Introduction

Who I am, who I was, and who I want to be. What this will be.

Werner Heisenberg said: “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think”, which is the inspiration behind the name of this publication. I am a physicist – an aspiring one at least – so I spend most of my days reading textbooks, doing complicated mathematics and trying to understand how the universe works. But I am also a writer, and have been for the better part of my life. When I was a child, I dreamt up immaculate worlds in my mind (the real world was too hard to understand, its rules and customs didn’t make any sense to me, neither did it make sense why people were being so mean to me at school), started translating them onto paper when I was ten. I didn’t pay attention in class anymore, instead I was scribbling in my notebook, my characters and their adventures the only thing on my mind. It probably didn’t help that I was bullied horrifically, making me all the more keen to ignore whatever was going on outside of my own head.

So I wrote. Pages upon pages of text about friendship, resilience, and finding oneself through meeting one’s people, after feeling alien to the world one’s whole life. Maybe that is strange to begin with, a child, writing about such themes, without ever talking to a single soul about how they were feeling. But that is what I learned to do with my emotions through my upbringing, you weren’t to share that you were unhappy, shouldn’t voice your feelings, just keep it in, push it down ever further, until you forget the emotions were even there to begin with. Of course, it all came toppling down at one point, my entire construct of self, unstable as it was, collapsed, leaving me to sort through the wreckage, alone. It wasn’t until my mid-teens that I started seeing a therapist, and it took another decade of therapy that didn’t work, collapse after collapse, for someone to figure out what was “wrong” with me – even though of course, there was nothing wrong with me at all, I was just different. I stopped writing, something that was once all I wanted to do became an uncomfortable chore I couldn’t bring myself to complete. The more I researched the terms that doctors and therapists were throwing at me, the more things that happened to me, the harder it got to weave them into fiction, it was just too awful, I couldn’t look that way, started pushing my emotions down again, just following the old script – it had worked for a while before I collapsed, I thought, it must work again, at least for a while.

Several years later, I feel the need to write again – and I have been writing, in private, tiny, almost illegible handwriting filling my journals, releasing my emotions and processing what happened to me, finally.

I am starting to know myself better now, diving into the strange world that is my mind, finding interests, passions, goals along the way (that’s how I found physics, it was in there all along, just waiting to be rediscovered). It is hard to know yourself when there was never much of a self to begin with.

I don’t have a concrete plan for what I will write, not yet.

Possibilities? Personal essays, short fiction, literature reviews, train-of-thought-ramblings, researched articles about physics, neurodivergence, or trauma.

But, and that is the thing I know, I will write. I will write.