Stephanie Gunn

I owe a debt of gratitude to Stephanie Burgis, who mentioned recently on her blog that she was re-reading a book, Finding Your Own North Star by Martha Beck.  I was intrigued enough to hunt down a copy and started to read it in dribs and drabs over the last week or so.

I’m only a little way into it, and it’s really made me begin to think about myself and the way I’ve always approached my career.

I’ve read my share of self-help books.  Some are utterly useless, most I’ll take away a few useful nuggets of wisdom.  Usually I’ll forget about them pretty soon after finishing them.

This one is really different.  Like I said, I’m only a short way into it, and I’m reading in a slight haze, thanks to sleep deprivation.  But beneath that haze, things are clicking over.

Most of you know that I studied to be a scientist.  I always wanted to be a doctor, but didn’t get the grades to get into medicine at university.  Instead I went into a science degree, majoring in genetics.  I really liked learning, especially the genetics work and microbiology.  When I finished my degree, I went on to do honours, which I also enjoyed.  After that, I pretty much just followed on with the accepted career path and went into a PhD.

I was really lucky with my PhD.  The actual work I did wasn’t earth shattering – it was always going to be slightly risky, since I was working up techniques for the first time in the lab and there wasn’t a lot of other good research published using similar techniques.  I got to work with some fantastic people who I miss working with to this day.  I had two absolutely wonderful supervisors, both of whom are geniuses in their own right.

I worked hard at the PhD.  All the while, though, there was something not really clicking for me.  I loved doing the research, I loved writing in a scientific manner, I loved being part of something that was exploring and defining the world.  And yet there was always that seed of doubt beneath the surface – was this what I was really meant to be doing?

Then I went to a conference in New York.  Which was huge and amazing and should have been the perfect opportunity for me to network, to make connections that would lead me to a good postdoctoral position overseas.  There was a lab which would have been absolutely perfect for me to work in, and my supervisor was on good terms with them.  I presented a poster, I went to a lot of really interesting sessions.

And then.

I took some time off, spent a bit of time in New York, which was an amazing and inspiring place, even in the grip of post-911 sorrow (I was there for the six month anniversary).  I went to England and spent some time with a good friend who was absolutely amazing to me and took me to some of the places I’d always wanted to see (Stonehenge!).  I caught up with another friend who was traveling there at the time.  And I did a quick trip to Dublin, where I stayed with a friend who I used to work with (and miss dreadfully) and spent St Patrick’s Day in the pubs (and got pickpocketed, which is another story entirely).

It was an incredible experience.  Except for one thing – as soon as I set foot in the UK, I got sick.  I thought it was a bad flu or cold – the usual symptoms, plus I lost my voice.  I pushed on, determined to try to enjoy the holiday.  And I did, though I was utterly exhausted.

And when I came home, I never got better.

Fast forward through a couple of years of struggling through the PhD, going from doctor to doctor trying to figure out what was wrong.  I got a few different diagnoses – chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and eventually, lupus.  I switched to part time study.  I finished my PhD, limping through every day.

I’ve always wondered on some level if I got so sick because science wasn’t the place for me.  I enjoy it, I learned a lot from my studies, the least of which is critical thinking and reading skills.

And reading North Star, it’s got me thinking about that again.  There are a couple of exercises that stick in my mind.  They are designed to help you to find your “North Star”, which is essentially the place which is the most fulfilling for you to work.

The first is to pinpoint memories of your childhood when you felt pure joy.  Immediately, I recalled two.  In both, I was living in my imagination.  I used to spent hours outside in our garden inventing stories.  I would literally sit in a patch of dirt, moving it around and building up small mountains on which I imagined villages, people, lives.  In the other memory I am with friends of the family, inventing a world in a sugar bowl.

The second exercise is to think of the people who energise you when you spend time with them.  Again, two people immediately sprang to mind.  Both of them I see all too rarely, and they are both amazing and wonderful women who inspire me more than they can ever know.  I won’t name them here, but suffice to say that there is one thing that they both have in common – their strong spirituality.  Both are pagan in their way, and both have this incredible light in them, though I think that neither can see that most of the time.

These things point me towards my North Star.  Imagination and spirituality.

And I think of another amazing woman I know, unfortunately only online.  She is a storyteller and pagan, a woman who lives and loves so vividly that it’s an honour to know her.

And I know where I need to be, what I need to move towards.  Writing that reflects some of that light that I see and admire in others, writing that will help people to find that light within themselves.  Writing that, to me, means something.

I want to show you my worlds.  Be they made of grains of sand or sugar.