“Oh yeah? Watch me.”

The unacknowledged inspiration sometimes known as spite

One of the least talked about secrets to finishing may be spite.

A friend of mine once teamed up with a colleague to be check-in partners for each other on their book-length writing projects. They agreed to make weekly progress reports to each other until they were done. They both ultimately finished their projects, so in that sense they were solid accountability partners for each other. But it wasn’t all rainbows, classic cheerleading, and encouragement.

My friend, who I’ll call Kim, remembers a beach vacation she took with her family. Despite the holiday, she told her writing partner (let’s call him Josh), that she still planned to work while away, with goal of moving from research to writing mode. When she returned, Kim told him how the week had gone. Josh listened and said, “I’m just going to put it out there,” using the eight words that guarantee you’re about to hear something unpleasant. “You went to the beach, you read … ok. But where are the pages? The idea that you’re finishing in the next year is complete fantasy.”

There and then, silently to herself, Kim decided to prove Josh wrong. “I was enraged at him,” she recalls. Josh himself was about to go on a trip. “When he comes back,” she vowed, “I’m going to be throwing down.” And throw pages down she did.

“The writing started in spite but the momentum kept going.” Four months later, Kim had finished. “He was stunned,” she remembers. Kim never mentioned to him the spite-infused inspiration he’d given her to power forward.

Katherine also has a story to tell of how, the path of proving someone — or in her case, something — wrong becomes its own beacon.

“When I left the military, I wanted to study how the brain works in space — about the way that astronaut brains change going from G environments to microgravity. And then I thought, well, we still don’t understand how the brain works on earth, I’ll help figure out how the brain works on earth.

To get experience while applying to a neuroscience PHD program, I got a job working at a lab connected to the department. Then I got rejected from the program.

The reason I was told is because engineers historically had not done well in the neuroscience program. So they just didn’t admit engineers. That was really disappointing.

Being told that stereotypically, my general field didn’t do well in a particular program, I was like, oh yeah? Watch me.

So I applied to do a PhD in an electrical engineering department and I got in. I wasn’t in the neuroscience department, but I ended up doing brain research anyway.

In graduate school, there were some really dark days of: why am I doing this? Why am I here? But then I’d say to myself, no, no, you have to finish so that you can give a middle finger to that other department where they thought that you weren’t PhD material.

I think a healthy amount of spite is very good. A lot of it at first was channeled toward the neuroscience department, but turned into a “screw you” to the system in general because the system wasn’t built for people like me and like many of the other women in particular, the very few underrepresented minority students who I saw in the department.

Have you read N.K. Jemison’s new book, The City We Became? The way that she talks about some of the monsters in it, their white tendrils and the way they take over buildings. That’s actually a great way to picture how I think of a lot of institutions — white tentacled monsters and all sorts of weirdness happening.”