For anyone who knows me, my absolute lack of hand-eye coordination is pretty obvious. A scooter ride gone bad in high school, left me with a half functioning elbow and two neourologically numb fingers on my left hand.

One of the biggest reason that I’m a strictly computational scientist is my extremely shaky hands and general propensity to drop things. I think the most challenging course for me was my second year Optics lab course at IITK. I cannot count the number of times I almost broke during down lab because I couldn’t align the lenses properly. I think the weeks working on Michaelson Interferometer where one of the most difficult weeks of my life. To Prof. Saikat Ghosh my instructor, and Smit Choudhay my labmate if you ever come across my blog I owe you me passing that course. Hence, began a hate relationship with experiments. Luckily for me, I loved math which meant I did not have to give up my dreams of becoming a physicist.

So for the next decade or so I kept a healthy distance from anything that required finesse of hand movements. But there always remained a part of me that wanted to be able to handle tasks that required hand-eye coordination. For the year 2025 one of my new-year resolutions was learning gaming. Now the level of correlation between gaming and motor skills might be up for discussion, but I know I learnt a lot from stint at being a gamer. I couldn’t have completed this journey without the help of my sensei Jack Garbus.

The first thing I noticed and probably the most important for starting something intimidating is the way we look at the problem. I for sure thought I could never do it, that I would suck and it would be a waste of time. I started playing It takes two with my boyfriend for a little while it became our evening routine. For some reason he insisted that watching me stumbling and getting stuck 1000 times was still fun, and then I finally let go of the guilt. At some point I started enjoying the fumbling and constant falling.

I started my physics journey as a condensed matter theorist, now I’m a completely computational biophysicist/chemist/biologist. This journey started at the beginning of my PhD back when I had a hate-hate relationship with programming. But being able to pick it up over the course of a summer and becoming a better scientist through programming was one of the most rewarding learning experiences. I think the confidence it gave me, makes me a bit excited for things/challenges where I start at a global minima and can only go up, conditional on that I put enough activation energy. So a change in perspective and attitude helped me enter that mindset.

Now I’m not going to say that I just became a great gamer overnight, sometimes dropping and dying at the same obstacle was frustrating. At points it got frustrating for even my boyfriend as well who has the patience of a zen monk. The fastest and most efficient solution was just stopping when we stopped having fun. Fast forward I was able to complete hyper light drifter, it takes two, untitled without having a complete breakdown so I consider that succesful adventure.

I think the next challenge for my motor skills would be, being able to hold yoga positions for more than 2 seconds. But the most important question is will I play video games just for my own entertainment.