When you can’t see the forest for the trees

I am writing this inside a train heading toward Rostock, reflecting on my decision to move to Germany and pursue a PhD six months ago.

During my interview in October, I had a list of things to say when my prospective supervisors at Max Planck and St Andrews asked me why I wanted to pursue a PhD: that only a handful study Demography in the Philippines; that I wanted to pursue a career in academia; that after some time I would want to come home and help answer many great, pressing research questions in my country.

All of it was true. But what I didn’t tell them was that I wanted an escape. Just a few months before that interview, many of us — mostly young people — found hope in an opposition leader, after six years of nothing but anger, pain, and death in my country. We campaigned for her presidential run. We joined street rallies. We dreamt of serving in the government. We found a reason to stay.

But the system was stacked against us, as we had always known. In the end, the son and daughter of two dictators won by a historic landslide, leaving the government opposition the thinnest it has ever been. It meant that the policy of killing innocent lives and rampant corruption would continue. It meant emboldened attacks against activists, scholars, and ordinary individuals alike. It meant the crushing death of our hope.

And then I found a way out.

Having little to no idea of what happens during a PhD, I passed the interview and got accepted into the 3.5-year program. On the night I had to leave for Germany, I packed as much as I could in a small suitcase, including only two jackets to help me stand Rostock’s harsh January winter. At the airport, my mom held back her tears as she said goodbye to the second member of our family who had to leave the country.

There are many things I have learned since coming here. I have finally learned how to cook. I have learned some German words that I could never quite assemble into a coherent sentence. I have learned that Germans are nicer than thought by most people, even the Germans themselves. I have learned that there are more things that bind than divide people from different cultures.

But there are also things that I did not prepare myself to learn.

For one, it took me quite a while to gather enough self-esteem back when I was working in the Philippines, only for my entire PhD experience to tear it apart. It is inevitable that one would experience imposter syndrome when surrounded by the best people in the field, but it is much worse for someone like me who comes from some little-known country in the Asia-Pacific, who miserably fails at initiating and keeping short talks in the hallways or during lunchtime, and who has always suffered from an anxiety disorder.

In the last few months that I have been here, I have also imagined what life must have been like for my father, who was working overseas while we were growing up. On colder days, the loneliness is crippling. On better days, you walk around and think about the privilege your family left behind doesn’t enjoy. On most days, you force yourself to go on and save just enough to perhaps finally come home.

The truth is, I am somewhat lost these days. Lost in the details of the work that I do. Lost in hundreds of statistical models that I have been running and analyzing in the past few months. Lost in occasional feelings of hope and longing.

The Germans have a nice idiom for this: Ich seh den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht (I can’t see the forest for the trees).

But maybe the point of all of this is to be lost in the woods, touch the grass, and see how the forest transforms with the changing season. Maybe the whole forest is more than what one can see from above.