During the twelfth summer of my life, I noticed not everyone around me was a person. People started repeating themselves, their differences only skin deep. They wore different faces but were the same on the inside. My age was reflected in the number of the count, and the number of unique people I encountered for the first time. I counted twelve.

I never meet anyone again.

Categorizing and pairing them by their patterns helped me hold on to the hope that I could find the real ones—the originals.

For a time, it felt incredibly lonely; twelve people and myself were all that was. The only thing I found after all my search was an even smaller world, as it turned out that the real number was half of my world, the number was six. Six people and myself.

Even those numbers had their copies.

Every persona of the twelfth had their complete opposite, which on the surface seemed completely unique, but was in fact only a different interaction of the same trait. Their opposite.

At the time I was still young and as alone as I thought one person could be, so the realization that it could be worse, that it was worse, hit me hard.

After that, I stopped looking altogether. The possibility that the truth could split even more terrified me to the core. So I let life flow as it was.

This revelation became the backbone of my life, as it defined my loneliness, it also defined who I was. At that point, I knew which persona complemented another, and just as I couldn’t stop breathing, I couldn’t stop from shifting my behavior depending on who I was facing. It came instinctually as it considerably influenced the outcome in my favor.

At some point, I decided to pick a persona that feels comfortable and make it my own. I called that moment Point 0 (Zero), and the process Zeroing (0). But the thing is… in time a skin gets tight if it’s not yours. It feels like an itch spreading from the inside. The process of repeating oneself brings thoughts of existential crises. You start feeling like a character rather than a man. I call that phase: Z-roing (Z).

Reaching this point serves as a signal that the time has come when I have to leave that persona.

For me and everything I am, this is life. It’s the only skin that doesn’t ich no matter how long I wear it.

After I accepted it as such and lived in it long enough to notice, I learned this cycle takes about 8 years. At this point, I am 38 and I’ve had to do this three times. If you did the math starting from the age of twelve when this all started, the numbers don’t add up. Well… that takes me to my Story, to where we are now. It’s happening right now, welcome to my third Zeroing.