How Numbers Stabilize Experiences

Throughout my life, I have forgotten many aspects of myself. This could be from how my personality was at a certain age, to not understanding which side of the story of my parent's divorce to believe.

Being continuously lost had caused me to feel unreliability and distrust of individuals, particularly my family. It hurts knowing that the people who you expect to trust the most are the same individuals who will hurt you the most. People I deeply cared for had lied to me, so I made this assumption about all my friends and family. Being unable to confide in people led me to find comfort elsewhere. The passion I had for numbers, not people, would make the most significant changes in my mind.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted attention. I approached this by either keeping quiet to myself waiting for someone to ask me how I was, or only speaking out about the topics on which I held a comfortable amount of knowledge. The first never worked as everyone was busy with their friends that they had already made. Changing schools every 2 years or so didn't leave me with much choice in the friends I made. Subsequently, I was left to only talk when I could raise my hand after those 20 seconds of silence where everyone looked around in confusion except for me, waiting for my moment, hoping I could answer the math problem.

English wasn't my first language. Settling into the language you realized everyone but you was fluently speaking in and in which you could not express your ideas was tough. I was very encouraged to learn the language, but my interest was more heavily focused on the aspects of life and school which did not require a deep understanding of English.

As life moved up and down throughout moving schools, moving houses, and not being able to openly communicate with my family, I started to study ahead in mathematics. Numbers follow a specific formula. Geometry is used to find the one quantity assigned to a certain shape. Algebra is a puzzle that might take a while, but it's all worth it at the end when the terms start to come together and feel familiar. All the work I did distracted me from the chaos I lived in.

Although I forget the timeline of events throughout my life, I remember the first time I learned multiplication. I remember being confused at every new topic, then becoming excited about solving it and even showing it to my family or friends so they could be proud of me. Numbers couldn't lie to me, numbers couldn't hurt, they always worked it out and all because of me. Math problems allowed me to feel useful in a system of equations and use my own methods to figure it out.

However, losing myself in the work I did eventually turned to me forgetting about the people I cared about. Before I knew it, life had passed me by at such a young age. My family would turn away from me because whenever they would offer to take me anywhere fun, I would decline. No one bothered to bother me, not even my brother who I thought was my best friend. I had assumed that everyone was evil deep down. That no one would ever be able to understand me like the digits on a page could. I had fallen into an obsession with solving equations and I was now faced with a decision to do what I loved or spend time with those I care about.

People interested in business always fascinated me, with their big suitcases, fancy suits, and giant skyscraper offices. When I found out that they work with numbers, on their customized schedules, I fell in love with the idea of an office job. However, this would fall me back into the deep hole of turning away from human interactions. This was until I found out that the career I adored was fundamentally a connection-based job. This forced me to try harder to communicate with people. My approach was still based on a traditional formula, never letting myself open up and only speaking about things that would benefit my skills in communication.

Numbers are everywhere, in the conversations we speak, in the seconds to hours we spend thinking, and in my heart, helping me run my everyday functions. Every subject is fundamentally a math-related subject. Math is simply a tool to interpret patterns that we see in different sectors of the world. It is a concept in our mind that does not exist in itself, only based on other natural laws that existed long before it was discovered. Math allows me to turn my hobby into a possible career. Math allows me to multitask and focus on multiple subjects as numbers are so different than words but at the same time inherently the same. Counting the seconds every task takes me might seem useless, but knowing that the digits continue to increase at a stable rate, makes life seem like a giant formula waiting for me to solve it.