Anyway, some people took personal offense to this? And, against my better judgement, I'm going to try to explain what I meant by this statement? (1/n) https://twitter.com/thebittersnake/status/1327104594586071042

So, US society for the most part is very Invested in binary thinking. You are Male or Female. You are left or right brained.* (yes, I know that left/right brain dichotomy is fake as fuck but people still believe in it) (2/n)

The reality is quite different tho. Most things exist in a spectrum, like gender for instance. But this is still very much propagated in school. (3/n)

Are you a math person or a reading person? stem or humanities? WHICH BOX SHOULD YOU BE PLACED INTO (4/n)

For better or worse, this can get deeply ingrained and thus lead people to believe that they can't be anything else and conform to that box (5/n)

I love math. I lucked out by having a parent who not only knew math but understood it. Could show me physical tangible examples of math in the world around me instead of just arithmetic drills on a page. (6/n)

Could show me a prism and hold it up to the light? And see a spectrum of colors dance across the beige carpet in our living room and told me "we can explain this with math" (7/n)

How could I not be utterly enraptured by it? Being able to distill the utter chaos of life into eloquent symbols? it was like magic to me. In some ways it still is. (8/n)

I love math but I was not a "genius". I had to work at it. It wasn't until much later that I realized I had ADHD. I didn't always immediately get something via a lecture. I had long hours sitting and working problem after problem til understood the underlying concept (9/n)

It was hard. It still is hard but I was incredibly fortunate to learn early that just because something is hard doesn't mean you're dumb? But externally people attributed it to me "being a math person". Not that I was a hard worker. Just "well you just have a math brain" 10/n

I love math. My first love is reading. I can't remember not knowing how to read. I often crafted stories in my mind silently, never daring to place them on the page because "I was a math person" 11/n

I shied away from creative writing because "I was math person" 12/n

For so long, I had unknowingly adopted the mindset that math was the opposite of art or creation. And since I was a "math person" I couldn't exist in that sphere. 13/n

Which in someways is ironic given my love of sci-fi but hey sometimes you're overly myopic when you're in a box. 14/n

I still remember the first lit course I took in uni. It was art of the probable. The professor was in literature but he was an alum of the university. The walls of my part-society/part self-inflicted box began to crumble. 15/n

We were reading both classic literature and plays but also work by Descartes and Pascal among others. One of the essays I wrote was looking at the intersection of Hamlet's "To be or Not to be" and Pascal's wager. 16/n

What many forget? Is that mathematics partial grew out of philosophy. To think, to ponder, to reflect upon the natural world. STEM itself grew out of that desire. 17/n

To want to understand the world around you? Is a human desire. There's no right or wrong way to do it. (I mean I Have Opinions but Literally So Does Everyone) but to imply you can only choose one way? Is deeply restrictive and putting barriers where there need be none. 18/n

It took me a long time to realize that there's nothing wrong with you for loving and being inspired by the intersection of STEM and Humanities. A good chunk of STEM disciplines consists of breaking down barriers between field. 19/n

Hell, my PhD is in a field that didn't even exist 20 years ago. But someone said what would happen if we tried to explain genes using math and computer science? And lots of people did say "uh I'm an X person and we don't do Y" and vice versa 20/n

But some went why not? Why not both? We see this in STEM and the humanities. 3D animation? A lot of that involves mathematics beneath the hood. I wish someone has told me that mathematicians worked at Pixar. That to do math was not merely locking yourself into a single box. 21/n

But I eventually climbed out into the messiness of the world. Imperfect, but here. Loving math. Loving words and intersect between them. Fin. 22/22