13/06/2026
Looking at the beginning of my life, the odds were not just stacked against me, they were arranged deliberately, like a wall someone built and walked away from. The neighbourhood, the resources, the circumstances, none of it was designed with my survival in mind. If not for the gift of intelligence, I am not even supposed to make it this far. And I mean that literally, not as a figure of sp*ech.
That is why I keep looking back. Not because I miss the past, not because the past was kind to me, but because forgetting where you came from is the first step toward being dragged back there. The forces that were stacked against me from birth did not retire when I started making progress. They are patient. They recalibrate. They wait.
I think about this in terms of matter. I am like a molecule working against cohesive force, the kind of invisible pressure that keeps everything in its original state, in its original place. To move from solid to liquid requires energy. To move from liquid to gas requires more. And plasma, that fourth state that most people never even think about, that requires conditions so extreme that the average environment cannot sustain it.
Each level of transformation demands that you generate enough activation energy to break what is holding you. There is no shortcut. The physics does not negotiate.
This is why I cannot rest in the way people mean when they tell you to rest. I can pause. I can breathe. But I cannot stop generating heat, because the moment the energy drops below the threshold, the system reverts. That is not pessimism. That is thermodynamics.
Poverty is still in my rearview mirror. I can see his head clearly, not far enough to dismiss, close enough to remind me. Some people are lucky enough to outrun it so completely that they forget what it looks like. I have not been given that luxury, and I have made peace with the fact that maybe I never will be. But there is something clarifying about a chase. It tells you exactly how fast you need to move.
I am not running in fear. I am running with memory, and that is a different thing entirely.
11/06/2026