Starting to Do Things

I don't know how to write a statement of research interests and goals. I should probably contact people from the specific schools to which I am applying because I have no idea if I am doing this the right way. I just needed to do something, and I think writing this has allowed me to step back and figure out why I want to do what I want to do and why it makes sense for me to go for this degree. Technically, it would be in Kinesiology, but some schools don't have programs in that, and everything would fall under the Neuroscience heading. Anyway, I started writing the story of how I got to this point and how my interest in research has been somewhat rekindled. I'm not sure if there needs to be more or less of anything, but I like it. I'm sure it will change, but I don't know where I need to go from here with it.
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I began my journey into the healthcare field without much of a thought. Everyone always assumed that I would become a doctor, and I did too. I was smart, and I had a passion for science and helping people, and that was enough for me at the time. Everything was going fine. But then the questions came. But these weren’t questions about the career I wanted to pursue. They were questions about my core identity as a person. Suddenly, all of my plans for the perfect future began to unravel.
In my medical school personal statement, I made a remark that sent up a red flag to my advisor: I said I didn’t want to fix people. I want to be able to give people the tools to claim agency in their own lives—to take control of their health with their own hands as I had done. A few more conversations and dozens of pages of introspective journaling helped me discover that medical school wasn’t going to be right for me, at least at that point in my life.
My original goal was to take a year off from school, save some money, evaluate what I wanted to do, and then go on my way about being an adult with a fancy degree, etc. But the job never came, and the more options I discovered for my future, the more paralyzed I became. I was frozen. My circumstances, combined with constant worries about my dwindling finances and personal relationships, eventually disrupted my ability to function entirely. I spent four days in a psychiatric ward under constant supervision, and there was no great epiphany when I left. I felt better, but things were terrible, and they continued to be terrible. A month or so after losing my job, I lost my home. After six years of independence and building a life and a community for myself, I left Pittsburgh with nothing but a few garbage bags worth of clothes and the random trinkets I had amassed from college. I moved back home with my parents, into the same bedroom I swore I would never inhabit again six years earlier. I took a look at the college degrees that had come in the mail. I had never seen them in person until that point. I wanted to burn them.
Every week or so, I would have a new idea about what I wanted to do with my life. But each time, I would find dozens of reasons that I would fail, whether it be my Asperger’s or this or that limitation I have in my background. But my not-so-glorious revelation came to me in little spurts, over the course of the months I spent getting to know my family and my hometown all over again.
I realized that through all the turmoil, two things had remained constant, though the depression played a significant role in delaying this realization: my passion for the science of the human brain and my obsession with physical activity and movement. When nothing else mattered or made sense, science was still beautiful. When I could not force myself to speak to another soul or look my own boyfriend in the eye, I could take my body to the gym and lose myself in the rhythm of my workout. I did not see it at the time, but these are the things that have given my life meaning ever since I can remember. I defined my college days by my involvement in drumline—the study of music through moving and feeling in perfect synchrony with my peers. And my fondest and most vivid memories from childhood are of playing sports, climbing walls, and just moving my body—pushing it—as far as I could.
In January, I met a man who helped me discover the impact that my experiences have had on my own thinking. I began writing articles on mind-body fitness, among other things, for Moodtraining.com immediately after returning from my stay at Resolve Crisis Center. My own writing about the brain’s ability to influence the body, positive psychology, meditation, and even my pieces on the basic biology of exercise and the human brain acted as the first bit of therapy. The words I found to relate these ideas to others helped me to see how much I believed in them myself—how much I needed to believe in them in order to keep living.
When I lost my home, I felt like I had lost everything. And it took until what most would consider a short time ago for me to pick up where I had left off. My mother, down nearly 150 pounds from her heaviest weight only two years ago, has learned to embrace the challenge of exercise in precisely the same way as I have, and it moved me to tears when I started joining her in her own exercise routine. We work together, challenge each other, and my experiences with my first individual trainer have been absolutely inspiring. And when I am inspired, the nerd in me rejoices and cannot be tamed.
I began to think further about the ideas I had been developing with Moodtraining.com. What if we were able to design a personalized exercise program that used data from the client’s own functioning brain? Obviously, this would be an expensive approach, but more realistic research questions and practical applications can definitely be drawn from the initial question. If we knew more about how the human brain responds to exercise in the long term and the short term, we could develop more effective training programs that not only target the muscles of the body but help to enhance the function of the brain as well, creating a positive-feedback loop. The impact of exercise on mood, longevity, and life satisfaction is well-known, but unlocking the minute details of how we attain these results will be the key to unlocking many more mysteries of brain function, perhaps the most promising of which are adult neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. My specific interest is in learning about how the various mental, physical, and social components of human physical activity influence brain function over time in normal versus diseased populations, emphasizing the role of exercise in inducing neurogenesis. I am also interested in the neurological basis of health behaviors, and whether certain neural profiles are more likely to result in a physically active lifestyle. Exercise has been a release for me for as long as I can remember, and I have long believed that the symptoms of my Asperger’s syndrome are much more manageable because of my active lifestyle. Exercise is about coordination, concentration, completing specific tasks, and in many cases, becoming a part of a group and learning the social rules that go along with membership in that group. It would be fascinating to take a look at how the brain of an AS person responds to physical activity in comparison to that of a neurotypical individual. Research into this area might unlock more about the mystery of autism as well as provide valuable data to inform future treatment plans that include exercise therapy as a physical and social aid.
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