(For P and his reckless bravery, which he won’t tell me how he got)

I had been desperately looking for a job and was fast closing in on one full year of being unemployed. This was new for me. As was not getting a salary. I had been earning since 2012. Back then it had been a piddly Master’s students stipend. But I have always been sensible with money, meaning kanjoos af.

So, I started to seriously consider doing something else. Doing something on my own. Maybe writing. Cos we’ve all wanted to be a writer. Even though we say cos. And can’t be bothered to say because. We still wanted to become a writer. Or a singer. Or a baker. Or an artist. Or whatever the hell your middle class parents convinced you was too impractical. And who was going to argue with that logic?

But in a lot of ways practicality was what had driven me (back) towards writing. Cos – I mean because – the job market was just not responding to my desperate desire to be a cog in its wheel. So here I was, trying to become a writer. And cos. (Fuck!) And because I didn’t want to waste the past more-than-a-decade which I had spent eating and farting chemistry – science writing. (Those middle class parents really did a number with the practical thinking).

And then there was the competition.

Job search had made me frantically active on LinkedIn, making connections left, right and backward. That’s how I added AM to my connections, 17 years after I had been his student. And he posted about the SJU personal essay competition. The topic was ‘The City from a Bus’, and I sent in an entry.

But here’s the thing. I didn’t write it.

19-year-old me wrote it. And when I submitted the essay, I did it with the certainty that I was sending it into the void. There was no way this was going to win. It would hardly make an impression on anyone. And my dirty secret would be safe.

In fact, when Professor K wrote to me telling me that I had won, I was convinced that it was a prank. It didn’t help one bit that Professor K’s display picture from the number she texted me was utterly ridiculous for someone as crazily accomplished. But when the news was confirmed, all I could think was ‘Oh fuck, the essay is going to get published somewhere. And people are going to see it.’

And then I read the essay that won the competition in the general category and felt like I ate cement.

Not right way. Because the very first time, I binged it. The I read it again slowly. And then a third time, I deliberately read it over the course of my day. Forcing myself to savour it slowly, and using it to add colour to my otherwise drab day. And by then, the cement had hardened.

I felt the desperate need to track down the writer and apologise to them for my garden-variety essay appearing alongside theirs. Their entry was pure gold. Mine was copper at best. It wasn’t even the shiny kind. But the sea-green oxidised version as the patina on the Statue of Liberty.

So, I re-read my essay a bunch of times, convinced myself that I was the author, and thought, ‘you know what: this is pretty cute, actually! And that’s a nice twist at the end to the theme. I can see why it won.’

Fast forward to about a month later and I published my first attempt at science writing with ‘How the oxygen we breathe can kill us: the unusual spin state of oxygen’ on Medium. Fifty reads and one dollar and forty seven cents later, I asked P what he thought about it. I dispassionately told him to give me brutal honesty, but in reality was cowering in fear.

P had not met me IRL, and ergo, did not know what a ridiculous person I was. He was careful and diplomatic, and did it in small steps. He first gently asked what I was trying to do with the piece – which made me think hard. Then he alluded to my competition-winning essay, and told me to use the same voice in my science writing.

But how was I to tell him that the 19-year-old me had gone back into hibernation?!