You are a second-year Ph.D. student in Astronomy. This has always been the path you wanted to take but you were not ready to jump into a doctorate after graduating with an MA degree. Family circumstances, financial difficulties and your mental health struggles put you off jumping into another four years of intense workloads and very little means of getting by on a day-to-day basis. Four years on, a marriage, a child, a divorce, you have decided to finally complete your education and earn that “Dr.” label to compliment your name.

You were aware that returning to life as a student was going to be difficult and very busy. However, the warnings shared by past professors, classmates, and random Twitter accounts, were an understatement. These past few months you have been waking up sweaty with anxiety and stress, and close to giving up your dreams. The reading workload is exhausting, the classes are tough, and your internships are extremely demanding and taxing on your mental and physical state. The excitement you had coming into the Ph.D. course in the first year has long dwindled and it feels like you are running on sparse reserves. You have lost all motivation to continue your dream, and what is worse, you are constantly feeling you are not good enough to ever reach that goal. You feel like a complete impostor and giving up now seems a lot safer than having to go through the heartbreak of failure.