The Version of Me That They Wrote

There are two versions of me. One of them lives in the files, the group chats, the admin records of the institution where I study. In that version, I am a collection of problems. Missed assignments. Absences. A student who left the group chats. A name in a complaint. That version of me is very efficient and very tidy, because the institution writes well — it has practice. It has templates.

The other version of me is the one typing this. That version remembers what came before each entry in the record. Before "student absent," there was a student sitting in a classroom listening to an educator mock people like him — people whose minds work differently — while other people laughed. Before "student left the group chat," there were months of messages that made leaving feel like the only form of self-respect left. Before "student failed to submit," there was a human being drowning quietly and asking, in every way he knew how, for someone to notice.

The record keeps the wound. It rarely keeps the knife.

What I learned is this: an institution does not have to hate you to erase you. It only has to be busy.

Busy institutions deal in categories, not people. A person says: I am struggling, and the way you are treating me is making it worse. A category says: non-compliant student. A person says: I learn differently, please meet me partway. A category says: attendance percentage. And somewhere between the person and the category, the truth falls on the floor, and nobody picks it up, because nobody's job description includes picking it up.

When you are neurodivergent, this happens to you more than to others, and nobody calls it what it is. It gets called "discipline." It gets called "policy." It gets called "we're preparing you for the real world" — as if the real world were a place where no one ever deserves context, flexibility, or simple decency.

I used to believe the categories. That's the deepest injury, the one nobody photographs. I sat with the question: maybe I really am the problem? When enough people with enough authority act like you are difficult, the arithmetic of self-doubt starts to feel compelling. One of you. Many of them. Majority rules, apparently, on the question of your own worth.

But here is what I finally understood, and I am writing it down so it survives whatever comes next:

A gaslighting is not a disagreement. It is a paperwork problem committed by people with power. They do not need to convince you that you are wrong. They only need to outnumber you in the record. And they will always outnumber you in the record, because they hold the pen and the filing cabinet. Your side of the story doesn't get a form.

So I am writing my own form. This is it.

I refuse some things.

I refuse the version of me that exists in their messages — the one assembled out of my worst weeks, stripped of everything that explains them.

I refuse to perform stability for people who destabilized me, then blamed me for shaking.

I refuse to accept that mockery of disability in a classroom is "culture" and my objection to it is "oversensitivity." A wrong that is traditional is still wrong. Slavery was traditional. Nobody misses it now.

And I refuse, most of all, the lesson they were teaching without knowing they were teaching it: know your place. My place is not beneath someone's joke. My place is wherever I decide it is.

But let me be honest about the part of this that hurts the most, because an honest testimony is the only kind worth anything.

The institution's reach was longer than the campus. It reached into my home. It reached the people I love, and it handed them its tidy version of me, and they — tired, frightened, wanting only for their son to have a future — held that version up to me as if it were mine.

I have never felt more alone than in a house where everyone agreed on a story about me that I did not write.

I am not writing this to blame them. I am writing it to locate the loneliness, so that others who feel it know its address. It is not the absence of people. It is the presence of people who love you, holding a map of you drawn by people who don't.

To whoever reads this and recognizes themselves:

If you are different in the way I am different, you will spend a portion of your life being summarized by people who met you for five minutes and looked away. They will be confident. Confidence is cheap when you're holding the microphone.

Do not argue with the microphone. Build your own.

Keep a log. Date everything. Tell a doctor, a counselor, one friend — someone whose record of you exists outside their filing cabinet. Take the qualification, take the degree, take the credential, and take it the way you'd take supplies from a place you don't intend to stay forever.

And somewhere in the middle of the war, rest. Lie down. Breathe. Recovery is not desertion. The fight needs the fighter alive, and your aliveness is not owed to their schedule.

They wrote a version of me. It was neat, and legible, and wrong.

This one is messier. But it's mine. Every word of it is mine.