I’m not sure when it really happened, but I know that at a very young age, I became very manipulative. It wasn’t that I wanted to be evil. I just didn’t think I was worthy of getting what I wanted because I wanted it. I had to find another way.

What I wanted most of all, of course, was to be loved. But I had love confused with approval. (True fact: I actually had love and approval confused until just a couple of months ago…seriously! I still have to ponder the difference for a while to really get it.)

Perhaps, for me, the opposite of approval was anger. I dreaded anger, especially the anger of adults. I harbored a lot of fear that wasn’t really based on reality. I didn’t have a Toto to pull away the curtain that revealed that the wizard was only a man.

I got the idea that if I did the right things, I could keep the adults from getting angry. This wasn’t the simple, usual “if I’m good, I won’t be punished” kind of mindset. This was much bigger. I operated on a principle (that was not concious) that if I did everything right, everyone would be happy. So if I managed to chime in at the right time, or deflect attention in some way, I could prevent the anger that I dreaded.

A good example of this was during family car trips. If there was tension, I knew that the way to prevent a blowup would be to get a different conversation going. The best way to do this was to ask my dad a science question. Dad is smart and he loved to teach us. If I could get him going about something scientific, then we would just have a science lecture to sit through instead of an argument. “What is electricity?” was a really good one, as was (on stormy nights) “What is lightning?” I never understood the explanations, so I had no trouble asking those, time after time. I always pretended to understand.

In junior high school, our science class did a section on astronomy. For homework, we had to actually make little astrolabes out of protractors and go out and observe the planets and the moon, and chart their path from night to night. I loved it, or at least loved the idea of it. I was pretty bad at the follow-through, but found that I could look that stuff up in Sky and Telescope and mark it down on the charts on the day we had to hand it in.

I mentioned that, since I liked this so much, I thought that perhaps I’d be an astronomer when I grew up. This was met with lots of approval, and I ate it up. I couldn’t get enough.

Science fairs were another part of junior high school, and then high school. I got good at them. I won trophies and medals. It gave me the attention and approval I craved.

I got a summer job working at the planetarium at the University of Toledo. This was really a big bonus…not only did I get the approval for being so career-minded as a 17-year-old, but I got to move away from home a little earlier than most other kids my age. I worked there for four summers, sometimes getting to help out during real observation time with the big 40″ telescope on campus.

All this time, during high school, I was struggling with math. I hated math. I didn’t apply myself. I actually got some C’s, which shocked my parents and shamed me. I remember at an open house, my English teacher suggested that, when I got to college, I might find that astronomy wasn’t a good fit for me…the reading and writing in her classes came to me without effort. But I thought that was just silly, because I was clearly going to be an astronomer.

And off to college I went. My first quarter, I took Astronomy, Physics, and Calculus (and started a 20 hour/week job in the astronomy department, doing mind-numbing work for a professor emeritus who really had no idea of what to do with me.) I think I got a B, a C, and a D. That same quarter, I discovered binge drinking and hangovers. It’s a wonder I got grades that good, honestly.

To say that I struggled through college would be a great understatement. No matter how painful it became, how obvious it was to everyone else that I was in the wrong major, I would not give up.

I got pretty far in, and then started the electromagnetics course. I had this idea that if I just memorized the equations, I would be able to figure out how to apply them. But nothing made sense to me. When the first midterms were handed back to us, my score was “0”. That was zero points out of 100.

I dropped the class. I decided that I’d do better the next year; I’d take five years to graduate after all, as many did. I took some extra math in the meantime, because I had a crush on a grad student who I thought would help me. I did well in those courses, partly because of my interest in showing off, and partly because, at a certain point, all the numbers drop out of mathematics and somehow that seemed easier to me.

Next fall, I tried to take electromagnetics again. But it was more of the same. I never would understand electricity or lightning! I didn’t even make it to the first midterm…I just quit going and officially failed the course.

I decided to change my major. I went to my advisor and told him of my plan. I knew it was going to be a lot more work, and that maybe I wouldn’t even be able to swing it financially. But he looked at my record, and with some clever substitutions (“History of Astronomy” instead of “Electromagnetics”), I was able to graduate. I got a B.S. in Astronomy. Everybody was happy. Right?

Well, my friends at the bar I worked at said they would miss me, because somehow I talked my way into an internship at Hayden Planetarium in New York City. I definitely wasn’t going to graduate school, so planetarium work seemed like the only option to make use of my degree.

New York was a great experience for me. I lasted about seven months there, living in Manhattan, working days for the planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and bartending nights at a club, “The Ritz”, where I got to see some of my favorite bands and swiped drinks for myself. If I had any energy left, my museum ID got me into any other museum in the city for free; I haunted MOMA and the Whitney whenever I could. I started looking more and more like a punk, which didn’t go over great at the museum. Eventually, it was all too hard to keep up. I also started having panic attacks. I finally admitted to myself that I really had no interest in astronomy. I missed my boyfriend terribly…he was living in Columbus, and I was grateful to move back there to be with him.

There was enormous freedom in making that decision. But it also felt like I was letting people down…my parents, and everyone who had helped me with jobs along the way. And, perhaps most painfully of all, it hurt to think that my college experience had been a waste. I worked hard and suffered for that degree, lousy as it was. It cost me a lot, in more than just dollars and time. But our path is our path. It shaped me in ways that I may still learn to appreciate.

I do know this: when I see parents celebrating the ways their child is unique, a part of me worries. Does that child understand that they are allowed to change? And when I hear about encouraging girls to go into math and science, I cringe. What about just not discouraging them from going into anything? Because I was on the vanguard of that girls-in-math-and-science wave, and I feel that, as a girl, I was very very susceptible to doing things for approval rather than out of my own true nature.

What was it that got me into all of this trouble over astronomy? It was my own need for approval, my own way of manipulating the world to love…or at least approve of…. this dumpy, clumsy girl with glasses. Because I myself didn’t think what was really inside was worth loving, and so I lost track of it.

And now I’m 46 years old and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.