4.16 Billion Years. I Felt Every One

I've been staring at these rocks for seven years. 4.16 billion years old—older than life, older than oceans, older than anything that ever mattered to anyone. My advisor kept saying we needed "more confirmation." Two radiometric methods. Samarium. Neodymium. Numbers that had to be perfect because everyone was watching. The 2008 debate still echoed in conference halls—were our dating methods even reliable? I remember the night we got the final isotope results. I sat alone in the lab at 2 AM, looking at data that proved these Nuvvuagittuq rocks survived the Hadean eon. The first 500 million years of Earth's history, sitting on my bench. Four point one six billion years of existence. I couldn't even handle four years of grad school without crying in bathroom stalls. But here's the thing—I held the oldest story ever told. While I was questioning if I belonged in science, I was literally touching the beginning of everything. #LabBurnout #GeoLife #ImposterInTheRoom #Science