The Ph.D. thing

So, I was saying about the science thing, how it wasn't really a fit for me...

I recall that I started four different biology Ph.D. programs in four different places and didn't finish any of them.  I fizzled every time.  That should have told me something -- either I didn't really want to do it, or I didn't have what it took to be a successful professional scientist.

I was confused about this for most of my life.  I had fixed on the idea that what it took was intelligence, and I knew I had plenty of intelligence, so there was no reason for me to keep bailing other than somehow doing it wrong each time.  I'd eventually try again, certain that this time I would get it right.

Even very recently, when I took some classes at ASU to help me decide whether to give it one last try, I was talking to one of the bio profs and I said something about the need to find out if I was still smart enough.  He immediately corrected me.  He said that intelligence is not really the issue.  The most important factor is (not his exact words, mind you) determination, perseverance, the clamp-jawed stubborn refusal to quit.  When he said that, I remembered being told that before, more than once.  The pros know this.  I kept ignoring it, proud of my good brain and how easy it is for me to understand and learn biology, how much I love learning about it, as if that's the same thing as being able to do it.

It took several weeks for this to sink in last semester, but when it did, I was finally at peace with letting it go.

I have realized at last, and permitted it to sink in, that the key factor missing in my psychological makeup is confidence.  I doubt myself.  I would always get to a point where I just didn't believe in myself any longer.  I would start doubting my methodology or my observations or my plan.  I was also so neurotically shy that I could not screw up the courage to talk about this.  On the other hand, that probably would not have helped anyhow.  Scientists don't sit around nurturing each other, bolstering each other's egos.  With rare exceptions, even mentoring major professors do not do any such thing.  I never even had a mother who did that, so I had to use strategies such as swaggering around acting like the tough silent type who didn't need any help.  I was never tough enough to hold onto that act long enough, and posturing without substance doesn't usually work in science.  There are plenty of competitive types who just love to discover another scientist's weakness and expose it to one and all.

Being female in a man's world was certainly an issue in the early days, but by the time of my final stab at it, that wasn't really an issue any longer.

Fortunately, doubting oneself is no handicap in poetry!  Constant reflection, looking at things from all angles and shifting one's viewpoint to try on new ones, is what it's all about.  Finding the root of something, digging at the painful spot and learning something from it, then sharing it in the sharpest language possible is what writers do.  The universality of human experience ensures that at least some others will also see the truths in what I write and can share the joy and pain of recognition in that discovery.

Fortunately, at my age, I don't have to sweat being able to make a living writing.  I can just do it -- maybe publish if I'm lucky, or just share it in some of the never-ending workshops and classes going on all the time all over the world.  This is just about the most satisfying thing I've ever done.