What was your favorite subject in school?
My favorite subject in school? Oh, it’s an easy question but layered in a way that defies a simple answer, as if something as fixed as ‘favorite’ could be pinned down in a mind constantly in flux. The truth is, I was never drawn to the standard allure of subjects with defined boundaries and rigid shapes. No, my favorite subject unfolded like a labyrinth that seemed, at first, impossible to name. It wasn’t math with its quiet, pristine logic. Nor was it science, although there were days when I fell into its seductive web of facts and theories. And yet, it also wasn’t English, though I devoured novels like bread and clung to every word in poetry as if it held a secret to the universe.
I’ll say this: it wasn’t so much a subject as it was a state of mind—a way of looking, of peeling back layers from the world around me. It was a fascination with the intersections of everything I couldn’t classify, categorize, or understand. My subject, my singular obsession, was uncertainty.
Imagine this: the young version of me, barely reaching my own potential, sitting in a classroom, staring not at the teacher or the blackboard but through the window, watching leaves spiraling in the wind. I wasn’t daydreaming, not exactly. I was creating a constellation in my mind. Every leaf was a point in an enormous map, connecting science to literature, math to art, and my young heart to the ancient pulses of the world outside. Teachers would ask me to pay attention, to stop “drifting off,” but they never understood that I was paying attention. I was simply tuning into frequencies they’d long stopped hearing.
What was my favorite subject? Call it “Existential Studies,” a term they’d never find in any curriculum guide but one that suited me well. There were moments—rare but potent—when something the teacher said would slip under my skin and resonate. An algebraic proof, so precise and relentless, felt like music to me. A few odd notes of poetry, caught in the endless drone of a textbook, would sneak into my head and set up a rhythm, a heartbeat of pure language that lasted long after the lesson ended.
If pressed, if I had to give it a proper name, I might say “Philosophy.” But this was a philosophy built in fragments, pieced together like some abstract mosaic. It was everywhere and nowhere in that structured school setting, hiding in plain sight as bits of light and shadow filtering through the blinds. In history class, when they recited wars and revolutions like dates to be memorized, I tasted not facts but questions, like strange, untranslatable words caught in my throat. How does a moment collapse into meaning? What makes some events linger, like ghostly imprints on the psyche, while others dissolve into the ordinary mist of time?
People would have looked at me—if they cared to look closely—and seen a student perhaps lacking focus. But I was sharp, honed in on the edges of things, on the spaces between subjects. I studied every pause, every moment of stillness that hung like unanswered questions in the air. And in these spaces, I found what I now call my “favorite subject”—the art of asking without expecting to know.
They never taught us this, never even hinted that it existed. Yet this subject was alive, breathing in the pauses between periods, in the notes half-scribbled in my margins, in the strange sketches I made on my notebooks. I could tell you about the day my history teacher mentioned Plato in passing, and how the name struck me as if he were a prophet of some lost religion, setting off a series of discoveries that took me years to piece together. Or the time in biology when our teacher described evolution, and my young mind felt a primal thrill at the thought that life itself was an unbroken thread winding through millennia, leading directly to me.
Every subject bled into this singular fascination. I’d go from learning about molecules to feeling an overwhelming awe for how small we all are in the vast, swirling tapestry of existence. One day in chemistry class, the teacher explained something about entropy, how it’s the measure of disorder in a system. And as soon as the word was out of her mouth, I felt it sink into me, like it had unlocked something. I realized, with a mixture of fear and exhilaration, that life itself is entropic, that my favorite subject—this fascination with the unknown—is part of that cosmic unraveling. To think, here I was, in a classroom learning about structure, while secretly harboring a love for the breakdown of it all.
Looking back now, I realize that I was collecting fragments, each lesson a shard of the greater, unknowable whole. My favorite subject was the pursuit of understanding, and the stark awareness that it would never, could never, be fully achieved. It was the joy of glimpsing infinity in finite moments, the thrill of realizing that every answer was merely a doorway to a thousand more questions.
My favorite subject was, is, and perhaps always will be: curiosity. An unruly, untamed force, sprawling across disciplines, refusing to stay contained.
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