THE EXTENDED BACKSTORY

 I was raised by an Americanized Greek-Canadian father and an American mother with predominantly Portuguese and French roots. My family was split across two faiths: my father's side, Greek Orthodox, and my mother's, Catholic. I was baptized Orthodox and attended Greek school on Sundays, but also went to Catechism and made my Catholic confirmation. Religion was always something I was simply told to do. My father never really attended church, except for a funeral, a wedding, or maybe a baptism. When I finally realized that both traditions were simply branches of the same Christianity and watched both sides of my family talk about the other, I came to a quiet conclusion: my family was not responsible enough to be my guide in these matters. So, I started finding my own way.

My childhood was spent in a broken home. My parents divorced when I was about seven or eight, and I have no recollection of their marriage ever being happy. My defining memory of that time is my father always yelling and trying to control the situation. Yet, I must acknowledge that he made sure we were fed, clothed, and housed — which is more than many may have. My mother worked equally hard to support us however she could. They were two parents who did their best despite the profound troubles they endured between themselves as a couple and as individuals.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at an age that now escapes my memory. I was prescribed Ritalin, but by the time I was ten, I had stopped taking it. I would often make my mother late for work by telling her I couldn't take my pill with her watching, and when she would go wait for me in the car, I would wash it down the drain. Later, as a teen, I told my mother: I feel I was made this way for a reason, and I aim to find out why. I grew up as a neurodivergent individual — and a left-handed one at that — trying to fit into a dominantly neurotypical world without a clear understanding of my own differences. It is incredibly hard to learn about yourself, to go through the natural trials and errors of growing up, all while everyone around you is constantly telling you that something is wrong with you simply because you aren't like them.

I had a moral compass for as long as I can remember — a quiet voice that always made me question if what I was doing was right or wrong — but I still made my share of mistakes. I was constantly picked on, both by my older brother and by peers, which left me with cripplingly low self-esteem well into my late teens and early twenties. I was quiet, awkward, and constantly told that I was an idiot and that everything was my fault. I dabbled in drugs and got into trouble, even spending some time locked up as a juvenile for stealing. To my father, I was a hellion. But beneath the rebellion, I always felt that something was fundamentally wrong with the world.

Around the age of twelve or thirteen, I started noticing things. The first thing I can clearly recall was that my father was going to yell and scream at me no matter if I did my chores or not. Children used to earn an allowance by doing their chores. So if I did my chores, got my allowance, and still got yelled at — does that sound like a me problem? No. That  is when things took a turn. I felt completely alone in figuring things out. That feeling is also a symptom of ADHD, but it was real regardless of how it is defined. I began using myself and my situation as a case study, the way I did with the chores experiment. Something in me was noticing patterns, running small tests, watching the results.

What I was doing, though I could not yet name it, was cross analyzing first-person and third-person observation. From the inside, I was searching for the right adjustment that might change the relational field. From the outside, I was confronting a system that often remained structurally consistent regardless of the variation I introduced. That mismatch forced a deeper realization: not all systems respond to effort in the way we hope they will.

In my darkest places, around the age of thirteen or fourteen, I began researching witchcraft and the occult — seeking power, control, and perhaps a superpower in a life where I felt powerless. But really, it was the peace and understanding that my family could not provide that I was seeking. I had already been greatly drawn to the stories of indigenous peoples, and Native Americans in particular. I respected that they respected the land. That is how I ended up reading about paganism first — just as humanity has — and then Wicca, because of that same respect for nature. Some of my family deemed me a devil worshiper and would not let my cousins around me.

It was also around fourteen that I started taking martial arts and formally learned about meditation. I read a book called The Seven Steps to Inner Power by Grandmaster Tae Yun Kim, which profoundly shifted my perspective. Her book taught me how to visualize in a meditative state. Following that, I began noticing how my thoughts and feelings directly affected my reality — and more importantly, that the way I responded, even internally, to the actions or words of others also shaped my reality, but only in the way that I allowed it.

By fifteen or sixteen, I started journaling. Or note-taking really — more sporadic, in the neurodivergent style. I was measuring myself and my actions against the only thing I could call absolute truth, and that was nature and how nature functions, because it is not influenced by the hand of man. At least not the natural rhythm, though we certainly do disturb that rhythm.

I look at the world from the inside out, not from the outside in. I began learning how to step back from emotional overstimulation and rely more heavily on logic when making choices. That shift was not a denial of emotion, but a reorganization of participation. In the terms of this paper, it was an early practical lesson in the role of the observer: reality is not only something interpreted, but something we remain connected to, reinforce, or gradually disengage from through what we invest in and cultivate.

At age sixteen, I was being told I was stupid and would never amount to anything. That used to echo in my head, and sometimes I would cry myself to sleep to the echoes of voices screaming in my head, saying I was stupid and to blame for everything.

I wanted to die. I wanted to kill myself for more than half of my life, sometimes thinking about suicide all day long. Do you know how exhausting that is? I never tried it. Not once. Though I had taken an unloaded gun, made sure three or four times that it was completely empty, and put it up to my head or in my mouth, pulling the trigger multiple times. This was my way of relieving that tension in a safe way — maybe even seeing what it would feel like to actually pull a trigger. There were other times I stood very close to train tracks, waiting for a train, focusing on the front of the engine as it approached and imagining I was standing on the tracks. When the train passed me and the wind hit me, I had an immediate, sudden, sharp pain that was gone right away. I had been so focused on the front of that train that I literally felt what it would have felt like to be standing there. At the moment of that realization, I cried a little.

But since suicide was off the table, there was only one other option: to become an introvert. And so I did. I would sit and think about how those actions would affect those around me. It was always the thought of my mother that stopped me. I could never do that to her. I loved her enough to choose to suffer in those moments when I felt there was no escape.

THE POEM OF QUESTIONS

How do you escape when there is no escape?

How do you forget what you know and observe everything that is?

How do you become everything that can be?

How do you be me?

How do you be you?

What does it mean to become us?

That which cannot be created cannot be destroyed because THE ALL recycles over and over again.

What is positive when it is not negative and what is negative when it is not positive?

What does it truly mean to be neutral? I am me and I am you,

I am Neutron.

When I was nineteen, I finally broke through what I called the "stupid block." I began teaching myself to work on cars. My father told me I would fail, insisting I knew nothing. But I had no money, thus I had no other choice. Anytime I tried to learn something from him, he would push me aside the moment I didn't do it exactly his way, calling me an idiot. The only thing his methods taught me was to give up when there was something new to learn. But as I grew older, a quiet integrity grew within me. I saw how people exposed their weaknesses when confronted with things they didn't understand, and it pushed me to pursue the things others avoided. I rejected sports and video games because my bullies loved them. I chose to be the weird one as a defense mechanism.

As I got older, the meaning of being told that everything was my fault changed. At first, it felt like accusation. Later, I recognized another layer of agency within it. I could not control another person's temperament, interpretation, or persistence, but I could still choose whether to remain emotionally fused to the situation, whether to engage the argument, and whether to keep investing my energy into a pattern that was not changing. In that sense, fault gave way to choice, and choice gave way to a more disciplined understanding of agency.

Just after high school, I began to notice profound patterns connecting the spiritual and the physical worlds. I realized that just as Christianity has the Holy Trinity, an atom is composed of a trio of particles. Electricity relies on positive, negative, and neutral charges, as does mathematics, and a triangle stands as the strongest structural shape with only three points. This was when I first started noticing the archetypal numbers — at least the number three. Later came the number seven, which I related to the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest, as well as the neutral seven on the pH scale. Then came thirteen, mirrored in Jesus and his twelve disciples and the thirteen lunar cycles. But that was just the beginning.

In my early twenties, my curiosity evolved into a profound spiritual quest. It has not been an easy road. I have experienced severe mental and spiritual breaks — going "crazy" three times, most recently at the end of 2018, and I found my own way back each time. I have spoken to countless people, stepped far outside my comfort zone, and compared experiences across different walks of life. Ultimately, it is all the same to me. I see the underlying similarities in everything.

My mother was my emotional support. The person I leaned on all of my life, up until her death. My father is big hearted. I can see through all of his behavior and feel who he is — I can see the love he has inside; I just don't think he loves himself. Both of my parents have been like opposites. Me and my father have always butted heads, and my mother has always been the one to nurture. Can you see it? That's exactly why I am a Neutron. She was my confidant and my best friend. If I were ever to be married, she would have been my best man.

From around the age of fourteen, I understood what the necessary sacrifice was, if I intended to build something real. I had to leave the old version of my life behind — the relationships, the conflicts, the version of myself that others had constructed and insisted upon. Knowing myself required seeing myself clearly, not through the interpretations my family and others had formed about me. What it is like inside this experience — this particular body, this particular way of processing the world — is something no one else has direct access to. I tried to share it. Most could not receive it, not because of ill will, but because genuine understanding was not available to them from the outside. My mother was the exception. She was the only one who actually listened and heard me. We both learned from and inspired each other. I could never have turned my back on the only person who held that position — it would have devastated her.

She passed away on October 29th, 2022, between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. PST. 

The way I received losing her was that the universe was forcing me to detach, because I could not do it on my own. Had that detachment not occurred, I would not have fully set flight on my own. Don't birds kick their young out of the nest to get them to fly? I had prayed and prayed and spoken out loud to my mother, asking her to come to me in a dream, just so I could be with her again. But only one dream came. She asked me — not what I was, but what we are doing with my life. And I told her. I said: I'm going to do my writing. She smiled and calmly said OKAY, while slightly nodding her head. As if that was what she had been waiting for me to say.

I had Math X in action as a subjective experience my entire life. I didn't create Math X until 2025. That's when I found the language for what was already running. Throughout my life, I was constantly told to pick one thing and stick to it. Because of my neurodivergence, I jumped from interest to interest, which was often criticized. Yet, looking back, all those struggles and shifting passions are exactly what allowed me to see how everything in existence connects. Since I was told to pick one thing, I finally did: I picked looking for how everything connects as one, in hopes of helping others see the same.

My bird's eye view of things is like a coping mechanism. It doesn't help me not suffer from the experience of something, unless I completely disconnect emotionally. It just gives me clarity, knowing that the only way is through — so I sit and wait for it to pass. I still have the feelings of no escape. Feelings of depression. But it's different now. I'm familiar with this place. Although it might be unpleasant, all I have to do is have patience. And so in that way it doesn't make me weak. Just patient.

It is a simple choice, but you can only make it if you are able to see it. Take a moment to observe nature. Look at how plants and animals operate in an ongoing cycle of regeneration. One existence directly aids in the creation of another. We breathe the oxygen that plants exhale, and they breathe the carbon dioxide we exhale. Our existence is self regenerating and could continue for eternity, if only we stopped destroying ourselves. Nature is the ultimate model of the truth we all seek. It was there, functioning as it always has, long before man ever formed the idea of academics or religion.

The world is so heavily invested in differences — which only create separation (expansion, entropy) — rather than similarities, which create connection (contraction, singularity). Hopefully this work influences people to treat each other better. And if not, at least I tried by sharing my own journey. That's what it looks like inside of a Neutron.