Shira: After we had been together for a year, we moved across the country for me to pursue my PhD at the University of South Florida. Not even a semester into the PhD program, I discovered that a research career was not for me and decided to transfer to a Master’s level graduate program. Leaving the PhD program was one of the hardest things I have ever done – I knew that I would be disappointing many people and failing to fulfill expectations of me.
Andy stuck by me through all of it. He was a huge source of support to me and helped me see that my worth was not dependent on my educational background/status/career prestige. It was then that I realized that I mattered to him because of who I was, not my accomplishments or resume. He truly wanted me to be happy – not merely impressive.
In a society that tells us that people’s worth is dictated by their wealth, productivity, and career prestige, I found Andy’s wholehearted acceptance of my choice to be pretty damn radical. This is when I realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.
Andy: There came a point where Shira and I had been having a rough time, fighting and arguing off and on for weeks. I didn’t know from one minute to the next if we were on the edge of a breakthrough or breaking up. But then, one day while driving to the grocery store, the song “Uncharted,” by Sara Bareilles, came up in some shuffled playlist. I found myself weeping openly in traffic, barely able to keep my car in my lane. I pulled over and called Shira, and asked her to pull up the following lyrics from the song:
I’m going down,
Follow if you want, I won’t just hang around,
Like you’ll show me where to go,
I’m already out of foolproof ideas, so don’t ask me how
To get started, it’s all uncharted…
I won’t go as a passenger, no
Waiting for the road to be laid
Though I may be going down,
I’m taking flame over burning out
In these words and that moment, everything I had been feeling, all of the self-doubt and fear and isolation, was transmuted into a kind of shared suffering. Hearing someone else express the same pain I (we?) had been feeling made it so much less personal and, for me at least, bridged the chasm that had been growing between us and transformed the experience into one of solidarity instead of conflict. There’s no good answer, there’s no magic bullet, the song said. But take my hand anyways, follow me if you want to, I’m not just going to let this burn out. In that moment, I knew that we could make it through this. But more than that, I knew we could make it through just about anything.