I'm trying to jump into aging-related biology and keep swimming against what seems like a strong, endless current of required background knowledge. I keep repeating to myself that people who are actually adept at this sort of thing and on the edge of the field can't be genetically that much smarter than me, so I should just keep at it and not lose hope every other day. I was reading a paper about some protein called p21 which was found to be important in regulating cellular senescence (a cell state that seems correlated aging). I thought to myself: "Great, another random protein that probably has years of specialized research and intuition behind how it functions." But I was flipping through Molecular Biology of the Cell, and then I came across this same p21 protein there! This is an introductory textbook, so maybe it wasn't that specialized, after all. I should really stop spiraling into a feeling of permanent inadequacy whenever I see a complicated name.