There’s a specific kind of freedom that comes with being completely unknown somewhere, alone, and not as a tourist (well, sort of, but not entirely). No social obligations, no history, no one who knew you before. You can reinvent yourself, in theory. In practice, what mostly happens is that you eat the same 3 meals on rotation and develop strong opinions about which supermarket has the better Quarkbällchen.
Caption_row
A walk after work
pspspspspsss
So: Göttingen, Germany. March to July 2025, more or less. A small university city in Lower Saxony that I had never heard of before I started searching for a researcher working on gravity waves on other planets for my internship. I ended up modelling hydrogen escape from Mars, which I’ve written about elsewhere. This post is about the other part of the story.
Caption_right
Gänseliesel (“Goose Girl”)
Göttingen is a beautiful, quiet university town. It has a famous tradition: students who pass their doctorate are dragged to the market square and kiss the cheek of a bronze goose-girl fountain. There are plaques for Nobel laureates everywhere, because an absurd number of them passed through. There’s even Carl Friedrich Gauss’s grave. The cafes are good. The transit works. The town is pretty much in the centre of Germany so it’s quite convenient to travel in any direction. Apparently it snowed in February in a way that was genuinely pretty before becoming genuinely inconvenient (coming from the tropics, I actually don’t mind…).
I went there knowing no one, which I thought I was fine with. I am, after all, an introvert. I like being alone. And for a while that was true. The first few weeks have a honeymoon quality, everything is new, even a grocery run is a small adventure in a foreign language.
But solitude and isolation are different things, and I came to understand the difference that semester more clearly than I had before. Solitude is what you choose. Isolation is what accumulates when you realize you haven’t had a real conversation in longer than you’d like to admit. There were people to have lunch with, to chat to in the corridor, to share a coffee with after seminars, but no one to call when you didn’t feel like going home to an empty room. I was just sitting in my little studio eating fried eggs with Buldak hot sauce over pasta (an insult to at least two cuisines at once, maybe three on average because I alternate between pasta and udon) when the feeling suddenly hit me like a delayed bus.
Caption_left
Somewhere in Hamburg
I went to Hamburg alone and liked it. I got stranded near Schlüchtern alone and liked it less. I planned a whole trip to Berlin on a Saturday, stayed up too late the night before, and missed my train. I sat with the missed departure time on my phone for a while and noticed I wasn’t particularly devastated, and then I wasn’t sure if that was equanimity or just the gradual blunting of wanting things. In the end, I never made it to Berlin. It was fine.
What I learned, or started to learn, is that I am more social than I had accounted for. This was genuinely surprising to me. I had always understood myself as someone who finds people draining, who needs significant alone time to function, who prefers a quiet room to a crowded one. All of that is still true. But there is a version of aloneness that is chosen and energizing, and a version that is circumstantial and quietly corrosive, and I had only really experienced the first kind before.
I guess it’s the kind of thing that’s hard to know about yourself until the conditions force it.
The science was going well, by the way. My supervisor was kind and brilliant and treated me like a real researcher, which was a new experience and one I didn’t fully appreciate until I later heard about other people’s supervisors. The work was interesting, like genuinely interesting, not interesting-because-I-have-to-make-it-interesting. I was writing actual Fortran (extremely unglamorous, I know) and running simulations on Mars and going to seminars about plasma environments and arguing with papers about exobase temperatures. 18-year-old me would have been absolutely unhinged with excitement about this.
Toward the end, a senior researcher at the institute offered me a PhD position. I thought about it for a long time. And then I said no.
Part of the reason was academic. The project was interesting, but it just did not align perfectly with my actual research passions. But the bigger reason was entirely personal. The people at the institute were genuinely warm, my supervisor especially, and the PhD students were kind. And yet I simply could not picture myself spending 3 more years there. It just… didn’t click. Research is not sufficient by itself. I need other things too, including people, including some sense of belonging to a place, and I had learned that there is a difference between being around people and actually having them. That’s not a small consideration.
If I do a PhD, and I still want to, I think it needs to be somewhere where I have some foothold. France, where I’ve built friendships. Or an English-speaking country, where I’d at least have the language as a bridge. Vietnam would obviously be the easiest place for deep connections, but returning home would mean giving up the planetary science dream entirely. I’m aware that my options are constrained, very unnecessarily constrained. Why don’t all humans have the same degree of freedom to travel and dream? I’m not okay with that, but I’ve accepted that meaningful change is going to take a long time.
Caption_left
Great place to have a crisis by the way.
The time spent musing like that has definitely clarified some things I’d been vaguely aware of but hadn’t looked at directly. The visa paperwork that treats you as a suspect until proven otherwise (got me thinking about the concept of geographical luck a lot more often than before), the cost of living in cities on a stipend that wasn’t designed to cover it, the exhaustion of navigating institutions that weren’t built with people like you in mind, and the racial slurs (“fuck you China girl”) thrown at you on a busy Parisian street in broad daylight. There’s also the guilt that eats you up every time you go back home and notice your parents have aged another year.
I’m not sure what to do with most of it. Some of it is systemic and I can’t fix it. Some of it I can navigate more wisely now that I know the terrain. Some of it I just have to carry.
Sometimes I feel really, really desperate for a global revolution because what the hell is this system.
But well, right now I’m still here, still doing the research, still excited about planets. And the paper we worked on that semester is currently under review at a journal. At least some things are moving forward :)
The technical side of what I was doing that semester is in How Mars loses its water, if you’re curious about the Mars part.
On a side note, writing this makes me feel a little nostalgic for Göttingen. Funny how that works!