A Mission To Heal Academia, Even If Just A Little

I’ve never been the best writer. I’ve always struggled with it at school. It’s kind of ironic that my work now, as a scientist, depends so much on writing. Maybe that’s why I found refuge in spoken words, in podcasts. It’s how I communicate best.

Still, I wanted to share this piece because it captures something essential about my path—this ongoing mission to understand suffering, to give it meaning through service, and to make sense of what I’ve lived. I used ChatGPT to organize my thoughts, and though some passages came out more polished than I’d write on my own, the core of it is mine.

---

Suffering has been with me for as long as I can remember. When I was nine, my father died in a catastrophic way that changed my life forever. It left a wound that took years to begin to understand. Since then, pain has been a quiet undertone in everything I do.

Over time, I’ve learned to live with it—not as an enemy or something to defeat, but as a teacher. Pain is a mirror that shows me when I’ve drifted too far from what feels true. I don’t believe suffering is noble or fair, but when faced honestly, it can lead to clarity—and sometimes, purpose.

Years later, in academia, I found a different kind of suffering. Quieter, but just as real. I’ve seen people with extraordinary minds collapse under pressure, hiding exhaustion behind polite smiles. Burnout isn’t rare in academia; it’s routine. The system seems designed to stretch people to their limits, while calling them students to justify poor pay and endless expectations.

It’s strange: academia attracts those who love knowledge, yet it often rewards productivity over understanding. You can devote yourself to truth and still be told you’re not doing enough.

I’ve seen rigor slip into cruelty, ambition into exploitation. Some mentors push their students until they break, convinced it’s the path to excellence. Whiplash wasn’t wrong about that dynamic. I’ve witnessed it more times than I can count.

But I’ve also had the privilege of working with exceptional mentors—people who cared deeply, who challenged me without crushing me. They reminded me that kindness and intellectual rigor can coexist. I’m endlessly grateful for them. Many others, however, never meet that kind of support. For them, the system is merciless.

For international students, the weight doubles. You live between worlds, never fully at home in either. You watch your family grow older through screens, miss weddings and funerals, and lose the texture of everyday life back home. You’re held to the same standards as those surrounded by family and stability, but with half the safety net.

I’ve seen international students spend years without returning home because visas made it impossible. They endure isolation that few understand. Academia calls it resilience. I call it survival.

Maybe this cruelty begins higher up. Professors, too, live under pressure—grants, tenure, metrics. When the system demands constant output, empathy erodes. Mentorship turns transactional. And still, somehow, we call it the pursuit of truth.

Over the years, I’ve watched brilliant people lose themselves. Some left academia entirely. Others stayed and hollowed out. They entered the field for curiosity, not competition. But the machine doesn’t care. It runs on exhaustion.

I used to think bad professors belonged in a special place in hell. But now I see the pattern. They were shaped by the same cruelty they inflict. It doesn’t excuse it, but it explains how it continues. People repeat what they’ve known.

At some point, I realized I couldn’t just condemn the system. I had to look inward. Every frustration I had with academia mirrored something within me—my own wounds, my own fears. The outer world reflects the inner one.

So I began to dig. Into my habits, my pain, my reactions. And beneath it all, I found something unexpected: tenderness. A quiet, unshakable sense that this, too, is part of the path.

Truth has always been my compass. It’s what drew me to science, to philosophy, to logic itself. I like to see myself as a an adventurer of Truth. Sailers navigate the sea in search of gold. I navigate life in serach of Truth. The irony is that I don’t know what Truth really is—maybe it’s not something to find, but something to align with.

Each of us carries our own version of truth, shaped by experience, trauma, love, and fear. And not just our own life, but those of our ancestors. Their struggles live in us, encoded in stories and DNA. To understand someone’s truth, you must understand the lineage that shaped it.

When I burned out, it wasn’t a transformation—it was a revelation. It didn’t destroy me; it exposed me. It forced me to hear what my body and psyche had been shouting: We went too far from our truth. Burnout isn’t failure; it’s feedback. A signal that something vital has gone missing.

I’d built my identity on achievement and usefulness, chasing approval from a system that could never give it. My suffering wasn’t meaningless—it was pointing me home.

That realization changed how I live. I now help others going through similar struggles—the exhausted students, the disillusioned researchers, the ones questioning their worth—because this is how my pain finds meaning. If I can use what I’ve lived to help others navigate their own suffering, then my pain serves a purpose.

Each time I listen, each time I reach out, I reshape what once hurt me into something that heals. Helping people isn’t self-sacrifice—it’s transformation. It’s turning pain into understanding, and understanding into compassion.

This week I met with a PhD student trapped in a toxic situation. At the end, he thanked me softly: “You are so kind, Pedro.” I don’t think of myself as kind. Don’t you see? You are part of me. Your suffering is my own, just shifted in time. When I help you, I’m helping the part of me that once didn’t know how to cope. And maybe, if I help you, you’ll help the next person, and slowly academia will heal itself. The movie Pay It Forward was right about that.

If my experiences can ease even a small part of another person’s burden, then they’re doing their work in the world. Through helping others, my suffering becomes something alive and redemptive.

I can’t fix academia. No one can. But I can try to make it a little more humane. A little more forgiving. Behind every paper, every grant, every line of code, there’s a person trying their best to stay afloat. If we crush those people, the pursuit of truth collapses with them.

So I’ve made it my mission to care for the human side of academia—to be the kind of presence I wish I’d had more often. If I can make even one student feel less alone, one researcher remember why they started, that’s enough. Even if I can make it just 0.05% better, that’s enough.

People say suffering makes you compassionate. I don’t think it does. Suffering offers the possibility of compassion. But it can just as easily turn you bitter. What matters is what you do with it. I still feel anger—it hasn’t disappeared—but I choose not to let it rule me. Every day, I try to turn it into compassion: karuṇā.

Healing doesn’t mean forgetting. It means refusing to weaponize pain. It means using it as fuel for presence.

I didn’t escape the darkness; I learned to move through it differently. The light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t waiting—it was something I had to build from within. When suffering returns, I recognize it now. It’s not here to destroy me, but to remind me of my direction.

If you’re in your own storm, I won’t tell you it’s all for a reason. Some pain never makes sense. But meaning can still be made from it. Suffering tests us. It gives us the raw material to decide who we become.

For me, that choice is service—to help others carry what I once carried alone. To make the spaces I inhabit, especially academia, a little truer, a little gentler. Because if my pain can help even one person, then it wasn’t in vain.

I hate to finish this open heart text with an advertising. But in all honest and sincerity, the reasons presented in this text are the reaons I created the mentorship program at Type Theory Forall. If what I’ve written resonates with you, and you’d like to work with me to navigate a more compassionate academic system, please check out the link below website https://typetheoryforall.com/mentorship.