"I sat in my supervisor’s office, red-faced and anxious, words tumbling out faster than I could control. For half an hour, I vented everything I had been holding in for months: the stress, the doubt, the sense that I didn’t belong. I was in the third year of my Ph.D., and a creeping fear had taken root that I wasn’t cut out for academia.
"I expected some kind of judgment or disappointment. Instead, my supervisor listened patiently, then calmly offered a line I’ll never forget: 'You are here to learn to ride a bicycle, not to invent a bicycle.' That one sentence landed softly, but it cracked something open."
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