Always admiring, now beginning

When I was young, the night sky felt like a conversation happening in a language I couldn’t quite catch. Astrophysicists were the translators—people who could look up, do the maths, and explain what was actually going on. I’ve admired them for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t just the big discoveries; it was the steadiness, the clarity, the way they made hard things feel navigable.

I’ve decided to give myself five years to feel at home in that world. Not to swap out my whole identity overnight, and not to chase a title, but to build the kind of competence that lets me read, think, and talk about astrophysics without feeling like an imposter. Five years is long enough to be honest about how learning really works: small, regular steps that add up.

What “comfortable” looks like to me

Comfortable doesn’t mean “finished.” It means I can move through core ideas without panic. It means I can sit with a chapter, work through the examples, and know when I’m stuck because of a missing concept—not because the whole subject is beyond me. It means I can follow an argument, check the maths, and explain it back in plain language. That’s the target.

The first step: rebuild the maths

Everything else depends on this. If physics is the story of how the universe behaves, maths is the grammar. I want fluency—the ability to write and read that grammar without thinking about every comma.

The pieces I’m rebuilding:

• Algebra and functions: manipulation without hesitation, and a feel for how functions behave
• Trigonometry: identities, geometry, and the intuition that ties angles to motion and waves
• Calculus: limits, differentiation, integration, and series—both the rules and the meaning behind them
• Vectors and matrices: geometry in higher dimensions, projections, and transformations
• A touch of probability and statistics: uncertainty, measurement, and how to reason with imperfect data

I’m not hunting for novelty here. I’m aiming for calm competence—the kind that comes from practicing the same ideas in different shapes until they stick.

How I’ll study

I learn best when the routine is clear and repeatable. So I’m keeping it small and steady: three sessions a week, roughly an hour each.

• Monday: core maths practice—short reading, then exercises
• Wednesday: physics-flavoured worked examples to keep the “why” in view
• Friday: using Python to visualise ideas—plots, simple simulations, and quick checks

Each session ends with two lines in a log: what I learned, and what I’ll do next. That’s it. No elaborate dashboards. No complicated systems. Just enough structure to make it easy to start next time.

Materials and mindset

I’m choosing a small stack of reliable, exercise-heavy books. For each topic, I’ll read a short section, write the key idea in my own words, and then solve problems. If I can’t solve problems, I don’t know it yet.

I’ll also build a small spaced-repetition deck for the bits that are worth memorising: trig identities, derivative and integral forms, definitions that everything else rests on. Memorising isn’t the goal, but fluency needs quick recall.

Python is there as a friendly assistant—plotting functions, checking derivatives numerically, playing with series to see how they converge. Not as a crutch, but as a way to build intuition I can feel and see.

How I’ll keep this humane

This plan is ambitious in timescale but gentle in pace. I’m protecting the three weekly sessions, even if life squeezes them smaller. I’ll accept slow progress over dramatic sprints that fizzle out. When a topic doesn’t click, I’ll change the angle: a different example, a diagram, a simpler case. I’ll write short notes to future-me about what finally made sense, because the hardest-won insights are the easiest to forget.

Why start now

Admiration is a wonderful spark, but it’s not a destination. I’ve spent long enough looking up with awe. I want to look up with understanding. Five years from now, I want to be someone who can sit with a piece of astrophysics, work through the reasoning, and explain it clearly. That begins—quietly, simply—with a pencil, a few good books, and three small sessions a week.

It’s taken me a while to admit this is something I really want. Now that I have, the plan is straightforward. Show up, learn the language, and keep going.