The Practical Application of Chemistry in Everyday Life

I am terrible at math.

You might (wrongly) assume that I'm being hyperbolic about this -- but when I tell you my addition-subtraction-multiplication-and-division skills are lost in a box in a subbasement of brain power somewhere -- I really mean it.  This morning I was watching an old episode of The Wire where Bubbles, a heroin-addicted street hustler, presses his new teenage business partner (business partner?) to do the quick math of 5x4 plus 6x7 and shakes his head in disgust when the kid can't immediately spit out an answer. And it made me feel a certain way -- for I, too, couldn't do the math that fast.

Bubbles would never want me working his cart with him.

Say la vee.

And while part of this is simply by virtue of being, oh, twenty-something years out of my last math class, part of it is how I've always been.  Math was always a challenging subject for me in school.  I struggled to see how the quadratic equation applied to my everyday life.  And I thought the best use of a graphing calculator was to play Tetris.

Then?  I took chemistry.  And things started to change.

My sophomore year of high school was my first foray into the periodic table of elements, with all its electrons and protons and neutrons.  My teacher was young and enthusiastic (and, ok, a total hottie) which made me lean in with interest for the subject.  At the end of that successful first go-round with lab experiments and states of matter, I asked my teacher what science class he thought I should take next -- and without batting an eye, he said, "AP Chemistry."

AP.  As in Advanced Placement.  This would be a college-level chemistry class sure to be populated by students who, ya know, liked science.

Was I that student?

Just as quickly as he volleyed his answer to me, I volleyed right back: "I'd fail."

He raised an eyebrow.  "You think so?"

And that was all it took to double dog dare me into the hardest class of my high school career -- maybe my academic career.  AP Chemistry: not for the faint of heart.

When I tell you that I struggled in this class, I mean I lived, breathed, and ate AP Chemistry.  I studied before school, during school, after school.  I breezed through my other assignments and other subjects and sunk deep into the reality that I was in way over my head with this AP Chem class.  But I thought about my teacher -- who was also my AP teacher -- and his staunch belief that I belonged in his classroom.  I worked my ass off and even though my blood sweat and tears earned me a B in the class, I knew I would never go on to become a Scientist.

This shit is hard.

But this, too, is true: when I had the opportunity to stand back and look at the experience of this class and the subject matter that I was learning about, I was fascinated by what chemistry had to teach me.  First, it took all that calculus-type math and it provided a practical application for it.  I loved chem lab days when doing this difficult math correctly meant a proper result from my experiment.  If I did up those numbers like they should be, then this liquid turns yellow.  But if I did it wrong?  Well, it might explode.

Math matters, y'all.

Math matters in chemistry because it has to do with the interaction of protons and neutrons and electrons and elemental weights and sizes.  Staring at the periodic table and seeing how many of these subatomic particles made up any given element was the key to the kingdom.  But it went beyond even that -- because those building blocks had a way of having strikingly different outcomes depending on which other elements were combining with them.

Take one carbon and two oxygen and you get carbon dioxide, a relatively harmless and everyday gas.  Subtract one of those oxygens and you get carbon monoxide, which is poisonous to humans.

What a difference an oxygen molecule makes.

In my time as an AP Chemistry student, I went way deep in the weeds of balancing equations and all kinds of things that seem like Greek to me now.  But at one time, I learned it and worked methodically through the steps to make sure the result was harmless and not dangerous, come lab day.  And while I absolutely never would ever have a job as a scientist, what I learned in that class, especially, carries weight in my understanding of the the world and all its quirks.

It taught me why math matters, for one thing.

But even beyond that, it helps me sort through a social concept that impacts every life I'm aware of: the age old question of can a person ever change.

As a social worker and a human who's spent her entire professional life dealing with other humans, I've heard both arguments: people CAN change! and also people NEVER change! and as someone who has gone through an immense growth spurt from, oh, roughly November 13, 2014 until now (#IYKYK), I can tell you that I am highly aware of how I am both completely different and entirely the same, all at once.

How can this be?

Step into my laboratory, won't you?

My soul's revival birthday is November 13th (ironically the same as my ol' AP Chem teacher's lunar birthday).  What I mean by that is I stepped cleanly out of an entire way of life on that day in 2014 and never reverted back to friendships or lifestyle choices that accompanied who I was before that day.  In my newborn years that followed, I would sometimes recount stories from those days of yore and yesteryear to folks at the family-owned yoga business I ran from 2012-2019.  When they'd stare at me in wonder as they tried to reconcile what I was sharing, I'd laugh and offer, "You should've known me back then -- I was like I am now, just drunker."

That was an easy, throwaway line that gave my yoga-family some context without me having to tear at old scars -- but the truth was I had gone through a massive and incredibly painful breakup with who I was as a person -- and I was still trying to discover who I was without the people who had once framed my entire existence.

My very drunk existence.

I had spent a decade in the company of musicians, especially one musician who, here's another irony, worked as a chemical engineer at his day job.  MIT-educated and able to do pretty complex math right in his head -- I was in awe of this talent.  I was in awe of him. It turned out he was in awe of me and my commitment to my writing and our mutual admiration society only grew from there.  For many, many years, we were in perfect harmony with each other.

But when our balanced equation turned up with a miscalculation, shit got wild, quick.

For a long time, I didn't understand that -- how we could go from being so perfectly in-sync to so out of whack?  Weren't we the same people we always were?

Maybe one of us changed or both of us changed and it broke our bond.

Maybe.

But this always felt like a failure in logic to me.  Both of us were extreme in our reliance on logic and science and the mathematics of relationships.  We should have worked because nothing had happened that would say otherwise.  But we weren't working.  So I blamed myself and I blamed him and I blamed god.

I blamed every and anything I could until I finally broke so completely that my only choice was to walk away and start over.

So I did.

In the years since leaving that pivotal relationship with a chemical engineer who moonlights as a musician, I did exactly what I did back in my AP Chem days: I studied.  I studied before school and during school and after school.  I studied on the weekends and while I dreamed at night. I studied.  I studied to understand how and why things had gone so completely wrong with this person.

As my deep-learning around this question propelled me forward, I landed in a social work Master's program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where I earned my own Master of Science -- in Social Administration.  

I am a Master of Science of People, y'all.

I am a social worker.

And what I learned as a student at Case was that it's both true and not true that people never change.  It's equally true and not true that people can change.

Both things are true and not true.

The answer I came back to time and time again -- no matter how I did the math -- was chemistry.  The periodic table of elements.  And the complexities of balancing equations.

Think about it this way:

Imagine you're Oxygen.

You have an atomic number of 8 -- that never changes.  You have the same weight, the same mass, the same general properties, no matter what.  Oxygen is always oxygen -- that's science.

Now, let's start combining you with others.

You meet another Oxygen -- Oxygen + Oxygen is what humans breathe -- rad.  Add one more Oxygen to the mix, and you're ozone.  Also pretty cool.

Get rid of one Oxygen and add two Hydrogens -- suddenly, you're water.  Add back that second Oxygen, you're peroxide.

While you -- Oxygen -- never fundamentally change who you are at your core (Atomic Number 8), you change pretty drastically when combined with the other elements.

See?

Human beings are both never able to change and always able to change.

That's chemistry, baby.

Going back to my healing from the years of chaos caused by my relationship with that chemical engineer, once I realized that the notion that "he is who he is" -- and "I am who I am" -- while also "we are who we are" together -- is only part of the story, that changed everything about the way I thought about what had happened between us.  Take us pleasantly paired Oxygens and throw us in with less ideal elements to keep our equation balanced and stable, and that explains why we exploded so spectacularly.

It's science.  Pure and simple.

Those elements that changed our relationship could have been environmental or they could have been social or they could have been a result of our individual needs to learn and grow as people.  I had someone once phrase it like my relationship with him was like a shirt that I once loved and it looked great on me and then over time, it didn't fit anymore.  That didn't mean it wasn't ever a nice shirt -- it just wasn't for me anymore.  So I can either continue to wear the shirt, ill-fitting, or I can remove it from my wardrobe.

That metaphor makes sense and is a comfort to some degree, but it never felt quite complete.  Because even after I removed that shirt from my wardrobe, I still thought about it all the time and wondered how it was doing and if it ever missed me.

Shirts can miss people in this analogy.  Just go with me on this adventure.

Or maybe the fact that a shirt can't miss the human that used to own it is why that metaphor only got me so far.  The reality is that I am a living breathing human and he is a living breathing human and while we're both on this planet as living breathing humans, I can't think of the most significant relationship of my life as a shirt I outgrew.

That shit ain't right.

But when it clicked in for me one day that the closer truth was related to chemistry class?  That was a day of awakening, y'all.

When I think about how I'm different now than I was before, it has nothing to do with my core self.  I am who I am, I've got the atomic number that I've got.  But what has changed is how I relate to that atomic number that so undeniably defines me.  I better understand what triggers certain emotions and reactions -- and why.  I am tuned in to who I bond easily with and who I don't.  And I am better equipped to know what to do when I feel reactive.  I've spent the last seven-plus years understanding who I am and why and how -- and that means I have evolved out of the person who would cling to an unhealthy relationship just because it felt "normal."  Does it mean I am now perfect and fixed and the greatest, most self-aware human alive?  Not at all. 

What it does mean is that I have a better understanding my own feelings -- my own atomic number -- and so I am better equipped to be an element, out in the wild, interacting with other elements in a more harmonious and productive way.

Be breathable O2 not poisonous CO.

Very that.

As a trained social worker, I lean heavily into strengths-based approaches like Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) that moves away from the "problem/solution" model into the "opportunities based" one.  

Almost literally, I look at the glass as half full instead of as half empty as a profession.

And when I embrace that people are not problems to be solved but opportunities to learn and grow, it changes everything about the way I interact with the world.  My little corner of the periodic table sees the whole board with energy instead of exhaustion.  

Math is hard, sure, and I'm not good at it -- but I don't need to be good at math in order to shine.  I simply need to see that math has value and creates opportunity for learning.  

AP Chem was hard but it wasn't impossible -- I learned, goddamnit, even though it was about as far outside of my comfort zone as humanly possible.

But that only happened because I chose to interact with it in a meaningful way.  I chose to engage with this subject matter that was guaranteed to push me to learn not only the subject at hand but to learn about myself and my capacity to expand my knowledge, if only I wanted to.  

This can happen with people, too.  Sometimes there are folks we interact with who, at the surface, seem completely incompatible with us -- maybe our politics are completely different, for example -- but if we choose to be intentional in our interactions with others, we might discover we're more alike than we are different.  Or we might determine that this person isn't ever going to be our best friend but we can find enough common ground to get along.  We can find a way to balance the equation and achieve peace.

That works so much more easily when we view others as opportunities instead of problems.

Part of that work is recognizing what is interacting with an individual's core self (atomic number) -- perhaps there are external forces or other elements that are impacting the balance of the equation -- maybe if the math can work out, so can the evenness of that individual's reactive state with the world around them.

For example:

Let's say there's a human who reaches a point with anxiety and depression that brings them to therapy (or an equivalent type of support).  During the course of this therapy, healthier coping mechanisms and skills are adopted that shift thoughts enough that this human becomes less reliant on crutches, like drugs and alcohol, which previously masked feelings that had once felt unmanageable.  With these newly acquired skills, those crutches may fall away more and more over time.  Through this path to sobriety (or near sobriety), it may awaken realities about other things -- relationships/people -- who also serve as crutches that enabled the more toxic lifestyle.  Once those enablers are detected, a healthier version of this human would start to shed those relationships outright or start to shift them into something that isn't focused on sheltering anyone from reality but, instead, opening a path towards healing.  

What I know for sure is that who we are at our core is who we are -- but pay attention to what's influencing you and others in your life.  We don't change -- but we react according to the laws of science.

Study up before you head into the lab.  If you do the math right, everything will turn out just fine.