Professor I admire told me I’m not cut out for my field

I’m a first year PhD student in an earth science who started in January at a school in the quarter system. The first class I took was a graduate only course taught by this professor who is a very charismatic lecturer, prolific in the field, and famous for being pretty abrasive. I did really well in it, and got along fine with the professor. He’s not on my committee (only because he’s retiring in the next year) but he’s a local expert on something really relevant to my research so I’ve asked him a lot of questions and worked with him. I’m a pretty talkative person, and I ask a lot of questions and think out loud.

Most people walk on eggshells around him, but I’ve spent a lot of my life being verbally berated by old men, so his jabs don’t really hit me that hard. I had always seen him as blunt, condescending, and occasionally rude, but not ill intentioned.

I was doing my first week of field work, and he came along with my group.

For some context, I got into an accident last year that made me permanently disabled. I have a poor sense of balance now, have a hard time using the right half of my body, and have chronic pain. However, I can still do field work, I’m just a bit slower and less coordinated. I still do big hiking and backpacking trips, climb mountains, etc. I feel a lot of shame about being slower and weaker than others, but I’ve been working fine.

Recently, the professor has been making some jabs at my intelligence. There are some grad students he’s really condescending towards that I believe he sees as inferior or stupid. I wasn’t on that list until recently. I’m not sure what flipped, but he slowly pushed me into that group. I still asked him questions, because I looked up to him as a scientist, even if he looked down on me.

After a few days of field work, I was working on something physical. I made a mistake but it wasn’t anything horrific (another grad student made the same mistake an hour before and got off fine).

But that’s when he said it. That I wasn’t cut out for this field. In front of everyone. Including collaborators I had just met in person for the first time.

I walked off into the woods and just burst into tears. He had confirmed every single thing I thought about myself. It was so embarrassing. I literally could not stop crying. Even for the rest of the trip, it would happen randomly. I had already been thinking that I would hold out for the rest of the year, and if I was still feeling like a failure every day I would quit. Ive had a lot of really distressing things in my personal life recently and now all I have to live for is this PhD. I don’t have a family who loves me, or friends in this town. My hobbies don’t bring me joy anymore. And now it feels like I will never finish this or succeed.

Everyone consoled me privately, and two people right after, but everyone was just normal with him after.

I have no idea what to do. I can’t stop feeling hopeless and depressed. It’s completely broken me. It wouldn’t be a big deal if it was someone else, but it was a professor I really admired. I was going to ask him for a letter of rec for a fellowship. Now I feel like everyone thinks that about me, and that no matter what I do, I can’t succeed.