Revise; Resubmit

Way back in 2004 I picked up and moved from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Milan, Italy. I went there because I was young, not to mention naive, and I wanted to see the world and challenge myself to learn a new language and explore a different culture. Officially however, I was going there to study and get my PhD. Of course, there was nothing stopping me from pursuing that goal in the US, but after living in the dead center of a continent for so long, immersed in a vast expanse of flat prairies, miles and miles from any ocean or mountain range, I was dying to get away, and the farther, the better.

A person learns a lot of things on their way to earn a PhD. For example, you learn that you can spend hours planning and analyzing and writing up your work for publication, thinking that you've overlooked nothing, only to have a group of anonymous reviewers tell you (in a best-case scenario) to reanalyze your results in a different way and to rework your conclusions acknowledging a different theoretical approach. And sometimes different reviewers will want such entirely different things from you, that the only thing you can do is strip your work back to the basics, focus on the strengths, and revise from there before resubmitting your manuscript for a second round of scrutiny.

A few months ago, I felt like I had been dealt a revise; resubmit recommendation with my life. I planned and I analyzed and I worked hard, but sometimes life, like our data, doesn't turn out the way we hypothesized. And when that happens, everybody seems to have a reviewer's opinion, telling you to take this and that and your grandmother's dog into consideration before you make your next plans. In the end though, there are no editors or reviewers who need to be happy with my life... there's just me. So, I did what I've learned is best in these situations. I stripped things down to the basics by asking a few simple questions. What are my strengths and what makes me happy? What are my weaknesses and what causes me unnecessary anxiety? On which parts of my life do I want to focus? What things could I gladly do without in my life and what do I need to keep? What skills have I acquired to help me focus on the good things and eliminate or improve the negative aspects of my life?

And so, after three years of living and working in Belgium, and seven years and one month after receiving my first immigration stamp, I'm headed back to Italy. Older and wiser now than ever, this time around I'm determined to make things work. Knowing Italy as well as I do, I'm prepared for the fact that this move definitely won't come without a few challenges. But no risk worth taking ever does, right?

I know this is just the first of many revisions in my life. I've been known to be a critical reviewer, so I'm sure I'll have lots of changes to make as I proceed, but as long as I keep the basics in mind, I'm confident I can turn my life into something I'll be happy submitting, to myself of course, for another round of reviews.