Michelle Murrain, computer consultant
Interviewed in New York, NY. October 28th, 2009.
Born 1959 in New York City,
"When we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn't just ourselves that we're discovering. We're discovering the universe."
— Pema Chodron, in “When Things Fall Apart”
MM:
When I was young there were moments where I understood that the world was not about me, and yet I didn’t come to a real awareness of myself until quite a bit later.
In the context of learning I probably want to start with my trouble in school because school was — I mean pre-college, with a couple of really standout exceptions — almost uniformly useless for me. Which is probably true of most people.
We moved to Great Neck, New York, when I was 9. It was the only relatively well-off suburb in Long Island that would accept African Americans to buy houses. We were one of the half dozen African American families that lived in Great Neck in the late 60’s.
The school I went to was a very good public school with 90 or 95 percent of the students going on to college. It was a very competitive school, and I was not at all in that expected place of doing well, of being into college prep mode. I just sort of hobbled along and learned most of what I wanted to learn on my own.
LS:
Were you bored?
MM:
Oh yeah, totally. In grade school, junior high school and high school I was totally bored, but I stopped being bored after that because I didn’t allow myself. During high school I learned how not to be bored. I read a lot, and I learned where to get information, and how to learn it on my own. Once I learned that, I wasn’t bored anymore.
The one time that I can remember feeling really bored was the short period of time that I did this retreat in Western Mass, in the Berkshires. I took very little with me to read on purpose. It was boring for 4 days, but it was a really active kind of bored. It was like, “I have to get in touch with this boredom!” kind of bored. So no, I don’t get bored, I don’t let myself be bored.
My mother was telling me a few days ago that she came across stuff that I had taken apart, radios and watches, because that’s what I did when I was young: mechanical objects. I put them back together to some extent, but obviously some things I didn’t because she still had some of the things that were taken apart.
I’m an only child and my parents were very engaged in their own lives and careers, and not very engaged in my life. They were mostly not around. So for me it was, like, school’s not very useful, my parents were not really there, so it was “me, myself, and I.” Maybe that was part of learning that the world was not just about me because I didn’t have many people who were acting as if the world was about me.
My grandmother used to take me to the Museum of Natural History, the planetarium and stuff, and it was such a great experience for me because I would learn a lot. She was very much somebody who encouraged my learning.
I graduated from high school and I had this weird thing where my grades were not really very good but I got really good SAT scores and, you know, those advanced test scores. So I went to Bennington College, which was a really good experience for me. That was a useful school (laughs)! It’s a small college.
My parents wanted me to be a doctor and I sort of acceded to their wishes to become Pre-med. I always had an interest in science; that was always my thing. So I was a science student at Bennington, which was sort of odd, because there aren’t many of them. But it was great because I got a lot of individualized attention. Unlike in high school I had teachers who could see, “Oh, she’s pretty smart. Maybe we should figure out what’s going on!”
Bennington has this thing called “Field Work Term,” which is a 2-month time in January-February where you’re off somewhere. I worked in a hospital microbiology lab one winter. I did research in the American Red Cross Blood Lab a second winter. For the third winter I worked at Columbia University in the heart research lab doing programming. That’s when I started doing programming. The fourth winter I stayed at Bennington doing my senior thesis.
Bennington had this old — well, it wasn’t old at the time — PDP-11/34 mini-computer and there were, like, 5 people who ever used it. One of the people whom I’d become friends with said, “Hey, why don’t you go check this out?” So I came by and we just sort of hung out and taught each other stuff because there wasn’t a computer science teacher at the time. There was this guy Lee Supowit, who was one of the two people on the math faculty. He was a very odd guy, but he was really cool. He was sort of a chaperone for this computer group. We just hung out and I learned how to program with a bunch of friends.
Then I got a 2-month internship at Columbia University helping with a program that was analyzing a certain kind of data… I don’t even remember anymore. I really got into it. I loved doing programming. I actually never took a computer science course throughout my whole career. A lot of people haven’t, it’s actually pretty common. So that got me into programming.
I worked at Columbia for the winter and the following summer and, because it was in a hospital, I knew that I didn’t want to be a doctor. My parents wanted me to go to grad school. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go but, I don’t know… it was interesting, I had a moment when I was either going to go to grad school or I was going to go into programming. But that was 1981, before anyone thought that programming was going to be a reasonable career. It wasn’t clear that you could make a lot of money doing it. It was a really new thing, not like it was 10 years later. So I went to grad school at Case Western Reserve University and did my Ph.D. in neuroscience.
I spent 6 years getting my Ph.D. and about half of the work of the Ph.D. was software that I wrote to do 3-D anatomical structures. Actually, I worked on cockroaches, which is kind of a funny thing.
One of the things of neuroscience — which I think is still true — is that people think if you understand simple animals, and you can sort of figure out how their nervous systems work, it’s easier to understand us. The simple animals turn out to be way more complex than anybody ever thought.
My advisor was Roy Ritzmann, who’s still at Case, and he was a great guy. He was a really good advisor who was encouraging and he gave me enough rope — luckily I didn’t hang myself. His style was interesting because he assumed that I could do the work. He made the assumption that I would learn to do what I needed to do, one way or another. He provided enough structure and support to get there, but no constraints. It’s a style I adopted as a professor, to some extent. That was really good experience, and he was a really good scientist
I wanted to go into a research career because I was, like, “This is cool! I can do this.” So I got a Post-doc with this guy Stanley B. Kater who was famous in my field. He was one of the top, top guys in the field and had, like, 6 Post-Docs and 4 graduate students and this huge lab. In my naiveté I figured, “He must be a really, really good scientist.” I knew that my advisor was really good, but he must be amazingly good if he had that kind of lab. And he offered me a job and I took it.
I moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, and found that he actually wasn’t that great. The reason he had such a big lab was that he was a good salesman. And that was soooo disillusioning to me. I was completely disillusioned. I was like, “This is what science is about? This is what I have to do to do well in science?” I knew I couldn’t do it.
I learned a lot about the realities of grant funding and that kind of stuff, but I was very disheartened. At the same time — when I was in grad school — I came out as a Lesbian and started to build a social network. There was a very tight knit Lesbian community in Fort Collins, and I found myself within it. I had this sort of instant group of friends and I was spending a lot of my time learning about who I was.
I’d been writing poetry since Bennington, and I wrote a lot of poetry when I was in Colorado. I was so engaged with my social life, with poetry, and combined with the incredible disillusionment with the job that I had, I was steering in a different direction.
You know I almost left being a scientist. I knew that I didn’t want to go into doing big university research stuff, so I ended up deciding that the right avenue was to go teach at a small college, which would be more my speed. That was when I applied for and got the job at Hampshire College. That was 1989.
Hampshire was a great place. As a faculty member there’s an incredible freedom to explore what you want to explore, to teach what you want to teach, to research what you want to research. It’s pretty amazing in that way. Since I’d been to Bennington I understood how a small, liberal arts college without grades works. It was a style I had an appreciation for, and I had really good colleagues. I got to know faculty from everywhere in the 5-college area, and I did a lot of cross-disciplinary teaching.
When I was at Grad school at Case, in the last couple of years, I was on the board of the Lesbian and Gay Community Center in Cleveland. In 1985 they had been awarded a grant to do an Ohio-wide AIDS hotline. Because I was a science Grad student I was considered the resident scientist and was tapped to train people on what AIDS was.
At the time they had just identified HIV and everything was very new, so much wasn’t known, and there was so much rumor and innuendo. I learned everything I needed to learn, and was training people on the current science and treatment options and that kind of stuff. I got very involved in doing HIV/AIDS advocacy in Cleveland.
When I went back to Massachusetts I got involved in the Hampshire County AIDS Taskforce. Then I got involved in an organization around women and AIDS because at the time West Massachusetts had large HIV drug using communities. I was doing some advocacy work around that and I shifted my research focus to HIV related epidemiology. I left neuroscience behind at that point.
Hampshire was great because even though I had been hired as the neuro person — and I still taught neuroscience — I could branch out and do whatever I wanted to. There were two other people (at Hampshire) who knew neuroscience, so I wasn’t pegged, but at most other schools I would have been kind of stuck. If I had changed fields they would have been, like, “Why are you doing that?” And if I’d changed fields it would have been a danger to my tenure, and that kind of stuff. At Hampshire I could do it and it wasn’t a problem.
So I took some courses in epidemiology at U. Mass. Amherst. I was still doing computer stuff on the side, and then in 1994 this organization I had done some HIV education for wanted to get on the internet, and they knew that I did technology stuff.
This is at a time when ISPs were exorbitantly expensive, you couldn’t just go to GoDaddy and get a host, and you couldn’t easily get an internet connection either. It was expensive and they couldn’t afford it. With the assistance of a Hampshire student we put a Linux box in my office, attached to the Hampshire network, and it became their site… they were the Family Planning Council of Western Mass, and we had family.hampshire.edu. I really enjoyed doing that. It was really fun. So I got into that kind of sideways, working with nonprofits on technology.
At the same time a colleague of mine wrote this big grant, a technology education grant from the NIH (National Institute of Health). Basically it was a big teacher education program. Teachers would come to Hampshire and get courses in various subjects. I taught a course, some of it was neuroscience, cognitive science, and technology. This was the mid to late 90’s so this was how to get online, how to build web pages, really basic stuff that is sort of de rigor now. At the time Massachusetts had a big push to get technology in the schools, so I got roped in to all kinds of stuff around that.
In 1996 to 1997 I took a year-long sabbatical. I was going to write a book, a book that was a broad overview of race and class and health in the US. I think the book has subsequently been written, but it hadn’t been written then, and I was going to write it. I had an outline and I had a publisher who was interested, and it was all ready to go. I was on sabbatical to write the book and I didn’t write it, I didn’t write it…
In October I got a phone call from a local Springfield television station. They wanted to put together a technology center for teachers and they didn’t know how to go about it. They didn’t know what they would need, and they didn’t know whether it made sense to do it, and they were sort of, like, “What should we do?” So they hired me to do a feasibility study, to spend a couple of months talking to people and laying out what might make sense. I talked to teachers, I talked to people in the field, I talked to a bunch of people, and I had a really, really good time doing the project and it’s like, “This is fun!” You know?
Later in that year I got roped into working with a reproductive rights organization helping them with some technology planning. They’re still my client now,12 years later, it’s kind of funny. And I really had a good time doing that. So I’m thinking, “Hmmm…”
At the time being an academic was sort of… you know. I’m not somebody to do one thing for a very long time, as you’ve probably noticed by now, and academic politics — people wanted me to be a Dean – and yuck. And I’m, like, “I’m really enjoying this consulting work, this is fun, I can make a living at it! Let me do that.”
I’d gotten tenure at Hampshire, I got tenure in 95 and I could still be there, but I chose not to. My last semester at Hampshire was the spring of ’99 when I worked half time and formed a consulting firm, and I’ve been doing that, not consistently, ever since.
So I started working with nonprofits and to some extent schools, but that market dried up when the money from the state dried up, so it ended up being just nonprofits. At first I did everything from building web sites to pulling cable, but that was then (laughs). That was when people needed everything. I probably didn’t pull cable for more than a year and then I focused on web stuff. By 2000 I was just doing web stuff and nothing else: no hardware, just web.
I built web sites for people from then until 2005 in various different guises. I had a business partner early on, which didn’t work out, and then I went solo for a while, and then I joined a consulting firm in Boston. I didn’t move, but I worked with them for a couple of years.
LS:
Where were you living?
MM:
I was living in Amherst the whole time. I didn’t move.
What I did next isn’t going to make sense without another thread of the story, which has to do with my spiritual life. Up to now if I tell you, “Then I decided to go to seminary…”, you’d be like, “Seminary? Where did that come from?” (laughs)
I was raised a Presbyterian and actually got confirmed in the Presbyterian Church. It’s a process like Catholic First Communion and you take some classes and there’s a little ceremony. It’s when you’re about 13, 14. The Unitarians call it “Coming of Age,” it’s very common. Did that.
When I was 16 my best friend in high school started to go to this Nazarene Church, which is basically fundamentalist. There are all sorts of reasons why I got involved in it Part of it was that I was very much a seeker — and still am — a seeker of truth, of being able to know the divine, a seeker of understanding. At the time I was 16, I had a really crappy childhood, and I was pretty confused. I was an adolescent and I was going in a not very good direction in my life. I think it was a way for me to… because it’s very black and white: there is one truth, and it is the truth.
It was a way to understand the world because everything is explained from this one truth. That was really attractive to me, and also my peer group was involved, so I became a fundamentalist Christian, and I became Born Again. I did that for 4 years from 16 to 20 on Long Island, and then I joined a church in Bennington, Vermont, when I went to school.
The truth is I never really bought it. I sort of went along for the ride, but it did help me structure my life because it did feel like, “Well, here’s a set of things I should and shouldn’t do…” behaviorally, and that was helpful. And I also had an experience of understanding the divine in ways that I hadn’t before. That was important, and that was probably what kept me around for so long.
But in the end I couldn’t reconcile it. There were a couple of things, I began to realize I was a Lesbian… and that was not going to do very well. And I couldn’t reconcile that there were people that I knew, that I thought were great people, who were going to Hell because they didn’t believe what I believed. It’s like, “I don’t think so!” So I left.
For most of the 80’s, actually for all of the 80’s, I was sort of wandering but not lost. I dipped into Paganism for a while, and did the I Ching for a while. I explored various things. When I was at Hampshire in 1990 I did my first Vipassana Meditation retreat and that set me on a course of having a meditation practice, which I still have now.
LS:
Do you want to say what Vipassana is?
MM:
It’s part of the Thai Forest Buddhist tradition, which is what they do at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center. I started to go to dharma retreats and sit every day, and I still do that, but it’s morphed a bit since then. It was yet another level of awakening, getting in touch with what I was feeling, what was going on inside of me. It was a critical piece of the puzzle, critical to my life.
I did that for a while, I mean I still do, but then I was actively going to retreats. And then in 1999 I went to this really great performance given in Northampton (Massachusetts) by these Tibetan monks. They were doing this nationwide tour. It was one of those things where they show people Tibetan culture and that kind of stuff.
They were doing dharma combat. I don’t know if you know about dharma combat, it’s this very strange and odd tradition they have. It’s a very expressive way of arguing various different points of the teachings.
I’m sitting there, you know, and sort of enjoying it, but a part of me was totally not getting it. That was one of the things that was always true of my going on retreats, sitting and reading Buddhist philosophy: it would go in one ear and out the other, and it never stuck. At times the fundamentals of Buddhism would stick, and I would really “get it” as I sat. But when people told me, or I read it, it didn’t stick.
And that’s so weird for me because I’m a bookworm, that’s how I learn, right? I can read a book and when I’m done with the book I get it, I understand the book. But I would read a book on Buddhist philosophy and I wouldn’t get it, and I was like, “This is odd. I don’t understand this.”
So I was sitting there and I realized, “Oh, well this isn’t my culture. It isn’t my tradition. It isn’t what I was formed with.” Which sort of made me go back and think about Christianity, because that was what I was formed with, and that’s my culture. Around the same time I had read in a book by Thich Nhat Hanh who suggested that people go back to their own traditions. Not that they should leave Buddhism, but that they should explore and understand their own traditions.
At the time I wasn’t ready to delve back into the Christian Church, so I joined a Unitarian Universalist church in Northampton, the Unitarian Society of Northampton, and I went for about 4 years. In the course of going there, getting involved and being reacquainted, I found this calling. It’s funny, if you talked to me in 2005 I would have said that I felt my Call to Ministry.
LS:
What does that mean? Does it mean to be in a ministry or to minister?
MM:
Well, Call to Ministry means to be called to serve in some capacity. For some people they become chaplains, or they work in religious-based nonprofits, or whatever. Some people actually become pastors or ministers. In retrospect, the call was about a desire to reorient my life around the things that were the most import to me.
LS:
How old were you at this time?
MM:
I was about 44 or 45. It’s classic, on some level. So I applied to the divinity schools and decided I was going to go into Seminary. I ended up choosing Pacific School of Religion, which is in Berkeley (California).
LS:
Was this an internet school, so that you could stay in Amherst?
MM:
No, I moved. I moved to Berkeley, to go to school.
I sold all my stuff; that was fun. I’d recommend that to anyone: just sell all your stuff. Everything I owned could fit in my car. It was very liberating.
By the end of the first year I realized that — well there were a couple of things I realized — I realized that I didn’t need a professional change in order to restructure my life around what was most important for me. That I could do that and still be a householder, and still be a non-clergy person. I also realized that being in the clergy was not the right role for me.
Going to seminary for a year and a half was one of the most important things that I ever did in my life. I have absolutely no regrets about it, even though it didn’t end in a way that most people might think was a success.
The other sidebar is that in Berkeley, in the Spring 2006, I met my current partner.
When I left seminary I was just going to stay in the Bay Area, but she wanted to live somewhere quieter, so we went back to Western Mass. for a year. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, so I applied for some nonprofit executive director jobs, but I decided that I really liked what I had been doing before so I went back to doing consulting; not the same thing exactly but sort of reformulated and reformed. In January of 2008 she moved back to Oakland and I followed in August. So now I live in Oakland.
LS:
What does she do?
MM:
She is a poet and a therapist. She teaches poetry as well as teaches… she’s actually a shaman, so she teaches shamanism courses, shamanistic journeying, and she sees clients and stuff.
I have a new business partner: Thomas Grodin. We have a new business called OpenIssue, LLC. Still working with nonprofits doing technology stuff, building web sites.
LS:
Have you found your niche? Or is this a sort of a springboard to go other places?
MM:
I’ve found my niche, I would say. I mean, we’ve found our niche as a company and I’m really comfortable within the company, working with him and with a bunch of subcontractors. I’m really enjoying it, and it’s nice to be within an organization.
We have synergistic skills, and a pretty unusual skill set for the kind of work that we do. We’re both able to speak technology, and do technology, as well as speak English with clients in a way that they understand. That’s relatively unusual.
We are both thinking that this is not the last thing that we’re going to be doing in our lives. He’s actually 10 years younger than I am, he’s 40, and he wants to go to grad school at some point. So this is not a permanent “we’ll-be-doing-this-forever” kind of thing. It’s a moment in time and we’re going to concentrate on getting some interesting things to happen, and then we’ll think about what’s next.
LS:
It sounds like you still have quite a few loose ends, although I’m not sure you ever tie loose ends up.
MM:
No, never do.
LS:
The spiritual things is on one track, and the business is on another track, and the academics are on another track, and the relationship… well it sounds like it’s stable but they tend to evolve too.
MM:
Yeah. Oh yeah, my relationship is definitely evolving. I’ve always thought of what I do as very much education. I think of myself as an educator in the disguise of the technology consultant. I’ve always felt that.
Academia in itself, I mean, I’m done. I had a pretty good 10 years, but it’s just not an atmosphere that nurtures me. And the spiritual stuff is… I actually belong to a church now — which I’m very heavily involved with — called The First Congregational Church of Oakland. It’s a very diverse, very progressive, very interesting place and I’m feeling called to be fully involved in it, and lend whatever energy and presence I can. That’s very much my home right now.
Life for me is… yeah, it’s always… I don’t stand still very well. Although it’s funny because I stand still very well in a moment. I can be fully committed to a task for a pretty good period of time, or to a project. I can really be focused in that way.
My mother used to tell me this story, it’s a really funny story because it’s so emblematic of how they are and how I’m not. They were at some party and there was this older guy playing the trumpet really well, this younger guy was looking at him in awe and said, “How did you learn to play the trumpet so well?” Because he wasn’t like a professional musician, right? And the guy said, “Well, I play every day.” And the younger guy asked, “Where do you get time to do that?” And he said, “Well, I worked my whole life and now I’m retired and I play every day.”
And this story, from my own perspective, was what you’re supposed to do: you work hard at what you don’t really like very much, and then later you get time to play. I never lived my life that way, and I could never imagine doing it.
I’ve always lived my life… I mean the decision to go to Grad School… it was fine. I’m glad I did it because getting a Ph.D. was a really good thing in the end for me, but that was the last decision I made that was not, “Let me do what I enjoy. Let me do what makes sense for me. Let me do what I feel fulfilled in.” And that’s always been the way I’ve been.
So long as this work is fulfilling to me, and I’m enjoying it, I’ll do it. And when it isn’t anymore then — which might happen in 10 years, who knows — it’ll be time to do something else, and who knows what that’ll be.
LS:
Your story has some discrepancies. To use a neurological metaphor, there are some big holes that you don’t see because they fade into the background.
MM:
Well tell me. I want to know.
LS:
Where’s the uncertainty? Where’s the struggle, and the strife, and the failure, and the...
MM:
Oh! (laughs) We haven’t talked about that.
LS:
It sounds like a Walt Disney life; you went from one success to another. I have a picture of a character jumping from one stone to another across a lake of flaming lava, getting to the other side unscathed. Most of us fall in the lava…
MM:
That’s fascinating!
LS:
… or we struggle and sweat for a long time, but you didn’t speak it.
MM:
That’s a fascinating perspective. I didn’t speak it.
Well. There’s been a lot of struggle and strife, for sure. I’ll tell you a little bit about my childhood, which was a real time of struggle and strife for me. Much of my adult life has been a process of healing from that time.
I was in therapy for 8 years, actually more than that, for all the time that I was in Hampshire. I think part of the reason that you don’t hear it is because I don’t know you that well, and this is for a book, so am I going to let go of all that stuff in gory detail?
LS:
Well, the reason it’s important is because it’s the problem that people have. No one has trouble when the going is good, that’s when we just coast along. It’s the bad stuff that is the mystery.
MM:
Yeah, sure. I would say that for me the hardest moments, I mean aside from my childhood, the hardest moments in my life, the biggest disappointment, or one of the biggest moments of, like, “What am I going to do?” was when I was in Colorado. I hated my job the minute I understood what was going on.
It’s funny, this friend of mine who had worked in the lab before, who I knew from when I was in Grad school, said, “Don’t work there.” (laughs) But I was enamored with the idea of working for someone who was so well known. The experience was very disheartening, and I didn’t do very well as a scientist in that setting. I was very not happy in the context of that job.
At the time I came really close to leaving science altogether because I didn’t feel like I fit, I didn’t feel like I could find a way that made sense to me. A lot of women in science have a really hard time being a woman in science. I actually never really felt as a woman, or as an African American woman… I never felt like I wasn’t taken seriously. That was really fortunate.
When I got to Colorado it was a really different atmosphere. I felt I wasn’t taken seriously as a woman in the lab. And the guy I worked for, his most favorite form of conversation was argument. There would be these heated arguments about scientific findings. That was really hard for me, I mean it’s like, ‘Why argue about this? There is no point.”
In some ways you could say that landing in Hampshire was jumping across the lava, and it kind of was: making the decision to teach at a small college versus going to a university. I chose the right one.
Had I ended up at any one of those other places I would have been much more pigeon-holed in terms of what I could have taught and researched, and I probably would have left a lot sooner. So Hampshire was very serendipitous… or not — I don’t know what you think about coincidence, or serendipity, or whatever — but it was the right thing for me at the time.
LS:
I get the feeling that you’re careful about your decisions. You haven’t talked much about the struggle that goes into your decisions, but it seems that you’ve made the right choices. Even in going to Colorado, the way you described it was a set up for what you learned: you thought that the guy was going to be good because he was famous, and you learned one of the ultimate lessons of science, which is that it’s a social pursuit.
MM:
Yeah, I guess that’s true.
I don’t know about careful, it’s an interesting question. I think I am so led by what feels like it will be fun. I felt like Hampshire would be fun: like it would be a fun place to teach.
LS:
Just to be practical, how did you assemble the information you needed?
MM:
You mean to go to Hampshire?
LS:
Not just Hampshire, but to make any decision at all. Do you get involved with the situation, do you get involved with the people? Are you intuitive, do you research things?
MM:
I’m pretty intuitive, I think. I do a lot of research. It’s a combination.
Like when I decided to become a consultant: that was a long and extended process of reading a gazillion books. I read, like, 5 or 6 books about going into business for yourself and being a consultant and stuff. In fact I got to the point where I said, “I can’t do this!” You know they have these stupid quizzes in the beginning, like “What kind of personality do you need to be going into business for yourself.” And of course I didn’t fit any of them, right? So, it was like, “Forget it, I can’t do this.”
But then, there’s this book I found called “The Consultant’s Calling,” and it’s this amazingly wonderful book, if you ever come across it. It’s a book about… do you know the quote by Frederick Buechner: “A vocation is where the world’s great need and your great gladness meet.” It doesn’t use that quote, but the book is very much like that quote. Consulting as a way to meet people’s needs, a way to educate people, and a way to have a balanced life. And I was like, “I can do that.” That book changed my mind. It made me realize that I could do consulting. It took me a year to make that decision. I talked to people. It was a very considered decision.
The decision to teach at a college instead of going for university position was more of a fall back. I spent two months thinking I would leave science altogether and then I was, like, “What am I going to do?” Yeah, I had this Ph.D. in neuroscience but what am I going to do? Am I going to bus tables?
There were a lot of things I could have done but I didn’t really know enough. I was in Colorado and I didn’t know about Silicon Valley. I talked to this woman that I’d gotten to know who was head of the Woman’s Studies at Colorado State. I was talking to her about my dilemma and she said, “Why don’t you think about this…” and she told me about Science Magazine that had lots of ads for positions. There were a bunch of positions at small colleges, and I thought, “Wow, I should try these out.” And that was how it happened.
My decision to go to seminary was very much an intuitive decision. I talked to a few people. A good friend of mine said, “What took you so long?” I thought that was funny. So that was more intuitive.
A lot of it has been fortuitous, but a lot of it has been following my heart, following what I feel I will enjoy, and that seems to have gotten me to the right place. It’s interesting, I’m just thinking about the thing that you mentioned about the holes, and about the struggle. I feel like in many ways… you know, all that stuff got sort of front loaded in my childhood.
LS:
What do you mean by “front loaded?”
MM:
I guess I learned a lot about the realities of the world, about the pain of the world, when I was very young. And I think that… I don’t know, somehow I learned enough that the directions I’ve chosen to move in have aligned with what works.
I don’t know how to describe what I’m saying but, um… I mean I’ve had small failures, like the business that I first started when I left Hampshire. I had a business partner and we didn’t work well together, and that was a little difficult to figure out what to do with. But at each little failure I learned enough not to make bigger ones. I don’t know. Maybe they’re still to come! (laughs) That could be, you know.
LS:
That could be. I guess that depends on where you’re going. Where do you think you’re going?
MM:
I have no idea. You know, I’m doing this work for the foreseeable future, but I know it’s not the only one. I literally have no idea.
One of my other side things that I do — but I can’t imagine this becoming a full-time thing, but who knows — is I write science fiction. I started writing in 2006. I have two novels that are pretty much done and a third that is all fleshed out but I haven’t written it. I haven’t had that much time to write.
LS:
Did this displace poetry?
MM:
Not really, because I stopped writing poetry regularly almost 10 years ago.
LS:
This is my last question. If you were talking to a kid, someone who is like you were when you were 14, assuming that you harbored indecisions and self-doubt when you were 14, which you haven’t talked about…
MM:
Oh, I still harbor indecisions and self-doubt!
LS:
… how would you advise that person to overcome, get through, or prevail in the face of those kinds of obstacles.
MM:
I think what I would say… two things come to mind. I would say, first, find a way to learn to love yourself, which I think I haven’t gotten to yet. And second, find a way to love what you do. Or find to do what you love, which is a better way to say it.
I think if there’s one thing that I would do differently — I don’t know if this would really change my decisions, but I think it’s one of the threads that really took me a long time, and as I said I’m still working on this — it’s to really love who I am. And I think that I didn’t always appreciate who I was.
Without that appreciation or that understanding… I don’t know… it’s just that there are directions that you might go in if you understand and really love who you are. There are things that you’ll give yourself if you do, and that you won’t give yourself if you don’t. And there are ways that you’ll take yourself seriously and… and… I don’t want to say “ignore” but not take as seriously what other people have to say — which may or may not be true — about who you are.
Although in some ways you might say that I jumped from stone to stone across the lava, if I had taken these two things to heart when I started, then I would be in a different place now. I would have taken a totally different path. I can’t say what that path would be, but I don’t think that it’s the path that I took.
LS:
That opens the whole thing up for your future.
MM:
Oh yeah, it does, definitely.
