Marina Suarez:

Okay, so, number one. I'm kind of afraid of the dark.

Number two. Kind of the unknown, or not knowing things.

Number three. Spiders. So, when I was a little kid, I really loved Indiana Jones and Raiders Of The Lost Ark. You know, most people know in the movie he's an archaeologist, and when I was little I loved looking, you know, digging for treasure in the backyard, or dinosaur bones, even though archaeology and paleontology are not the same thing. But the very beginning of the movie, him and his assistant are walking through some underground temple or something like that, and he has some, like, tarantulas on his back, and his assistant has a ton of tarantulas like on his back. And that scared the hell out of me. And from then on I'm terrified of spiders.

Number four. Issues about climate and environment, and, like, the future. Especially for my nephews.

Number five. Like, brain diseases like dementia, Alzheimer's, that kind of thing.

Number six. Loss of a sibling or losing one of my siblings. I am the second youngest. My identical twin sister is two minutes older than me, and we're actually... we're quite alike. We actually have a very similar profession. We're both geologists. And, I don't know, it's almost like you have a second conscience. But, my twin sister got married three or four years ago I think. And so that was really weird, because I have such a unique relationship with my twin sister that the idea of having somebody else have a unique relationship with her was just very weird, and still is a little bit weird to me. I've gotten a lot more comfortable with it, but that was shocking to me, how much it felt like losing a sibling again. Because that has kind of already happened to me. So my youngest sister was killed. She was hit by a car while she was running. She was a cross-country runner in college. And so that obviously changes a person forever. Like, you don't ever really ever get over it.

Number seven. Disillusionment between family members.

Number eight. I really think there's a fair bit of racial animosity out there. And as a minority I knew was present, but I didn't think it was that pervasive.

Number nine. There's something called, like, imposter syndrome. As a little kid you dream of finding a dinosaur. I mean, that was my lifelong dream. I mean, I found it in in east central Utah. My twin sister was with me, actually, so we were both working on our master's research. And we had found this one little gully where the rocks were really well exposed. So in kind of crawling down into that gully there were a few little bones peeking out the side of the cliff. And I remind my twin sister Celina I found it first. But I think even though that was a big accomplishment, being a good academic a good professor or a good teacher a good researcher requires many many, many, other skills and knowledge and focus. And every now and again it's it's kind of like, “Gosh, can I really do all of this?”

Number ten. Time. So like, not having enough time.

My name is Marina Suarez and these are 10 things that scare me.