When I was young, my father used to tell me to find a profession where I couldn't wait to get out of bed in the morning to get to. That passion was more important than comfort and contentment.

I went through school a "gifted kid", and excelled in science and math. Thus, when I went to college, I stayed the course, in my case, studying astrophysics. Then I went to grad school and got a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Then I got a postdoctoral position in astrophysics. Then I hit the proverbial jackpot. I landed one of those lauded permanent jobs in astrophysics.

For a long time, science could get me out of bed in the morning, channeling that passion. I loved thinking about the stars and galaxies and black holes, loved mentoring my students and watching them develop that passion, loved pushing the edges on the mysteries of the universe. It was passion.

So why was I so exhausted all the time?

Because with science, and with astrophysics, comes a life in academia. Our passions are squeezed for every last drop of what we have to give until we are a shell of our former selves.

It took me a long time to understand why.

Because my passion for science was not about the stars (though they're cool) and was definitely not about academia (gosh the tales I could tell you of the types of people you have to tolerate there...), but about storytelling.

At its core, that's all science is. It's sitting around your campfire trying to make sense of the world around you. It's imagination applied to the real world, looking for the thing that "just fits."

When I was that same kid, the one my dad told to follow her passion, I would run around for hours and hours with my friends, playing at pretend adventures where we got to be the heroines saving princes, where we were pioneers riding horses through the wild west, when we were superheroes or Jedi using the Force.

But everyone tells a scientifically gifted kid to chase the money, which is in the science. One does not make a living storytelling. So I followed the path I was supposed to follow, never stopping to consider that through all the math equations, through the mysteries of the universe and the academic papers, through the lens of Hubble and James Webb, I was still sitting at that proverbial campfire, just with a lot more math and computer programming.

But the fundamental truth, the one that took stripping away the layers is this: I want to tell stories, and I have wanted to tell stories since I was a child on a playground.

I am a storyteller.