In grad school with this illness

I’m not starting this story at the beginning. I’m starting in the middle, in graduate school, because that’s where my life first split into two timelines. One existed on paper. The other unfolded inside my mind.

When I arrived at university for grad school, I felt like I had finally stepped into science for real. I took everything that interested me: cell biology, cancer biology, stem cells, bioinformatics, computational neuroscience. My health was stable enough that I could focus. Madison felt almost unreal in its calm. Days in the lab, nights reading papers and novels, moving between data and stories with the same intensity.

Science stopped feeling like a subject and became a language I was learning to speak. Experiments demanded patience. Coursework demanded rigor. For the first time I felt steady.

But underneath that stability, something else was forming. My work on a cancer gene shifted from a technical question into an obsession. I became convinced its expression oscillated. My advisor disagreed. I went back to differential equations and time series thinking, pulled by one question: if you don’t know the period of oscillation, how do you know when to sample? From the inside it felt like dedication. In reality my thinking was accelerating. Conversations stretched into monologues. Doubt faded. Curiosity began to harden into certainty.

Looking back, graduate school was the start of a pattern I would only recognize years later. Cycles of clarity and acceleration, growth and collapse. At the time I believed I was moving toward discovery. Two years after I left, another group confirmed that the gene really does oscillate.

This is not a story about genius or failure. It is about learning to think, losing that ability, and slowly rebuilding it.