You Make me Better

“You’re like Hanuman,” said my mother.

I started. “Excuse me?”

“You always need to be reminded of your own ability.”

Abilities, indeed.

It can be difficult for me to toot my own horn. It’s not a good thing to do to begin with, but in some sense, I could use the ability. What are my skills? What can I be confident about? Granted, these are questions I’ll keep asking myself for a long time, maybe even for the rest of my life. However, certain things I would like to be confident about. I’m hoping that opening up about it will help somehow. And maybe along the way, I may answer a question I have been asked so many times that it’s gotten stale for me.

Honestly, even beginning to write this article is a huge step for me, one I struggled to take as I typed this.

Astrophysics and astronomy. That’s what this article is about. And even then, there’s so much I’d like to encapsulate. This…subject (let’s call it that for now) has been an important part of my life for thirteen years now. As I write this, that accounts for sixty-five percent of my life. Some would call that a huge influence.

Maybe a good place to start would be to say that my love, or its influence on me is not a result of the subject itself. It’s not really that I solve one equation a day to get me closer to knowing more about the universe. I actually haven’t even read a lot of literature that might be considered a part of the manual How to recognize an astrophysics enthusiast from ten miles away.

And yet, it accounts for thirteen years of my young life. I have indeed studied it: the way a child does, the way an enthusiast does, and the way one might do if they were hoping to make a career out of it. There’s really no doubt in my mind about the direction I would like my life to take, and that is towards astrophysics. If there’s one thing I can be confident about, it’s that. The question I get tired of answering is why.

Is it so unbelievable that I like this subject?

The short answer is that astrophysics is the type of field that has taught me about myself as much as it has taught me about what’s beyond the night sky. It has helped me define how I interact with the world. It has opened me up to other subjects as well; it’s allowed me to be Soumya the person as well as Soumya the aspiring astrophysicist. Arguably the most important thing my love for astrophysics has done for me is granting me the gift of being self-assured.

And if that’s the short answer, what does the long answer look like?

I don’t really know. All I know is, the long answer is long.

To start: yes, my love for astrophysics did begin as a love for the subject. The first things I learnt was that Earth is a planet, there are eight other planets (the IAU hadn’t declared Pluto a dwarf planet yet), and that the Sun is a star. Afterwards, I never looked at the sky the same way again. Even a clear blue midday sky seemed to hold a secret. There’s something out there, my younger self would think. There’s something out there that doesn’t go away even if no one can see it.

And I never went back from there. Did I feel like giving up? Well, yes. I remember a time when studying it terrified me. But I bounced back. And honestly, I don’t even remember that time as much as I remember the rest of it.

There are some experiences from my time in elementary school that might be considered “being bullied” by some definition of the word. There was this feeling that I wasn’t smart. There was this feeling that I didn’t fit in with my peers, and I was explicitly ostracized. And that’s when I put my back into studying astronomy: I’ll prove them all wrong. I read about things I didn’t fully understand until some years later. In the end, though, I still felt like…I was studying something I genuinely liked, and no one will be able to take that away from me. I displayed an interest in astronomy that no one could question.

That still happens. Studying astrophysics, or anything that supplements my prior knowledge about the subject, always increases my self-esteem. It makes me feel on top of the world. I feel like nothing can go wrong when I think about what I have done, what I do currently, and how I’m going to make use of this in the future.

That alone should be a reason to love astronomy and astrophysics as I so do. But the story doesn’t end (it never will). What you love can still surprise you in different ways, and that makes you fall in love with it even more.

In middle school, I was unwittingly exposed to the debate between science and religion. This happened at a time when my family touted one faith and my school taught another. So in the midst of feeling like I was being stretched like taffy, these debates seemed like a way out. I was intrigued, so I started talking about it with my parents.

Young children often ask questions about God that deserve an answer, but are left unanswered. What is God? When was He born? What will happen when He dies? Have you seen Him? Can I see Him? Has anybody seen Him?

While I don’t mean to attack or belittle any religion or faith while expressing my point, it struck me that I don’t have to live with half-answered questions when there are complete answers readily available. Theism, agnosticism, and atheism became terms I started understanding. And now here I am: an atheist influenced by my love for astrophysics. As one scientist put it, God was rendered unnecessary for me.

There was this time in high school that might interest you if you’d like to know if I’ve done some “real work” (ha!) in the field. I was researching gravitational waves and detection methods as a part of an initiative taken by my school. At one point, I was required to make a presentation about my work. This came at a time when I was extremely self-conscious and dealing with stage fright.

I suppose it provided me solace to know that I was going to present my passion in front of everybody, a passion that never steered me wrong. Maybe it was this overwhelming desire to get my point across no matter how many words I had to use. But there was something in me that broke free. Something just broke the dam and in the span of that one presentation, I forgot my stage fright and never saw it again.

And a good thing too, since I was able to win a public speaking award at an international conference not a year later.

Maybe my gap years should have been a lull time in this journey. I wasn’t studying for any exams and I didn’t really have much on my plate. But I’m good at keeping myself busy. I did have other pursuits: art, music, dance…I even had a job at one point. But no. Astrophysics never went into the periphery, not even if you discard the number of times I tried to find a college that offered astrophysics as an undergrad degree.

I did a competition that tested my story until now, and added a few pages of its own. It gave me more of that feeling I talked about: the feeling that nothing can take this away from me.

That feeling helped me shut someone down when they made the mistake of understanding my silence as stupidity.

I stand as someone who has, as of now, has devoted sixty-five percent of her life to one interest. I intend to keep increasing that percentage. I hope this has been an insight into what astrophysics means to me. I hope this adequately answers why I love it. I hope it’s a reasonable conclusion that this has made me better.