Maybe I didn’t love maths because I was good at it. Maybe I loved knowing there was always an answer.

Last night, I was talking to a friend about maths.

She told me she had never liked it. Numbers had always been difficult for her, and I immediately said:

“I love numbers. Numbers never let you down. They’re always exact. If you need to trust someone, trust numbers.”

I was half joking.

But then she asked me a very simple question.

Why did you like numbers so much when you were little?

And I started thinking about it.

I don’t think I had ever really asked myself that before.

Maybe I Didn’t Love Maths. Maybe I Loved Certainty.

I was very young when I became fascinated by numbers.

And when I say young, I mean really young.

Before I was four, I had one of those little boards with beads you could move from one side to the other to count. I could sit there doing sums, moving the beads around, adding, subtracting.

I loved it.

Around that same age, my mum sometimes worked shifts from three in the afternoon until eleven at night.

There were no mobile phones.

So at night, I waited.

I knew what time she finished work. And somehow, even as a tiny child, I also knew approximately how long it should take her to get home.

Eleven o’clock.

Eleven ten.

Eleven fifteen.

If enough time passed and she still wasn’t home, I would start getting nervous.

Where was she?

Why was she taking longer?

Had something happened?

I was a little girl. I couldn’t call her. I couldn’t check her location. I couldn’t do anything except wait and watch the clock.

At that age, I was also living in my grandfather’s house. It was a home with a lot of love, but there were moments that could be unpredictable.

My grandfather was one of the people I loved most in the world. But alcohol was sometimes part of our home too, and as a little girl, I didn’t always know what kind of evening it was going to be.

An ordinary day could suddenly change.

I could be sitting in the kitchen drawing or playing, and suddenly the atmosphere would shift.

People would react.

Arguments could happen.

And I think somewhere in that little brain of mine, I understood very early that even in a home full of love, things could change without warning.

But numbers didn’t.

Two plus two was four.

It was four yesterday.

It would be four tomorrow.

It didn’t matter who was angry.

It didn’t matter who came home late.

It didn’t matter what kind of day you were having.

You could calculate it ten thousand times and it would still give you the same answer.

Maybe that’s why I loved numbers.

They were predictable.

And predictability felt safe.

Then I Discovered Problems

As I got older, maths became more interesting.

Then came physics and chemistry.

And eventually, something I absolutely loved: those long problems where they gave you a situation but didn’t tell you exactly how to solve it.

You had to figure it out.

What information do I have?

What am I looking for?

What is the unknown?

Which variables matter?

What formula could connect all of this?

And then you solved it.

I think I loved that process even more than simply getting the correct answer.

Because there was something incredibly reassuring about looking at something that initially seemed complicated and thinking:

There is a way through this. I just have to find it.

And without realising it, I think I started approaching life the same way.

Something goes wrong?

Okay.

What’s the actual problem?

What do I know?

What don’t I know?

What can I control?

What are my options?

What do I need to do next?

Solve one thing.

Then the next.

For a long time, this worked remarkably well.

Maths Also Gave Me People

There’s another part of this story that I hadn’t thought about until that conversation.

Maths didn’t only give me certainty.

It gave me people.

When I was around ten, I changed schools.

My previous school had been more modest, and the new one was a little more cheto, as we would say in Argentina.

At first, the girls didn’t really include me.

So I hung out with the boys.

Eventually, things changed. I made girlfriends and found my place.

And as we got older, studying became one of the ways I connected with people.

Friends would come over and I would help them with maths, physics or chemistry.

I genuinely loved teaching them.

I loved when someone looked at a problem and said, “I don’t understand this,” and I could say:

“Okay. Look at it this way.”

We’d study first.

I’d explain the exercises.

We’d solve everything.

And only then would we throw ourselves somewhere, listen to music, watch films, talk nonsense and be teenagers.

Looking back, it’s funny.

The thing I had originally loved because it was so predictable eventually became one of the ways I connected with completely unpredictable human beings.

And Then People Ruined My Perfect System

After school, I started studying Civil Engineering.

Which meant maths.

A lot of maths.

Exercises and formulas and calculations, over and over again.

And the strange thing was that I was doing something I was good at — something I genuinely liked — but at some point I remember thinking:

Life can’t just be this.

Around that time, another part of my world started opening.

I became involved with a church community, and through that experience I started meeting people and entering environments that were completely different from the neat world of equations.

I visited people in hospital.

I visited people in prison.

I listened to stories.

I started seeing lives that couldn’t be reduced to one decision, one mistake or one obvious explanation.

And slowly, I began understanding something maths had never prepared me for.

People don’t work like numbers.

Two plus two is four.

But two people can live through remarkably similar circumstances and become completely different human beings.

Someone can make a terrible decision and still have a story worth understanding.

Someone can know exactly what they should do and still not be capable of doing it.

Someone can have choices and, at the same time, be profoundly shaped by circumstances they never chose.

Responsibility can exist alongside context.

Two things can be true at once.

And sometimes you can identify every variable and still not get a clean answer.

That was a completely different kind of education.

Not Everything Is an Equation

I don’t think I ever stopped being the girl who loved formulas.

If anything, she’s still very much here.

Give me a problem and my instinct is still to understand it.

Break it apart.

Find the pattern.

Identify what can be changed.

Do something.

I like solutions.

I like knowing what comes next.

And yes, I still love numbers.

There is something deeply comforting about the fact that they don’t suddenly wake up one morning and decide to become something else.

But life has taught me something numbers couldn’t.

Some problems need solutions.

Others need time.

Some situations need action.

Others need understanding.

Sometimes there is a clear unknown waiting to be solved.

And sometimes there isn’t.

Sometimes people contradict themselves.

Sometimes circumstances change.

Sometimes you do everything correctly and still don’t get the result you calculated.

And perhaps one of the strangest parts of growing up has been learning to live inside that uncertainty without immediately trying to turn it into an equation.

Because maybe not knowing isn’t always a problem.

Maybe sometimes it’s simply the condition of being alive.

I still trust numbers.

Give me the same equation ten thousand times and I love that the answer won’t suddenly change on me.

People will.

Life will.

And apparently, I have to live with that.

I’m still learning.

But maybe growing up has been realising that not every unknown needs to be solved before I can be okay.

And now I keep thinking about the question my friend accidentally made me ask myself:

What did you learn to rely on before you were old enough to understand why you needed it?