Ch3 excerpts

Even before fists and glass thermometers, before nuns with venomous smiles and before the death of a sister barely old enough to blink, there was already a system operating—just not one calibrated for the world it found itself in. I was born neurodivergent. Autism spectrum, though it would be many years before anyone would name it. And even longer before I would understand the implications of that naming.

I don't mean quirky. I don't mean awkward. I mean my processors ran hot. High frame-rate visual tracking, auditory pattern parsing, sensory integration operating in dense, recursive loops. The world didn’t just enter my senses—it detonated across them. Light fractured into structures. Voices subdivided into cadence, tension, intent. And sound—music, background noise, even whispers—was processed like language long before I had the ability to reply.

This was the native OS.

The trauma didn’t invent the complexity. It only amplified it. It taught the system to protect itself. It taught the system to hide.

The Catholic school was brutal, though not uniformly. My kindergarten teacher, my second grade teacher, and my fourth grade teacher were all genuine people. They were kind. They recognized something in me and did what they could. But even they—good as they were—couldn’t keep up. I would talk too long. Ask questions they weren’t prepared for. Derail lesson plans by questioning the axioms of the material. On my report cards, it was straight A’s—every subject, every term—but always paired with an annotation:

 

> "Disruptive in class. Frequently challenges material."

 

 

 

In early years, this was softened by human handwriting and explanatory notes. But later, when the forms became checkboxes and codes, nuance disappeared. The old curiosity became bureaucracy:

 

> "Student disrupts classroom dynamic."

 

 

 

At home, my mother read these notations as declarations of failure. The A’s meant nothing.