I have complained about this more often, I guess, so sorry, dear readers, but I need to vent.. My Achilles heel is that I freeze when uncertain. More specific: my problem is that I can not decide what the take home message of my current paper should be. Some digging in my psyche and talking with friends made me realize: I am capable of deciding and advising on all sorts of matters, just not on my PhD topic. The why behind that issue is also clear: I am afraid I will decide to pick a message that, seen through the eyes of the Experts, is crap. Because none of my supervisors is an expert in the topic I am working on, I feel that the decision is mine, while I do not have any back up. In my horse world, I know that what I know is not BS. When friends ask me their opinion, I easily give it. Coming from a family of hotel and cafe owners, I can also easily see what needs to be changed when eating out or sleeping in a hotel. Only on the matter of my thesis, I just freeze. Writing one of my previous articles was easy, nobody had touched that topic, so our study was the first. I do not mind at all if other people come up with other ideas, I do not mind that in the end I might be wrong on that topic. The core topic of my thesis however simply isn't that "new". I could easily have missed some papers, or formulated the already proven wrong ideas. And simply do not know about it. I read all related stuff, search through google, I pubmed, and all that stuff, I am almost certain I am safe. But what if there is a key word I simply do not know about since I am not in the inner circle? I just wish I had a supervisor I could trust on this topic, who would say ""Jump, there really is water in the pool, the pool only looks empty. Trust me, it isn't. You could say that after 4 years, I should be mini-expert on my topic. Problem is, I never had a decent conversation with an expert. Yes, I presented posters on conferences, but never had a talk. Yes, people stopped by my posters, and gave thumbs up, but those people never were experts. And I was too shy to introduce myself (why should this expert want to be bothered by me, simple phd student...). Being uncertain is a pain in the ass.

in the end

What better way to end this clusterf*ck of a year with all these things going wrong (family getting cancer twice, family addicted, family rehabbed, family suicide attempt, hubby gets hernia, closer family depressed, personal misery due to miscarriage, family getting two herniae (hernia's?) and hubby getting robbed [and I have this feeling I am missing something horrible that should have been on this list, well a good thing that I can not remember what]): ONE OF MY ARTICLES IS ACCEPTED. This means that I can start writing the other chapters of my thesis, and I guess it is safe for me to say that in 2012 I WILL DEFEND :) (*knocking off on wood. Please reader, do the same, let's not jinx this, I have not enough room for bad things left to continue this epic cluster of trouble in 2012, so let's knock on wood together, okay? Promise me you knock...)