source: http://www.animalfactguide.com/

I am an ostrich. If I encounter a problem academically that I can’t solve fairly quickly, rather than hunkering down and bashing the living daylights out of the problem until I get the answer, I stick my head in the proverbial sand and hope the answer jumps into my head all by itself. I’ve always done this – which may be a bit of a surprise considering I’ve gained the highest academic degree possible in a physics based subject – but trust me none of my degrees in astrophysics came easily nor was I at the top of any of my classes (firmly rooted in the bottom quarter more like it!). I am insanely jealous of my husband’s academic tenacity. When he encounters something he doesn’t understand he will surround himself with text books and resources and people ‘smarter’ than him and whack his head off the problem until he thoroughly understands it and can explain it to anyone. It is a big reason he is the quality of scientist that he is and it is certainly why he is developing into a much loved and respected professor. It is also a quality I truly hope our daughter has inherited from him – rather than my ‘meh, I’ll look at it again tomorrow’ stance.

Fortunately (or is it unfortunately) I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older that this trait comes from a place of insecurity rather than just being ‘dumb’. I get scared that I can’t ‘be’ what it is that I really want to be so rather than truly trying and failing I give myself the get out of clause of “well, I didn’t get an A cause I didn’t study enough.” I’ve done it in my personal life too – “well, that relationship didn’t work cause I didn’t throw myself into it.” From when I was eight I wanted to be an astronomer. Did I truly know what that meant? Nope – but it is what I wanted. I was good at maths and physics throughout high school and achieved the grades I needed to attend the University of St Andrews. It was here at the start of my (many, many) years of university study that I took on the persona of an ostrich as it is after high school that shit gets real when you are studying science. It is hard. Like, hard hard. And although throughout undergraduate studies there are still ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers in science those answers aren’t as simple as 4 anymore.

The MMTO where I worked for five years. source: mmto.org

But I did persevere in my own way and though I never attained the highest quality of degrees (2:2 undergraduate for me!) I did complete and was awarded BSc, MPhil and PhD degrees. I went on to find my niche in the professional astronomy world and was offered a permanent position after my first post-doc. However, I never lost my insecurities nor my ‘fingers-in-ears-shouting-la-la-la’ method to deal with them and I know it held me back. Now that I have decided I want to ‘be’ an author those insecurities are rearing their ugly heads once again. And I have started to sidle into my comfortable sand pit in the corner in which I’m using my daughter’s bright-orange plastic shovel to dig the hole for my head (thankfully she is in there with me making the hole digging a lot more fun!)

The biggest insecurity I have when it comes to creative writing is: do I have enough stories to tell? It isn’t that I can’t put words into pretty/informative/invoking sentences by rather do I have enough characters and situations in me to create engaging stories that will build me an audience and keep them! I have only written two new pieces this year – both plays and both for class. They were sizable pieces of work that took all semester to craft but it was only two stories. I haven’t written any new fiction in over a year. That is bad. That is not how I make myself an author. That is how I fully morph into an ostrich, again, and hold myself back. But I am older now and I am certainly more self-aware (and less distracted by beer) and so fingers crossed I can ward off any unsightly transmutations by making myself do the hard things. So I’m off to try and tease out some more words on a new short story under the theme of ‘first meetings’ … wish me luck!