Strength in Numbers

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with numbers.

Math has always been a strength of mine. Growing up, my dad was an accountant, and it just made sense that I had inherited his knack for working with numbers. I never really questioned this ability. It was just something I was good at naturally, and I never gave much thought to its role, significance, or purpose in my life.

When I was 5 years old I would spend time reading from a World Atlas, focusing specifically on the numbers. The population of a particular city. The area of a country in square miles. The order of all 50 states based on its population density, from largest to smallest.

When I was 7 years old I became interested in sports. After attending my first baseball game my dad began to share his baseball card collection with me. I would spend hours upon hours studying the backs of the cards, absorbing their career statistics season by season, column by column. I was completely hooked.

By age 10 I was but keeping score during my sister’s community league basketball games, and spent four years as the JV and varsity basketball team’s statistician between middle and high school. I took a statistics class as a high school senior and a Statistics in Baseball course as a sophomore in college, which inspired me to begin creating my own metrics. I’ve since worked for ESPN, and have created a number of different formulas for baseball over the past 10 years.

In grad school, even as my focus expanded beyond sports, I continued analyzing numbers, this time relating to health (some of you may be familiar with my health perceptions survey). I have been and still am involved in several research projects to this day. I’ve worked on more spreadsheets than I can remember, and despite some jokes, I’ve truly loved it all.

So what’s the point in me telling you all of this?

In one of my earlier articles, I referred to my OCD as a disembodied voice that would tell me what to do. Whether it was retracing my steps, tapping my feet in patterns, or repeating a sentence, I would give in to whatever it was that my OCD wanted me to do.

“I must admit that for years, I genuinely felt that my OCD was a separate being.”

-From my article Stuck (12/25/17)

It didn’t matter how irrational the action my OCD was telling me to do might have been. I was so restricted by anxiety that I almost always felt I had to give in. Aside from being exhausting, one of the most frustrating things about it was that while I couldn’t resist the impulses, doing them didn’t really make any rational sense.

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