superposition

I find peace in chaos.

At 3 AM, when the world is quiet and my OCD is loudest, I find peace in the one place that makes no sense: quantum mechanics. While others are partying, I'm watching an old man explain the double slit experiment. Not because it's required for some advanced physics class, but because something about quantum mechanics pulls me in like gravity. Most of my peers find it curious, but I can’t shake the paradoxical truth of quantum reality.

My OCD has always stipulated that the world make perfect sense. For years, my brain functioned like a computer: true or false, right or wrong, one or zero. No in between, no gray area where contradictions could coexist. During my childhood, this binary thinking felt like refuge. If I could figure out the “right” way to think, feel, or act, everything would be okay. However, life kept presenting situations that defied my neat categories, and my mind tried to force complexity into simplicity.

Yet gradually, through all those sleepless nights with quantum physics crowding my mind, my brain began to shift. Here was a law of physics stating that particles exist in multiple states until observed. An electron doesn’t choose between spinning up or down: it spins both ways at once, existing in a cloud of probability, not certainty. For someone whose brain screams at ambiguity, this should’ve been torture. Instead, it was an awakening.

The more I studied quantum entanglement, the more I saw something I had never noticed about my own contradictions. Just as entangled particles stay connected across vast distances, the seemingly opposite pieces of myself could stay linked. I could feel genuine gratitude for the treatment that saved me while still holding resentment about everything I had to brave. I could dream about the future with hope and still feel my chest tighten with terror. My OCD had always convinced me that holding contradictory thoughts would tear me apart. But quantum mechanics whispered something different: maybe contradiction wasn’t the antithesis of truth.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle became my eccentric mantra. The theory that we can’t simultaneously know both the position and momentum of a particle, that precision in one conjures ambiguity in another, helped me accept that I couldn’t have perfect knowledge of myself or the future. My compulsions had always been attempts to achieve certainty, but, like subatomic particles, the human experience is fundamentally uncertain. It’s there, in uncertainty’s shadow, that we taste freedom.

While falling asleep to lectures on quantum tunnelling, I discovered that particles can pass through impenetrable barriers. It gave me a new way to see my own journey: how I went from a kid paralyzed with anxiety to someone who could lead therapy groups. I turned uncertainty from an adversary into a mentor. I didn’t circumvent my mental walls; I tunneled straight through them, carving out paths where logic insisted none should exist.

Today, when attempting to contain my obsessive thoughts, I tell myself that even the smallest of particles refuse confinement, and find solace in something bigger than my desire for absolutes. Complexity, not certainty, is the natural order of things; the universe itself is in superposition, welcoming incongruity as a feature rather than a bug.

My draw to quantum mechanics isn’t only about physics; it’s also about finding a language for the insurmountable complexity of being human. In a world demanding simple answers, quantum theory permits me to exist in multiple states at once, to find beauty in uncertainty, and to accept that the deepest of truths might be contradictory. They teach us that quantum tunneling defies classical physics: particles passing through barriers they shouldn’t. But what they don’t tell you is that sometimes the toughest journey isn’t the one through the barrier. It’s realizing the barrier was never really there. My OCD convinced me I was confined. The quantum world showed me I have always been free.