I was lying face down on the bed unable to move but my mind was still grinding away at an idea. Evan, my husband came into the room to change out of his work clothes.

“You ok ?”, he asked.

“No.” Was all I could muster. I hated my job. I shouldn’t, I knew that. It was a good job, working as a tech. in a research lab. Someone with a MS in environmental science who liked lab work, and microorganisms, and field work SHOULD be happy there. But I wasn’t. It felt tedious and isolated. I felt more alone in that lab than anywhere else I had ever been. I spent hours doing tasks I could do blindfolded and my mind was starting to take on the properties of a highly caffeinated hamster.

I tried listening to podcasts and audiobooks, and that worked for a while, but ultimately it may have made things worse. The ideas and new experiences entering my brain through my headphones spurred a barrage of ideas, thoughts, and wonderings. Ideas for books I thought I might like to write, wonderings about why the author of whatever book I had been listening to had approached the subject in “that way”, why hadn’t they asked “this question”. I didn’t know exactly what was wrong with me but I was unhappy, and wrestles, and also exhausted all at the same time. And recently there was this other, nagging, insidious idea that I just couldn’t shake.

“I want to know if Panicum virgatum produces atrazine degrading phytochemicals.”

“What?” was Evan’s confused reply.

I turned my head to face Evan while I spoke. “You remember me talking about Jamie’s research project, that PhD student who graduated a couple of years ago?”

“Yes…sort of.”

“She found a chemical in Eastern gamagrass that degrades the herbicide, atrazine. But that’s where her research ended. No one else seems to be moving forward with her finding. And I was reading some papers, and that grass doesn’t grow easily, at least not to start with. But Panicum virgatum, switchgrass, grows well here and it’s in the same family. I want to know if it makes a similar chemical that can degrade atrazine.

“Why ?”

“Atrazine gets into drinking water and there’s evidence to indicate it changes how hormones function and I found a paper that indicates it can cause women to give birth early.” There was a pregnant pause between us while I avoided Evan’s direct gaze.

“I think it could be a good PhD project.” I still couldn’t quite look at Evan. He was always supportive, but for some reason this conversation felt like I was blurting out a deep, quiet secret. Something I might only whisper to the trees outside my bedroom window late at night under cover of darkness.

“That sounds cool,” Evan said. You should talk to your MS advisor about it.

I closed my eyes and momentarily pretended Evan didn’t exist. He didn’t seem to understand how impossible that was. People like me don’t come up with their own PhD project. You need to have a 4.0 GPA and have gone to private school for that. Not to mention, it would not be a funded project. So I wouldn’t get paid to do the work. How would we swing that? I would just be wasting my MS advisor’s time and probably annoy him.

Even this early in our marriage, we had only been married for about a year, Evan seemed to sense when something was amiss. I doubt he knew how severely negative my inner monologue could be, but he could often tell when something was bothering me and it needed to be addressed. Evan sat down on the bed and said “we could figure it out if you want to go back to school.”

“What if it’s a stupid idea?”, I whined.

“It doesn’t sound stupid. And you could always check it out with your friend Mark. Maybe he could give you some feedback.”

I wasn’t quite ready to admit it yet, but this was sound advice. Mark was a friend I had met in high school and by some bizarre coincidence, we had both ended up in Missouri studying at the same school. But he was now finishing his Phd and I had completed a MS. He was a super smart guy. He DID have the 4.0 GPA and had moved directly from his batchelor’s degree into a PhD without passing GO or collecting 200.00$. Before he started his PhD he had worked as a chemist and read papers about environmental contaminants. He realized the author of the work he found most interesting worked at our school in Missouri, he contacted the researcher, applied to the school, and started working on his degree. Certainly, he could tell me if in sharing my idea with my MS advisor I would be in danger of being greeted with uncomfortable grins and platitudes while he edged towards the nearest door.

I rolled over, smiled up at Evan, gave him a big hug, a tear, a sniffle, and got up to start making dinner. Even if the PhD thing didn’t happen, I knew I was pretty lucky in other ways.

A few days later, I had lunch with Mark. I explained my thoughts and ideas. I talked about buffer strips between agricultural sites and open water like rivers and streams that people in Missouri often use for drinking water. I explained how different plants in the strips might be able to make buffer strips more effective at keeping atrazine out of the water. He already knew all about atrazine, it was a contaminant his lab had studied pretty thoroughly with regard to its effects on hormones in animal cells.

Finally, I told him about my interest in switchgrass and my idea that it might produce a chemical that reacted with atrazine, breaking it down to a less toxic compound. I had compiled some research papers that showed increased atrazine degradation in the root zones of switchgrass plants. However, other scientists had not pinpointed what had made the atrazine break down faster. Many people thought it was due to soil fungi or bacterial activity, but it had not been definitively proven.

“That sounds like a cool project”, Mark said. “When do you start?”

“I don’t know. You don’t think it’s dumb?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Maybe I’ll talk to my advisor about it in a year or so. After I’ve had time to flesh out a plan of study. I don’t want to come to him with a half-baked idea.”

“Maybe you should talk to him now.” He was looking at me in a way that indicated he felt I was being silly and making excuses. I didn’t really have a response prepared. I had been pretty sure Mark would gently and kindly identify the holes in my research plan. But that had not happened. So I just stared at him.

“Look,” he said, “you have a realistic idea backed up by some good research. You should just go talk to him and the two of you can flesh out the rest. You don’t need to do the whole thing on your own. That’s not how PhD projects work. Most other students follow an outline laid out by their advisor. You’ll be fine. Just go talk to him. He won’t shut you down.”

I knew he was right. Dr. Main had always been a good mentor. My imagination and tendency towards catastrophization was getting the better of me. I just needed to take this first step. The rest would get figured out along the way. Just like the rest of life.