Livre d'Or

So, I think I have a bit of sympathy with MK's viewpoint but I think that's because, when you've known someone a long time, sometimes your view of them can be a bit stuck in the past. I still think of you as the exceptionally clever girl from school who was so clever that, even in a school full of clever girls, teachers openly talked about her as probably the most brilliant kid they would ever teach. I always had as a background assumption in my head that you would have a brilliant academic career and it's really hard to change that view. So, I do emotionally react to some of your posts like this one and think "really? surely this is just a mid-life crisis? Of COURSE, Liv really wants to be a scientist."

And I also have some of the gender issues going on in my head - when I was at school, I genuinely thought that the girls around me could and would have exceptional careers and break the glass ceiling and all that stuff. So, it's depressing to see that so many women our age dropping out of what are seen to be "high powered" careers and doing more support roles/caring for family roles.

But I don't know that all of that is fair to put on an individual basis - I think you can think that these are genuine societal problems but you're not a society, you're a person and you should do what makes you happy. But, of course, figuring out what that is is really hard.

I think I agree with someone else who said that perhaps posing yourself hypotheticals would help you to figure some of this out. E.g. it might be worth thinking about whether you would have been keen on the Cambridge college job if it had been in Oxford?

I think my take in the end, for what it's worth, is that you are clearly unhappy in this role and that needs to change but I don't, in all honesty, think that you would ultimately be all that happy in an unsatisfying job in Cambridge either - I think you need to find a satisfying job in/near Cambridge. I wonder if science education/outreach might be an avenue to explore? I think, for instance, you'd be amazing at a role that involved explaining science clearly to children or adults.