I've filled notebooks no one will read. Pages of Telugu script looping into itself, solar systems spiraling outward, periodic tables that map the universe in rows. My mother kept twenty of them. They sit in a box somewhere, dense with meaning only I can parse.
The handwriting curves and tangles. Legible, if you're willing to work for it. But I don't write to preserve—I write to possess. Each time I draw the world map, I'm not reviewing. I'm conquering it again. Five hundred attempts to get the coastlines right. Every border memorized through the act of tracing it into being.
My hand refuses straight lines. Curves demand an effort my fingers resist. Yet I can render continents from memory, Telugu words for spelling competitions, the periodic table in perfect rows. The mind sees clearly. The hand translates poorly.
In Taekwondo, this split was brutal. My kicks wouldn't rise high enough. My limbs refused to snap with the force others found easily. Even light taps during sparring landed heavy on me. Pain echoed through my nervous system in ways I don't think others felt. While they were learning to harden, I was learning to flinch. Effort felt like betrayal; my body refused force.
The gap doesn't close. I pick the side the task needs.
***
I draw borders obsessively. Every nation traced, every flag memorized, every capital locked into place. I know where one country ends and another begins with precision that borders on reverence.
And I believe borders are fiction.
The lines I draw so carefully—the ones I've redrawn hundreds of times—are accidents of history, artifacts of conquest, temporary arrangements pretending to be permanent. I see the world as one continuous surface, arbitrarily divided by agreements that shift with every century.
Yet I keep drawing them. Honoring the boundaries I know aren't real.
***
I look compliant—nodding, finishing, meeting expectations. Watch closely and you'll see it: attention drifting mid-sentence, agreements forgotten on contact. It isn't deliberate; it's involuntary dissent.
Being told what to do feels wrong in my body. The resistance shows up as my mind going elsewhere. I don't lose focus from difficulty; I lose it from being directed.
When I teach myself—programming, music, Telugu, cricket, chemistry—focus becomes effortless. Hours vanish. But put me in a room where someone's explaining what I half-know, and my mind steps out.
I've learned to work with this. I don't fight the drift. I just find ways to learn that don't require being told.
***
Sound isn't just sound. It's texture, movement, temperature. A laugh behind me feels like a tap on the shoulder. A chord ripples through my chest as if it's displacing air inside me. I live with little buffer between sensation and thought.
For years, this was just overwhelming. Bright lights, loud rooms, sudden shifts—everything registered at full volume. I'd shut down or need to leave.
But I also crave it. Loud music at parties. Flashing lights. Being consumed by more than I can handle. There's euphoria in dissolution—in letting go of trying to sort and control. In those moments, I stop holding myself together. The boundaries blur and I just exist. Flooded, but free.
The cost is real. Afterward, I crash. My body gets heavy and slow. Thoughts tangle. The world turns brittle.
I don't resolve this. I just know: I'll seek the flood, then pay for it later.
***
I read the penguin book one hundred times. Not because I didn't understand—because I was fascinated. I drew the periodic table five hundred times because something in the pattern wouldn't settle. I learned Telugu spelling until it became automatic.
And then it stops. Completely.
Not gradually—dormant, all at once. Like a star gone cold. Still there, but no longer burning.
History was alive for me during one period. Then chemistry. Then personality typologies. Then Minecraft gravity mods. Each consumed me completely—until it didn't.
I don't know what I'm chasing in the repetition. Maybe I'm trying to exhaust the subject. Maybe I'm waiting for it to answer a question I can't name. But once it's done, I move on. The periodic table still matters to me, but it's not alive anymore.
This is how I learn: total immersion until exhaustion. Then the next thing. Then the next.
***
I teach myself. Python by trial and error. Music by ear. Telugu through pattern recognition. Chemistry through obsessive reading.
But learning alone isn't enough. I need connection—not instruction, but someone whose thinking I can map mine onto. In AP Psychology, it clicked because the formal frameworks connected to what I'd been noticing about cognitive load and attention. In teaching computer literacy, I learned by watching students think: eyes narrowing near insight, shoulders dropping when cognitive load lifts.
Connection isn't instruction. It's finding where my thought process meets a discipline's structure. Where my observations align with formal study. Where what I've been thinking has a name.
I learn alone. Then I bring it to someone and ask: does this map? That's when understanding expands.
***
I work well in simple structures. Clear patterns. Logical progressions. The periodic table organizing elements by properties. Telugu aligning sound and symbol. Code mapping logic to syntax.
But I resent being told what to do. My parents built scaffolding for me—deadlines, formats, communication protocols. Sometimes I pushed back, finding their systems rigid. We'd debate. Sometimes I proved flexibility worked better. Sometimes their structure saved me from my own executive dysfunction.
The line is hard to articulate. I want structure that reveals patterns, not structure that imposes paths. I want frameworks I can test my thinking against, not frameworks that tell me how to think.
Simple structure, yes. Rigid instruction, and my mind leaves the room.
***
I don't reconcile these. They coexist.
Precise mind, clumsy body. Drawing borders, believing in none. Compliant outwardly, resistant inside. Craving overwhelm, overwhelmed by it. Obsessive until dormant. Solitary learner who needs connection. Wants structure, resents instruction.
This is what it's like to be me.