I don’t want this site to become a biography about who I am, but I think there is value to be found in the lives of every individual. My own personal stories are driven by trials and experiences that I have faced, and continue to face each day. So, in order to better understand the motivation behind the story, I think it will be helpful to provide a little bit of context.
My name is Zach, and I have a BS, MS, and PhD in Nuclear Engineering. During my research years, I transitioned into Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Since graduating in 2017, I have been working for a national defense contractor on projects related to knowledge science and decision support. I have a fulfilling job, and I believe that my colleagues would say that I am “on a path towards a long and meaningful career.” The thing is, none of that is me. My titles and position in society are important in ways that I don’t completely understand, and I can acknowledge that my pursuit of these titles has shaped who I am as a person. However, knowing these things about me as an individual tells you almost nothing of value outside the constructs of our society.
So, who am I? Well, my name is Zach, and I would consider myself a chronic thinker. I was diagnosed as gifted and ADHD at a young age. As a result of being different (read: weird), I was ostracized by the majority of my peers during most of my childhood. This pushed me to a strange place at such an impressionable point in my life; I was an observer of life rather than an active participant. I was the kid sitting on the bleachers watching other kids play. I was the person just outside of the conversation; close enough to hear, but not participate. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t like other kids, or to say that my childhood was sad. I just became someone who spent the majority of my time watching and thinking. My thoughts were pervaded with the desire to understand those who didn’t accept me, and to use this knowledge to better myself.
If that wasn’t enough to impact who I would become, my step-father at the time was a healthweb developer at the beginning of the dot-com era, and we moved from place to place each year as he set up the infrastructure for modern health insurance companies. Each summer, we would move to another place and I would be forced to go through the entire process again: move to a new school, try to make friends, get pushed away, spend my time observing, repeat. It wasn’t until I was well into my teens that I started successfully leveraging what I had learned in order to mold myself into the person that I wanted to be. In the years that followed (through a truly commendable amount of effort) I started making friends and was even able to stop taking my ADHD medication, but I never stopped being that observer.
To this day, nearly two decades later, I am finally beginning to truly understand myself. I’ve spent almost 30 years slowly getting closer to someone who understands who they are on the most fundamental level, and the one thing I understand above all else is that each of us struggle to reach this same goal. We all want to understand who we are and the path to get there is difficult. We are not always on the path, but our struggles are the journey we take to walk along it. At the end of the day, what I understand most about myself is that my thoughts are molded by the stories of my life and not the other way around. I am shaped by the sum total of my experiences, which results in the way that I think and act; these unique experiences in life provide me with my own unique perspective.
I don’t think that what I want to share can ever be completed. I cannot know the whole of the thing, because I cannot have thought of it completely in every way. Instead, my goal is simply to tell a story. My story will not explain the things I believe, but with a little bit of luck, it will create an opportunity for you to see the way that I see, and maybe together we can begin to describe a new way of thinking.
So, who am I as a person? I’m not a nuclear engineer beyond a few years of education. I’m not a philosopher beyond any self-awarded title. I’m not a metaphysician or ideologist beyond occasional accidental wisdom. I would say that I am just an observer, like anyone else.
Thanks for reading.
