Table of Contents
One of my longest-running obsessions in my life—perhaps the single most focused obsession—has always been numbers for me. As I previously touched upon in my blog entry titled "The Little Weirdo That Could," I talk about my fascination with numbers and how my earliest memories involved the fine structure constant.
These numbers that I saw felt like they were important—a significance for which I didn't understand. I saw them everywhere, even when I closed my eyes.
At the time, I would often do anything I could to forget about them in the moment. This often involved a rich imagination where I painted environments within my head, creating elaborate scenarios that unfolded like cinema-grade, high-definition movies.
Nelson’s Bubble
I was always off doing my own thing in my own little bubble—whether that was enjoying flights of fantasy, obsessing over numbers and patterns, or using forks to enhance my creative imagination by placing myself into a focused meditative state—although this wasn't something I intended at the time.
I found that having an object, such as a fork or even a toothbrush, would help me to visually create elaborate scenes mentally. As I would hold these objects in my hand and wave them back and forth rapidly or fling them about, I would stare into them, and it would help me to create additional scenery in my head.
Of course, the numbers that haunted me were always present in some form—in my mentally based worlds, they would present themselves as duplicates of objects or multiples of people. A lot of these environments were of a futuristic setting, such as aircraft, spaceships, and things of that nature.
These scenes often included geometric shapes and structures, and I would get so caught up in marveling at my creations that I would lose track of time. When I finally looked up, it was hours—sometimes even half a day—that had gone by.
Explorative Memories
Join me as I explore my obsession with numbers, the worlds I’ve created to escape them, and my quest to understand why I experience all of this. It’s a candid look inside my mind and my journey toward self-discovery.xplorative Memories
Around the age of 7, I discovered that I possessed the ability to open up any memory I had personally experienced in my life and insert myself back into it. I could look around in it and inspect things more closely that I had missed at the time.
One such memory I often revisited was my fourth-grade science class. My science teacher was the only teacher I ever had who remembered my name. As common and simple as it is, she always greeted me and called upon me.
When the other kids froze me out and ignored me during group activities, she allowed me to work on my own and still gave me credit for it—the only teacher who ever did so. She would tell me about how she remembered what it was like being in school and how she saw a lot of herself in me.
She was so full of life and had a vibrant soul. The following year, she was murdered. It was never the same after that—people moved on, time progressed—but I never had another teacher quite like her.
Secret Lost Forever?
As I got older, I found that I began to lose focus on the fine structure constant. I stopped seeing its numerical representation. At the same time, I also began to become extremely tired when I attempted to create or enter into these mentally rich worlds I had built for myself.
I can create new worlds, but I can't stay in them for longer than an hour or two. And once I leave, I feel drained both emotionally and physically. I feel like my chance to uncover the fine structure mystery has run its course and will never return—that makes me sad.
Mathematical Analysis
In my preteen years, I discovered that I had the ability to look at something in the environment—such as a car driving by or a railroad crossing arm lowering—and be able to mathematically predict outcomes and situations based on variables like plastic bags, rocks, or even fallen trees.
When I became a photographer in my 20s, I began to utilize these abilities toward that pursuit. Like a heads-up display on an aviator's helmet, I was able to visualize the angles at which the sun was overhead and get a perfect shot every time by calculating angles and trajectories in mere seconds.
This method of achieving goals with photography has only strengthened since then, and I have used it with experiments, hobbies, and scientific investigations.
Final Thought
There’s a lot about myself I don’t know—many oddities I’ve been exploring and trying to make sense of for as long as I can remember. While I’ve made excellent progress toward understanding myself and all that is humanly possible, I still lack the “why?”
I’m getting older, and sometimes I wonder if I will ever crack my own mystery before I die. Nobody else cares. It’s fallen on me to peel back the veil of my own mysterious circumstances. It’s hard for me to just sit here and accept that it’s all one massive coincidence—that I would have all these experiences in a single lifetime.
I’m no superman, nor do I strive to be. I want to know why these things about myself existed—and even persist to this day. What’s so special about me? Did I get so lucky that I won the genetic lottery and just happened to get all these abilities? Or did it have nothing at all to do with my origins? Perhaps it was purely unintentional, and I am just the most unlucky guy in the world.