Every day (most days) I get out of bed, sit at my laptop and write words. Usually, they’re not terrible. Sometimes they’re even great. I type and type, breaking only to watch cat TikToks and eat yoghurt from a tube.
In the beginning, every tiny acknowledgment felt like standing on a podium. An editor’s kind rejection of my pitch? A retweet from another writer? Publishing my work without paying me? Each milestone was life-changing. The mere suggestion that I might be anything less than awful at the thing I was trying to do felt like a glitter bomb had exploded in my belly.
As time went on, I got better at it. I published a couple of books. I won a prize. Editors started approaching me to write things. And it was glorious, of course. But the more I succeeded, the less success I felt. I had learned to be a better-than-most writer and, in the process, I had picked, eaten and regurgitated all the low-hanging fruit.
When you’ve become good but not brilliant, people stop saying “good job”. They expect you to be competent. No one celebrates your 300th article about how you were a sad kid but you only cry some days now that you’re an adult. A sense of achievement comes only at the highest echelons. Did you win money? No? Then stop yammering.
As time passed without constant applause, I felt the only explanation had to be that I was, in fact, horrible at writing.
I decided to enrol in an economics degree partly because of masochism and partly because AI is rapidly stealing my job. But I had also started to wonder, how do I satisfy the desperate part of me that needs constant reassurance, given I already have the maximum allowable number of cats?
Differential calculus, apparently.
Being a writer, I approached my new life the same way I do everything: by buying notebooks. Then I sat in front of my Zoom lecture, yoghurt tubes in hand, and waited as other students connected. They looked smart. They had calculators off-screen, probably.
The teacher opened with pictures of different fruits nestled inside curly brackets.
“Wow,” I thought. “I have no idea what this means.”
It was a wild, unfamiliar feeling. Not because I am a genius, but because of all the years I’ve spent inside my writer bubble, doing the thing I’m already good at.
“These fruits are a set,” the teacher said. “They can all be described using conditions of joining the set, which is called a function.”
“Golly gosh!” I went, slightly hysterical. “I have absolutely no idea what’s going on at all.”
I wrote in my notebook, using different coloured pens when I thought something might have been a formula (y = x2). In the background, I googled basic mathematical terms (“integer”) and scribbled them on the lecture slides. I scrawled notes to myself that I knew I would need later (“Because the flat part is on the top or bottom!”).
While mostly it may as well have been a different language altogether, I was starting to pick it up. Linear, quadratic and polynomial functions. First- and second-order derivatives. Using the determinant of a matrix to find its inverse. Every single time I sat at my desk, I learned something new – no matter how small.
I felt like the most powerful person on Earth. A mere mortal – a middle-aged one, even – who had developed a passable grasp on year 12 mathematics. The low-hanging fruit was on the forest floor and I was gobbling it up.
By day, I continued to write. I made sentences that would change people’s perception of the world and themselves, and felt nothing. Then, I curled up with my Intro to Econometrics textbook and read. My brain expanded and contracted. Each time I recognised a term or vaguely understood a calculation, I felt a rush of success. It was invigorating to know I was so truly dreadful at maths that my next win was only ever moments away.
This morning I rocked up to class, ready to be absolutely middling. I took notes as my professor described methods of economically evaluating energy projects. Most of them were simply words I knew inside sentences that meant nothing. Other students asked clever questions with complex answers that I may never understand.
But I caught some of it. Enough to feel the wee spark of growing as a human.
I’m now five weeks in to collecting absolutely minuscule achievements. I may never be a great economist. But why would I want to be, when I can continue to be quite terrible at it and win forever?
