The first year of my new life felt like a never-ending series of tests, evaluations, and endless scrutiny. They studied me like I was an anomaly, a strange case they couldn’t quite figure out. It was as if I was trapped inside some sort of experiment; I was constantly surrounded by psychologists, neurologists, educators—all of them eager to understand how my brain worked, why it was the way it was. They subjected me to tests that would make most people feel like lab rats. Aptitude tests. Problem-solving challenges. Analytical exercises. Brain scans. And the cycle would repeat.

They were obsessed with studying the way I processed information, how my mind jumped from one conclusion to the next, how I could see patterns where others saw chaos.

I came from nothing, and I wasn’t supposed to be where I was. I wasn’t supposed to have made it this far.

They wanted to know where my creativity came from, how my brain was wired so differently. But no matter how many times they poked and prodded at my mind, they never understood me. They didn’t know where the answers came from, didn’t know why I saw the world the way I did. They could collect all the data they wanted, but data meant nothing. You couldn’t just pick me apart and expect to find answers. It wasn’t that simple.

You could only look for patterns, try to break it down into something manageable, and in doing so, they would never truly understand what made me, me.

When they asked me about my earlier years and tried to dig into my past to figure out why I was the way I was, I couldn’t give them all the answers they wanted. What was the point?

They couldn’t understand what it was like to be invisible, abandoned by everyone around you, nothing more than a casualty in the eyes of those who were supposed to protect me. There was no reason to tell them I spent my days counting the holes in the window screen, or the blades of grass in the tiny backyard they locked me in for hours, or how I wandered for miles to a crumbling park when I was six, just to count the grains of sand beneath my feet.

Numbers were the only thing that kept me from drowning in the horror of my memories. They offered a way out, distracting me from the screaming, the blood, the face of my father—the one who had those same startling green eyes. Eyes that looked too much like mine. His gaze was always filled with fury, always reminded me of my place in the world.

The pain was constant, but numbers gave me a way to escape. They let me float above it, detached from the world, from the violence that had shaped my life.