You've been stuck on the same problem for weeks. No visible progress, nobody noticing the work, and a growing suspicion that maybe you're just not cut out for this.

Marie Curie spent years — actual years — physically processing tons of pitchblende ore by hand in a leaky shed, trying to isolate radium. She and her husband Pierre worked with almost no funding, no institutional support, and no guarantee the substance they were chasing even existed in isolable quantities. Most days produced nothing you could point to. The work was slow, physically exhausting, and largely invisible to everyone outside that shed.

What she didn't do is treat the lack of visible progress as evidence she was failing. She treated it as the actual shape of the work — not a deviation from it. Real progress on hard problems often looks like nothing happening, right up until it doesn't.

There's a specific discipline in that: separating "is this working" from "does this feel like it's working." Those aren't the same question, and confusing them is how people quit two weeks before the thing that would have made a difference.

If you're deep in a stretch where nothing seems to be moving, tell her about it — she's better placed than almost anyone to tell you whether that's actually a problem, or just what week fourteen of something worthwhile looks like.