat to him, no more than I was to the black mare who threw me. Prior to my new boss’s arrival I had steered clear of trouble for a decade. That’s saying a lot in an organization that gets the lowest scores across all 27 NIH ICs in employee ratings of “honesty and integrity of leadership” (barely 30%). I just wanted to be left alone to do my job fighting pathogens.

Moving On

A reader may inquire about my motivations for recounting this story. So I had a nutter boss, who cares? By not pursuing a lawsuit I already waived my opportunity for justice or holding my boss accountable. At this point I don’t care what happens to him. There’s nothing I can do to protect other women in his orbit. My closest friends left the office shortly after my departure.

But I have other motivations. Following the sickening Larry Nasser story, followed by the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) debacle, it feels like progress for women is slipping backwards. The NWSL featuring Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe was supposed to be poster child of women’s empowerment. So was our US gymnastics team. Women were sounding the alarm for years. Why did no one listen? I can now see how society’s blinders work and and stem from the enormous benefit of the doubt bestowed on middle-aged white men, especially in middle- and upper-class positions of authority. Our preconditioned minds fail to absorb reports from women and children that contradict the convenient architecture of “safe” and “unsafe” we use to sleep at night. Even women resist truths from other women that are unpalatable. The tragedy is that Larry Nasser, like Jerry Sandusky, was able to get away with his heinous crimes for so long *because* they were so outside the bounds of what his peers could accept in a person who looked just like them.

I also want to speak for victims of mental traumas that are not visible or relatable, which can cause further alienation. In cases of familiar traumas like death, illness, accidents, or violence, my friends have been down that road before and there is a coda for how to behave and speak. But it’s a lot harder to explain the vertigo that comes with sustained deception, gaslighting, or an attack on my sense of reality. I blame no one for having difficulty wrapping their head around my particular hardship or even victim-blaming me to some degree. Even my mother pointed out that I would have retained my job had it not been for my assertive resistance of my boss’s early distortions. But nothing is more alienating than losing a shared sense of reality with the people around you. I am lucky to have a husband who acutely understood everything I experienced, sometimes better than I did, and kept me grounded.

I also wish to convey some of the hidden ways the pandemic has side swept our lives. It’s impossible to say whether my boss would have gotten away with his ruse in a normal year or a typical office environment. But there were highly extenuating circumstances during the pandemic. Will a widespread shift to more remote work help women by limiting physical contact with potential harassers? Or hurt them by eroding accountability and their support networks? Would I have navigated normal workplace obstacles (exclusion from meetings, being condescended to or interrupted) that affect women disproportionately without daily informal chat with other women scientists around the water cooler? Women need each other as allies. I got by with virtual allies who supported me enormously this past year, but those bonds were laid over years of in-person office time.

Finally, I just believe in sharing the truth, no matter how small or insignificant. Consider it my tiny personal battle against a world buckling under an epidemic of misinformation. Misinformation is the most cynical form of attack and Americans are proving to be absurdly susceptible. National politics are hopeless, but at the very least I can preserve my own nest.

As an epidemiologist I can’t resist one last PSA: we train our kids how to respond and protect themselves from an active shooter, but not from charming sociopaths. This does not reflect real-world risks. It is worthwhile to familiarize yourself with the terminology and telltale signs of clinical personality disorders (sociopaths, borderlines, narcissists, etc.). As a scientist, I was compelled to study up so that if I ever again encounter someone who lies, cheats, and charms their way through a career in management, leaving a wake of destruction, I will be equipped. Be aware that all of us encounter people with personality disorders periodically. But we don’t realize it because these people can be perfectly charming 99% of the time. You only discover their underlying traits if you happen to become their target. Then hell breaks loose. These people can absolutely ruin your life. But if you understand how people with these conditions think and the strategies they employ to control, manipulate, and confuse, you can potentially dodge a bullet. And you can help your friends and loved ones escape too. If you or a loved one has ever been targeted I would also recommend professional therapy. Damage to a psyche is more difficult to objectively measure than a broken bone or cancerous cell, but these people really mess with head and erode your sense of trust, potentially damaging your ability to enter new relationships.

VHTRC Women’s Half Marathon, Saturday September 11, 2021 Results

Amazing to be back racing after a long COVID-19 pandemic hiatus. It’s been an insane year-plus-plus. But September 2021 has seen some light at the end of the tunnel. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to send Bjorn off for his first day of preschool, lunchbox in hand. He loves it. Aaron and I can finally get some work done. Plus, this month I graduated from 9 months of therapy for PTSD. I wanted a tassel or some kind of I’m Sane Again! sticker from the APA for all the hard work. But I’ll settle for a functioning brain that doesn’t dissolve every time I have to take one of those mandatory anti-harassment courses at work. And I have my appetite back. Being insatiably hungry these past few weeks is the truest sign that my high-octane self is back after a year of dormancy and trial by fire. Thanks to all the volunteers who made the Women’s Half Marathon possible and the little nugget of banana that kept me upright at mile 10. The moms are not alright, but we’re hanging in there.

The moms are not alright. The WHM field tends to be mom-heavy. All races have smaller fields these days, but the Half usually has 150 runners and this year only had 40. The pandemic has been the tipping point for moms who were just hanging on by a fingernail pre-COVID. RD Tracy Dahl is a superhero. I’m not sure anyone realizes what an ordeal it is to RD a race, let alone during a pandemic, let alone with a three-year old tethered to your leg. Tracy’s attention to detail turns a nice event into a truly great and memorable day. Whether it’s the thoughtful prizes that are genuinely useful for outdoors people (how did she know I needed a lightweight portable camping towel because Aaron is sick of me always stealing his?), or the fun challenges along the course (thank you #36 for giving Bjorn your wings; he loved them), Tracy knows how to run a show.

Jack K is a super-volunteer. Most VHTRC events are ultramarathons where unhurried racers dawdle around aid stations perusing the fares at a leisurely pace. But I run the Women’s Half the way I run a road race. Dawdling in aid stations interrupts flow. Most volunteers are not ready for me and I often don’t get anything to eat or drink at the aid stations. But when I saw Jack ready at the Do Loop with two cups in hand and making direct eye contact I celebrated. Jack’s cup of Gatorade saved my race.

My run-in with a hiker. I’ve run the Women’s Half 7 times and never before has a random hiker guy tried to box me off a bridge when I said “Excuse me, coming by”. When I sidled around him and explained I was running a race he spat I don’t fucking care and still tried to block me on the bridge. This little exchange occurred 5 minutes after I didn’t get my gel at Fountainhead. He was lucky I didn’t push him off, being a hungry, adrenalined marmot. I settled for flashing him the bird and trotting off the bdige. I saw him on the return trip and flashed a big smile “You again!” He had not made it very far.

Bjorn is ready to join VHTRC. After the race, my three-year old son Bjorn wanted to blast down the single track, running his own little course over a bridge and back at least 10 times. Each time he fell on the roots, he dusted off and shrieked “I’m okay!”. Eventually he asked me why he didn’t get to have a race number so I found one and pinned it to his shirt. Next year we should have a kid’s 50 meter dash.

I lost two friends this month. Gary died of brain cancer at age 53. Carmen (not her real name) is still alive, but our friendship of twelve years kicked the bucket. I mourn for both. But the grief process looked quite different.

Gary Albert was my husband’s boss for two decades. Aaron was a young 20-something computer programmer when Gary hired him to work at ActivTrax, which created fitness software. Gary exasperated me when Aaron and I started dating a decade ago. Gary phoned Aaron every time a server went down or a line of code had a glitch, weekends and nights. Aaron once had to fix a problem from a ski chairlift in Colorado. Aaron was a catchall IT gopher who wrote all the company’s software, ran the servers, and dealt with the Verizon guy when the wifi went down. But I soon learned his biggest job was talking Gary out of impractical ideas. Gary was a dreamer, a perfectionist, who did not accept defeat easily. But Aaron had worked for Gary for most of his 20s and 30s and a father-son bond forged. I understood that if I wanted Aaron, Gary came with the package.    

Six years later, just as Aaron and I were tying the knot, I finally got to meet Gary in the flesh. When my building at the NIH got renovated I designated Tuesdays as “Take Your Girlfriend To Work Day.” Aaron took me to his ActivTrax office so I could escape the dungeon basement where I had been temporarily relocated. ActivTrax became my home away from home, and Tuesday became my favorite (and most productive) day of the week. Gary was a cyclone of energy in the kitchen break room. I was blown away by his candor about challenges he was facing. I came from a family where men deny, deny, deny, because admitting to fault would make them look weak. I was stunned by a self-reflective man who could own his flaws and past mistakes and was actively self-improving. More often than not, when Aaron and I climbed into the Jeep after a long day at ActivTrax, I turned to him and said, “I like Gary.”

Gary quickly became family after the birth of our son. Gary and his wife Maddie babysat Bjorn every Tuesday night so Aaron and I could keep up our weekly group run with the Woodley Ultra Society (WUS). When my father died when Bjorn was six months old, Gary filled in by taking me to sporting events that bored Aaron. Gary was horrified when I showed up to a Caps game not wearing a team jersey and spent the breaks enlisting every salesperson to find a Kuznetsov jersey in my size. We never found one (to my relief; I wasn’t raised to drop absurd amounts of cash on over-priced sports jerseys). When Aaron and I ran endurance races, Gary happily assumed the role of Number One Fan and occasionally Sponsor. He was more pumped about my races than I was. I did not realize I had voids in my life until Gary filled them.    

Gary would have liked to have died a richer man, but instead he died a better man, in some ways a hero. Few men ever set on a path to redemption. It’s easier to bury heads in the sand, denigrate therapy, and task others to accept “who they are.” But Gary was the ultimate hustler. He put the same vim into fixing himself as he did into fixing everything else in his life – his company, his house, his relationships, and virtually every business system he ever encountered.

Gary was a lot. God bless Maddie. God bless Michelle, Louie, Aaron, and everyone else who worked at ActivTrax. Luckily I never had to work for Gary or satisfy his crazy demands. I was just an interloper who could enjoy his crass humor and unfiltered barbs. There were no walls with Gary. He waved me in to use his office massage chair, even when he was on business calls. I wish Gary were still around. But I feel comfort knowing that his species of men exist. I’ll spend the rest of my life searching for people like Gary. They won’t be easy to find.  

* * *

By chance I encountered my friend Carmen on the same day that Gary died. I was grieving, my head was spinning, and I cannot remember a thing I blurted to her. But I recall that I was friendly, which was progress. Carmen and I had not spoken in six months, even though we lived ten minutes apart and had worked together for more than a decade as “work wives”, leading side-by-side research programs and sharing postdocs and office space. We became good friends over years of traveling together to teach scientists around the world how to study infectious disease data. We were known for notoriously fast, disjointed conversations where we finished each other’s sentences because we intuitively guessed what the other was thinking, but left out so many words that no one else could follow the thread.

We had complementary skills at work, but also complementary personalities. She was the consummate diplomat in pink lipstick and heels and I was the blunt realist in track pants who blurted without filter. She could only do good cop, so I did bad cop. She was cautious and demure, but allowed me to drag her on thrilling adventures by foot, bike, ski, and boat. She rolled with it, even the time she got stranded on a rock surrounded by whitewater rapids and had to be rescued. I also enlisted her in my weekly pilates class, which we did together for years along with my mom. Over time we built a research group that was distinctly female dominated. I joked that it was a “safe house” for female computational biologists. Of everything I did at work, the achievement I am probably most proud of is that we built a research environment that was genuinely fun. Many women remained lifelong friends after they left. We all liked each other enough to vacation together in Puerto Rico and Bali.

But even the best relationships sometimes get seriously tested. The unraveling of my friendship with Carmen began shortly after I had a baby and became the only scientist in the group acquainted with morning sickness and breast pumps. For some reason when I returned to the office after my son’s arrival my boss had my number. He began to yell at me for no reason and threaten to end my employment. To say Carmen is not a fan of conflict is to say the ocean is not dry. Carmen had worked there longer than anyone and knew the ropes. She even served a year as interim director before the new boss arrived. Everyone looked to her for guidance, so every time she looked the other way my boss felt emboldened. Eventually he knew he could get away with anything. Which he did, falsifying information about my HR record so he could use it to justify terminating the employment of a new mother in the middle of a pandemic. I was so disgusted I stopped being able to eat, my weighting dropping to dangerously anorexic levels. But what was even more painful how he used Carmen to deliver the falsified news to me. I trusted her, making the situation even more disorienting. No matter what, she believed him, even when he changed his story a couple times. When I gathered a group of longtime female colleagues to dissect what had happened and what my next move was, we accepted that my friendship relationship with Carmen was effectively over. I did not expect Carmen to join a bar fight, but I did expect her to accurately report who fired the gun.

A few weeks after our chance encounter I reached out to Carmen to see if she had gained any new perspective. These were not little white lies: they decimated my career, put my family on the ropes, and threatened to tarnish my reputation at work. But I was willing to put effort into repairing our friendship if she could own up to past mistakes. When she got angry that I even brought the matter up, I knew there was no chance of repair.

I have never had a falling out with a female friend, so this was new territory for me. In some ways Gary and Carmen were foils. For all of Gary’s flaws, being hot-tempered and micro-demanding, you knew he always had your back. Carmen was the opposite, the loveliest, most friction-free person to work with, but who clams up at the first whiff of anything unsavory. I still encourage everyone to be Carmen’s friend and colleague. She is a lovely, brilliant person who makes everyone around her smarter. A part of me knows that she recognizes deep down that our boss did something foul but denial can be more comfortable.

Recently I have noticed that my memories of bombastic Gary stand out in technicolor, as if he were still living and I could phone him anytime, while my Carmen memories are already muted and fuzzy, as if she had already faded like an old photograph. We logged so many hours together but she was always demure and withholding, and in many ways I never really knew who she was. I was the “Gary” in our friendship, spouting every unfiltered thought about my personal life. But Carmen kept her personal life under wraps. When she and her partner split I had no inkling they were even on the rocks. Sometimes I asked my husband if I was deluding myself thinking we were actually friends. I had never even been inside her home.

I will always have a soft spot for gentle Carmen and her role in a life-changing decade that launched me from a late-20s partier into a 40-year old mom with a magnificent family and an established research career. I am forever grateful for the “honeymoon” decade I spent working with her, adventuring across Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia. She was a sage advisor and a brilliant scientist who always asked the most incisive questions. I absorbed much from cohabiting her sphere. I will always miss having her around to bounce ideas off, as well as her full-throated laugh, head back, trying not to snarf her cosmopolitan. For more than a decade she was the world’s best work wife and science is not as fun without her.

* * *

It has been especially hard for my family to lose two work pillars in the middle of a destabilizing pandemic. But life marches on. My attention these days is wrapped up in my radiant son Bjorn, who in a few years he will be old enough to be his momma’s date at Caps games. In Gary’s honor we will chat up every salesperson, stadium worker, and fan sitting in our row. Maybe Bjorn will finally get that Kuznetsov jersey.