Then I met people who had reasons. Some train for olympiad gold medals like athletes, others dream of winning arguments on the national debate stage. When I went to join the school’s robotics team, I had to get in a line not unlike one at Six Flags. And as a fan of great classic cinema, namely Madagascar 2, I found myself becoming Marty. Feeling like one of a thousand identical zebras at the great watering hole that was campus.

So I did what anyone with reasonable animalistic instincts would do. I tried to become the best zebra.

I never made it to the front of that line. I kept building robots in a new garage with my friends, just growing to dozens instead of seven. I no longer got my adrenaline racing a guy from ITMO at 4am but instead found it on the competition field. I wasn’t part of the debate team but racked up a win-rate against referees.

And somewhere in there, without noticing, I stopped trying to be the best zebra. I just did the things that felt alive. I had a garage, bad sleep schedule, and a stateful inability to do things I didn’t care about.

For years this felt like weakness. I thought I was just undisciplined. A kid without a “why” who always figured out the “how.” I wondered if I’d grow out of it. Wake up one day and want to do the things people expected me to.

Now that I’m in college and ignoring my major requirements and lying about prereqs, I took an upper-level physics class. (Well, enrolled in a physics class. I was doing the reading at 2am the night before the exam. yk)

In the chapter about particles, it talks about two kinds: bosons and fermions. You can stack bosons infinitely, same state, same place, same everything. That’s how lasers work. Indistinguishable photons, cut from the same cloth. Physicists call them “gregarious.” I’m not kidding. That’s the actual word.

Fermions are different. No two fermions can occupy the same quantum state. The probability is zero. In some irreducible way, distinct.

I realized I’d spent years being afraid of an amorphous thing that semantically sounded like failure. I wasn’t afraid of failure. I was afraid of being a boson. Stackable. Interchangeable. Measured by my wattage¹.

I want to be fermionic. Not because fermions are better than bosons (they’re not, lasers are cool as hell) but because I think I finally understand what I’ve been looking for. I want to be irreplaceable in the quantum sense; the no-cloning2 theorem isn’t enough.

Fermions don’t know they’re fermions3. The proof appears from the interactions. The patterns left behind4. Moments where something happened because they were there, and wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t. Sixty-second intervals5, scattered across my life, where I really bent the world’s trajectory for the better. Not because someone like me was there. Because I was, occupying the only state I could. α

Thanks to Divij, Amol, Warren, Mihir & Huxley for reading drafts of this, and to all the people I interfered with that gave me my own zebra stripes.