Let it go

It's very hard to let things go, Disney songs notwithstanding. It's even harder to let go of a project that you conceived and completed, only to hand the reins over to someone else at the moment of completion. They say if you love something let it go, I'm not sure they were thinking of research projects but I guess there's a similar principle. 

I feel a sense of ownership over the completed product of this project. It came from a very impactful experience and from a very personal place as an immigrant to this country who once faced similar barriers. It was very many sleepless nights of trying to understand legal papers. 

All my training has been in the health sciences, and almost every paper I've needed to read since second year undergrad when I took Greek history for fun have been somewhere in the medical science realm. History of medicine might be as far as I've strayed. It was a real challenge to figure out where to even start with a social justice research project. Pubmed doesn't have anything, uptodate has no best practice guidelines and apparently Google scholar only gets you so far. Thank goodness for librarians! 

Even after accumulating the papers there was the hurdle of actually understanding them. The legal jargon was beyond me. I last read constitutions and human rights declarations in high school law class. The style of academic papers was foreign and so were the types of citations. How does one cite a declaration but not a UN declaration in APA? I still don't know if I did it correctly. 

After all of that and with no small amount of help from my literature-background partner, I presented a completed paper to the community partners that inspired this. I was and still am proud of the end product - double spaced and everything. And now I hand the paper over and it's fairly out of my hands. I can't carry it through to publication, see it into a journal, and others be able to use it as their research jumping off point. I can't even really be involved in the advocacy side of taking this paper to the powers that be and pushing for changes to happen based on it. For one thing, I'm leaving in a few weeks for a different province for work. For another, I'm not the right person to be advocating for this. There are people whose jobs it is to work in the environment that I've only written about, and who are in the know-hows of the politics and structures where the advocacy will happen. I won't be able to be dedicated to the degree needed since I'll be full time at my actual profession of family medicine. And despite the lengthy paper I only know this small aspect and not enough about everything else.

Admitting our limits is hard. Admitting that we have limited time and resources is hard. Admitting that we are not necessarily the right person for the job is hard. So for the best of the project, for the best outcome of the advocacy, for respect of the community partners who gave me this opportunity, I have handed the project over to them.

We had a handover meeting yesterday and we reviewed the paper and its goals. I hope to still be kept in the loop but have discussed my limitations with them, and they acknowledged the same. They will take the paper and run with it as far as they can with my recommendations. I've done my part so far, and the most important part now is making sure that I don't hold the project back.