Learning Disabled: My Special School

Part One

Author’s Note:

What follows is a story recalled from childhood memories. I am telling it now as a thirty-something adult, which means the lens has changed. A child experiences things one way; an adult understands them differently. That doesn’t make the childhood memories less valid—it just means I’m holding two truths at once. What I felt then was real. What I understand now is also real. This is my attempt to tell both.

The Special School

For years, I’ve joked about the special school. I say it with just enough sarcasm that you know I’m kidding, but also that I’m not. It’s become shorthand in my life—a punchline with teeth. “Oh yeah, I got sent to a special school.” People laugh, or they don’t know what to say, and either way, I move on.

But I’ve never really told the story. Not the whole thing. Not what it was like to be five or six years old and already know that something was deeply, fundamentally wrong with you. Not what it felt like to sit in a psychologist’s office for six hours while strangers mapped your brain like it was a broken machine. Not the years of medication and tutoring and therapy that came before, during, and after.

So here it is. The actual story.

Let me take you back to the beginning. Before the diagnosis, before the therapy, before any of it. Back to when I first learned I was broken.

The Stories I Was Told

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been different. And it wasn’t a feeling I came to on my own—it was shoved in my face from the time I could comprehend what it meant to be a person on this earth.

Before I could even form my own memories, the stories were already being told about me. How difficult I was. What a hard baby I was. The challenges that my labor, my infancy, my toddlerhood brought upon my parents and family.

I screamed. That was the headline. I screamed so much, so often, and so loud that my belly button burst open. It stayed sore and infected for years. No one could comfort me—not my mother, not my father, not anyone. The only time I was quiet was when I was sleeping.

Of course, I don’t remember any of this. But I heard it enough times that it became part of my origin story. The difficult baby. The problem child. The one who came out wrong.

There was the story about the girl named Brooke. I was in first grade at my small private Christian school, and apparently I jumped on top of her and started choking her. When the adults pulled me off and demanded to know why, I said: Because she was prettier than me.

There was the story about my sister. I was maybe four or five, and I slapped her across the face. When I was scolded and told to go apologize, I walked back over to her and slapped her again.

These stories followed me. They were told at family dinners, repeated when relatives visited, referenced whenever I acted out. They became evidence. Proof that something had always been wrong with me, even before I was old enough to know what “wrong” meant.

And somewhere deep inside, I absorbed every word. I was the difficult one. The bad one. The one who couldn’t be fixed.

The Early Years

The early education days were a giant blackout blur with bits and pieces mixed in—fragments of memory floating in fog.

I remember going to school and not understanding what was happening around me. I remember trying to make friends, but something always went sideways. People didn’t like me, or I couldn’t figure out how to get along with them. I was told I acted out in ways that are funny now, retold as an adult, but hearing them as a child—or even remembering them now—makes me cringe.

It was a small private Christian school. The kind of place where everyone knew everyone, which meant everyone knew me. The principal knew me by name, and I spent more time in her office than I can count. Eventually, they just kept me there. They moved a desk from a classroom into her office—a desk just for me—and I would sit there alone, eating my lunch while the other kids were in the cafeteria together.

The school was housed in a church building back then, and even as a five-year-old, I knew how to navigate myself through the hallways to her office without being told. At some point, they stopped escorting me. They’d just say, “Go to the front,” and I’d walk myself there, sit down, and wait.

Wait for the lecture. Wait for the call to my parents. Wait for more punishment.

I had an older sister who did not act like me. The contrast was impossible to miss. She was normal. I was not. And everyone—my parents, my teachers, the other kids—could see it.

The Trashcan Kid

I was the kid who sat at the kitchen table for hours every night, long past bedtime, because I couldn’t finish a single sheet of homework. School felt like torture, and then I’d come home and have to do more of it. There was no escape.

My mom tried to help. I remember her holding up sight word flashcards, trying to teach me the difference between the and THE. She’d show me the card and ask me to spell it. I would. Then she’d show me the same word in a different variation and ask again. And I would completely blank. No memory of what I had just said five seconds before.

She’d send me back to the couch to stare at the flashcard for ten minutes. Then she’d call me back and ask again. And I still wouldn’t know.

At first, I think they thought I was messing around. Playing games. Not trying. Then the frustration set in. Then the anger. I was accused of not paying attention, not putting in effort, not obeying. And because I genuinely didn’t remember—because my brain simply could not hold onto the information—I had no defense.

Teachers hated me too. I don’t say that for sympathy—I say it because it was true, and I knew it even then.

My second-grade teacher, Ms. Knight, was one of them. I told my mom that Ms. Knight hated me, and I must have been convincing, because my mom said something to her. The next thing I knew, Ms. Knight pulled me into the hallway to tell me she didn’t hate me. But she didn’t actually address anything. She just made me feel crazy for feeling what I felt. Gaslit by a teacher at six years old.

This was the same woman who stopped class one day because I couldn’t come up with a compound word.

She wanted something like “Back-Pack”, backpack. Simple. Easy for everyone else. But my mind went blank, the way it always did, and she just stood there at the front of the room and said, “I’ll wait.”

Thirty or forty kids turned to stare at me. Some of them started whispering. Some of them laughed. The silence stretched out, heavy and terrible, and I sat there drowning in it.

I looked around the room, desperate, searching for something—anything—to say. My eyes landed on the trashcan by the door.

“Trashcan,” I said.

That was the answer she wanted. Lucky guess. But it was obvious I hadn’t known it. And instead of helping me, instead of teaching me, she had let the weight of that moment—the stares, the whispers, the shame—be my lesson for the day.

That same teacher would snap at me if I tapped her arm to ask a question. “Don’t touch me!” “I HATE to be touched/tapped!” “Use your words!!”

…But she didn’t hate me, just strongly disliked everything I did.

No Time to Be a Kid

School wasn’t the only place I was failing.

My parents tried everything they could think of to help me. That meant tutoring—lots of it. Summer tutoring. After-school tutoring. Any program they could find and afford to get me into. On top of the school day and the hours of homework every night, I had tutors trying to drill information into a brain that couldn’t hold it.

There wasn’t time for extracurriculars. There wasn’t room in the schedule for anything that wasn’t trying to fix me.

I did try cheerleading once, when I was young. I don’t remember how long it lasted—not long. What I remember is standing at practice, completely lost. The other girls would be learning a cheer, and I’d be standing there with no idea what was happening. By the time we got to the little league football games, I’d be on the sidelines in my uniform, frozen, forgetting everything. Forgetting the cheers. Forgetting where I was supposed to stand. Forgetting what I was even doing there.

Eventually, I was pulled out.

My whole life became about what was wrong with me.

The Way Discipline Worked

Discipline was part of my life long before school ever entered the picture. It was woven into my earliest memories—or rather, woven into the gaps where memories should have been.

At home, we called it spankings. Or licks. It followed a specific Southern tradition: the switch. These weren’t just sticks picked up from the yard. They were fresh-cut, flexible branches—new growth from a bush or tree, chosen specifically for their ability to sting like a whip. There was a psychological weight to the ritual, too. I was sometimes sent outside to pick my own switch, knowing that if I chose one too thick, it would only be replaced with something thinner and more painful. But, my father had his favorite tree/bush by his old office. Sometimes he would drive from one side of town to the other, just to get a switch from that one particular tree/bush.

As I got older, the punishment escalated. By my pre-teen years, my parents had graduated from a single switch to holding two or three together at once. The process was formalized: pants down, bent over the bed, total vulnerability. It was framed as discipline, as correction, as love. But it didn’t feel like love. It felt like proof that I was broken beyond repair.

At school, it was called paddlings. My parents had to sign a special form at the beginning of the year giving the principal permission to paddle me. And she used that permission. A wooden paddle board, swung hard, in the principal’s office. I spent so much time in that office that they eventually moved a desk in there just for me.

I think in my parents’ minds, they were doing the right thing. It was definitely less severe than what they had experienced as children. But from my perspective? I was getting spanked morning, noon, and night, and I had no idea why.

I simply didn’t remember.

Here’s the thing about those years: I can probably tell you each spanking I got—when it happened, where I was, who delivered it. But I cannot tell you the why behind a single one of them. The punishment is seared into my memory. The reason for it? Gone. Erased. Like it never existed.

That was a huge portion of my early childhood. Not learning. Not playing. Just being punished for things I couldn’t remember doing, couldn’t understand, couldn’t stop doing because I didn’t remember what I was doing wrong in the first place.

School made everything more intense. Before school, it was just home. But once I started kindergarten, the opportunities to get in trouble multiplied. Now there were teachers watching me, principals paddling me, more adults with more rules I couldn’t seem to follow.

And everything stacked on top of itself.

If I got paddled at school, I got spanked at home for getting paddled at school. If I got in trouble with my mom before my dad got home, I got spanked again when he arrived. If I acted up while my aunt was babysitting, they would wake me up from my sleep at night to spank me.

The cycle never stopped. And through all of it, I carried this suffocating weight—the constant knowledge that something was deeply wrong with me, that everything I did was wrong, that I deserved whatever was coming because I was bad. I was difficult. I was broken. That’s what I believed, because that’s what everything around me confirmed.

The Stick Figures

Somewhere around second or third grade, I started drawing on my homework.

Little stick figures. A person with a gun to their head. I’d draw them in the margins, in the headers, wherever there was space. I think it started after I learned how to play hangman—the image just stuck in my mind. But it wasn’t really about hangman.

It was about how I felt.

Doing homework felt like torture. Going to school felt like torture. And I didn’t have the words for that feeling yet, so I drew it instead. A little stick figure with a gun to their head, over and over, page after page.

Looking back, I know what that looks like. A child drawing images of self-harm is a red flag in any era. But at the time, no one sat me down to ask what I was trying to say. It was just another thing that was wrong with me. Another problem to add to the list.

I think that’s when my parents really understood that this was bigger than behavior. Something was happening inside me that they couldn’t reach with flashcards or switches or tutoring.

Something was breaking.

The Testing Begins

Around third grade, the serious concern set in. Maybe my parents realized that the punishments weren’t working. Maybe they finally saw what the teachers had been seeing all along. Whatever flipped the switch, this was when the testing phase of my life began—a phase that would stretch on for years.

One night, I was walking upstairs to my room and my dad stopped me. He was staring at my face, and he called out to my mom: “Hey, have you ever noticed how dark her undereyes are?”

It was just an observation. Probably concern. But I didn’t hear concern. I heard: Here’s something else wrong with you. My face burned with shame. My body was just another thing that wasn’t right.

The first round of testing was for allergies. Someone mentioned it might explain some of my issues, and needles were involved, and I freaked out.

My mom told me they were going to do patches, not needles. She promised. But when we got to the doctor’s office, the nurse opened a brand-new sterile box of syringes, and I lost it. My mother swore they had lied to her, that she didn’t know. I had to be wrapped in a blanket like a burrito, my left arm held out, while they injected me over and over with different substances. This wasn’t the allergy testing they do now with little skin pricks. These were full syringes, one after another, shot into my arm.

I remember becoming talkative after one of them—the dairy one, the nurse said.

What I remember most is holding my arm out of the blanket and being injected, over and over, while I couldn’t move.

To this day, I don’t flinch at needles. Vaccines, blood draws, IVs—I can watch the needle go into my skin without blinking. I had a short piercing career in my twenties where I’d tell the story like a badge of honor. I got shot up with so many needles as a kid that nothing fazes me now. Dark humor.

After the allergy testing, I was told I had allergies to wheat and dairy. That started the restriction phase of my life. My entire diet flipped overnight.

If you don’t know, everything has wheat and dairy in it—especially in the South, where we load up on butter and biscuits and cheese on everything. Suddenly my mom was spending hours in grocery stores reading ingredient lists, hunting down health food stores for Bob’s Red Mill flour so she could make me special pancakes. I drank rice milk in my cereal while everyone else had the regular kind. Every meal, every snack, every treat had to be different for me.

I’m not going to say it gave me an eating disorder. But to this day, I pick apart my food before I eat it. If I get a hamburger, I separate it layer by layer. I’m a plain eater. I don’t try new things easily—I have to talk myself into it every time.

And later, when I hit puberty and decided I was done with restrictions? I discovered ice cream and cheeseburgers and deep-fried Oreos all at once. I blew up like a balloon. My stretch marks are the evidence. It took years to learn how to have a healthy relationship with food after that.

The Battery

The allergy testing helped some, but it didn’t solve the bigger problem. So we moved on to the next phase: psychological evaluation.

Between third grade and fifth grade—I can’t tell you exactly when, because it all blurs together—I went through intensive neuropsychological testing. This was standard practice in the early 2000s for kids in private schools who weren’t meeting expectations. Because private schools didn’t have the resources to do it themselves, parents had to seek out private specialists. Neuropsychologists. Clinical psychologists. Expensive professionals with long waitlists.

For a child, this wasn’t just “doctor’s appointments.” It was invasive, exhausting, and relentless.

They called it a “battery” for a reason. It was a series of high-pressure tests designed to push your brain to the point of failure so they could see where the short circuit was. The setting was always the same: a small, sterile room with no windows, fluorescent lights humming overhead, and a stranger with a stopwatch and a clipboard watching your every move.

A full evaluation took three to four separate sessions, each lasting four to six hours. For an eight-year-old, that’s the equivalent of working a full-time job under intense scrutiny. And the tests were designed to get harder and harder. The psychologist would keep asking questions or giving puzzles until you couldn’t answer anymore. For a kid already drowning in failure, it felt like hours upon hours of getting it wrong.

I solved complex patterns. I defined rare vocabulary words. I manipulated blocks while being timed to the millisecond. I copied pages and pages of repetitive symbols as fast as I could until my hand cramped. I sorted cards by shifting rules without being told what the new rule was—designed to be frustrating, designed to make you fail. I listened to lists of fifteen random words and tried to repeat them back immediately, then thirty minutes later, then an hour later. I drew complex geometric shapes from memory after seeing them only once.

We think of testing as “sitting still,” but for a child, it was physically draining. After six hours of holding it together, I would collapse in the car on the way home. Total emotional meltdown.

While other kids were at recess or soccer practice, I was in clinical offices. Over those two years, I probably spent forty to sixty hours being evaluated.

And it wasn’t cheap. Because this was “educational” and not “medical,” insurance wouldn’t touch it. The initial evaluation cost thousands of dollars. Follow-up tests cost hundreds more each. By the time it was done, my parents had spent somewhere around $7,000 to $10,000 (back in 2000) -just to get a report that explained what was happening inside my head.

The feedback sessions were their own kind of torture. My parents would sit in low chairs while the specialist spread out bell curves and standard deviation charts on a big desk. They weren’t given answers yet—just discrepancies. “Her verbal ability is here, but her processing speed is way down here.” Graphs and numbers and clinical language that raised more questions than it answered.

And at the end of every session: “We need more data. We need to refer you to another specialist.”

The Diagnosis

Here’s something you need to understand about the early 2000s: getting a young girl diagnosed with ADHD was an uphill battle against a medical and cultural landscape that viewed the disorder almost exclusively as a “naughty boy” problem.

The diagnostic criteria at the time were heavily skewed toward externalized, disruptive behaviors—the kind that made teachers’ lives difficult. Because girls often masked their symptoms or presented with the inattentive type rather than the hyperactive type, they were frequently written off as having personality quirks rather than a medical condition.

Teachers were the primary gatekeepers for diagnosis. If a child wasn’t disruptive, they weren’t referred for evaluation. A boy throwing a pencil was a “problem.” A girl staring out the window was just “dreamy.” Girls in the early 2000s were heavily socialized to be compliant and people-pleasers. Many of us worked twice as hard to hide our struggles—masking—leading adults to believe we were fine, even as we felt like we were drowning.

Instead of being seen as hyperactive, girls with ADHD were often labeled “space cadets” or “airheads” or “lazy.” Hyperactive girls weren’t running around the room—they were “very social” or “chatterboxes.” In 2003, a teacher would see a talkative girl as a personality trait, not a symptom of impulsivity.

And when girls were finally taken to a doctor for the emotional distress caused by their undiagnosed struggles? They were rarely screened for ADHD. Instead, doctors treated the side effects. The anxiety. The depression. The feeling of constant failure. They’d prescribe medication for those things while completely missing the underlying cause.

Without a medical explanation, girls like me grew up with character-based identities instead of neuro-based ones. We weren’t told we had “brains that work differently.” We were told we were ditsy. Flaky. Dramatic. Slobs. Lazy. Not trying hard enough.

To be that girl in the early 2000s was to live in a constant state of “should.” You should be able to remember your homework. You should be able to sit still. You should be able to be as organized as your friends. Since “girls don’t have ADHD,” any struggle was viewed as a personal moral failing. A lack of effort. A choice.

I was one of the lucky ones—if you can call it luck. My symptoms were severe enough, disruptive enough, visible enough that someone finally looked deeper.

Oh, and it wasn’t Luck, it was my parents.

The final report came back sometime in fifth grade, right before Christmas break.

One day, I was asked to come outside to the screened-in porch for a talk with my mom. My older sister was there too. Looking back, I think she already knew something was happening—maybe my mom had given her a heads-up that things were about to change.

My mom told me they had gotten all the testing results back. She told me I had something called ADHD. It stood for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Classified as a behavioral disorder.

She told me I also had Dyslexia. And something with pattern recognition. She explained that my brain just worked differently than everyone else’s. And that they were going to find me the help I needed.

I don’t remember exactly how I felt in that moment. Relief, maybe. Shame, definitely. Confusion. The same fog that had followed me my whole life. Finally there was a name for the wall I had been hitting, but having a name didn’t make the wall disappear.

I went back to school. We got let out for Christmas break. And I knew I would never set foot in that school again.

It was both exciting and terrifying.

The Pills

Somewhere in the middle of all the testing and right around the time of my diagnosis, they started me on medication.

It began with vitamins and supplements—things that were supposed to help with focus, with brain function, with whatever was misfiring inside me. When those didn’t make enough of a difference, we moved on to something stronger.

The medication was called Strattera. It was a non-narcotic ADHD medication, which meant it wasn’t a stimulant like Ritalin or Adderall. The catch was that it had to build up in your system over thirty days. You had to take it every single day without missing, or you’d have to start the whole process over.

I hated taking pills.

There was one time—I don’t remember exactly when—that a pill got stuck in my throat. Not in a choking way, but in a way where I could feel it lodged there, and I was coughing and gagging and couldn’t get it out. It eventually went down, but that moment stuck with me.

To this day, in my thirties, dealing with my own autoimmune issues, I have to force myself to take medication every morning. I wake up and there’s a pile of pills waiting for me, and every single time I think about that moment. It’s silly, maybe. But trauma doesn’t care if it’s silly. It just stays.

So by the time I got to the special school, I was already medicated. Already on a restricted diet. Already tested within an inch of my life. I was a child who had been poked and prodded and examined and found deficient in dozens of measurable ways.

And I was still just trying to understand what was wrong with me.

The Transition

I homeschooled for the rest of fifth grade. My mom found a little online program, and I did my best with it—which wasn’t saying much, but at least I wasn’t failing in front of thirty other kids anymore.

Over the summer, my parents started sending me to therapy at this odd little house in Braselton, Georgia—about an hour away from where we lived.

The therapy was called NILD—the National Institute for Learning Development. It was unlike anything I had ever done. I jumped on trampolines. I wrote on chalkboards. I did exercises that felt strange and pointless and exhausting.

And I did not like my therapist.

Her name was Mrs. T. She was older, maybe in her sixties, and she gave me no slack. None. It was like she knew I was smart—actually smart, underneath all the fog and the failure—and she refused to let me pretend otherwise.

This was new.

Every other teacher I’d had either ignored me, punished me, or gave up on me. They saw the struggling kid and wrote me off. But Mrs. T looked at me like she could see something I was trying to hide.

What I didn’t know yet was that the odd little house where I went for therapy was the school. My parents had enrolled me, and I didn’t even realize it. The summer therapy was just the introduction.

That fall, I started sixth grade there.

The Special School

The school was a house. Literally a house—a single-floor home that had been renovated into a learning space.

When you walked in the front door, there was a living room area to your left that had been converted into the front office. To your right was what had clearly been a formal dining room, now serving as the principal’s office—Mrs. A’s domain. If you walked in a little further and turned left, you’d go down a hallway with a classroom on the right. The hallway eventually teed off, splitting left and right, and there were three more classrooms at the end—one to the left, one in the middle, one to the right. You could tell they had been bedrooms. There were two bathrooms on that side of the building.

If you walked back down the hallway toward the front door but veered the other way, it opened up into a larger area—our lunchroom. A few tables, a few chairs. There was a real kitchen, a home kitchen, with bar stools at the counter. And the space that would have been the garage had been closed off and refinished into our therapy room. Later, it got transformed into a classroom. That’s where I had science.

It didn’t feel like a school. It felt like someone’s house, because it was. The rooms were small. The hallways were narrow. Everything was quiet.

That quiet is what I remember most. Dead silence, most of the time. Maybe some soft music playing. You might hear kids talking in other classrooms, or teachers’ voices carrying through the walls, but it was muted. Hushed. Like a house. Because it was a house.

The classrooms had three to five kids at most. In the classes I was in, there were usually only one or two other students. It was small and close, and everyone got to know each other very well. There was no hiding in a crowd. There was no crowd.

This was my first time being surrounded by kids like me.

There were kids with ADHD. Kids with ADD. Kids with Tourette’s. Kids with learning disabilities that had long, complicated names—names that today would probably just fall somewhere on the autism spectrum and get sorted out from there. Back then, in the early 2000s, every variation had its own label. The medical world has since consolidated a lot of those labels under broader umbrellas, but at the time, we were all walking around with our own specific brand of “different.”

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the only one.

The school combined regular academics with intensive NILD therapy, built right into the schedule. I had therapy two or three times a week, sometimes before school, sometimes after, depending on the rotation. Every session was eighty minutes of grueling, focused work.

One technique was called Rhythmic Writing. I’d stand at a chalkboard and draw huge figure eights—as big as my upper body—while calling out which direction I was going. “Left, right, left, right.” Once I had that down, the therapist would start asking math questions. “What number makes ten with six?” And I’d have to keep drawing, keep calling out the directions, and answer at the same time. “Left, right, four, left, right.”

Then they’d put me on a mini trampoline and do the same thing. Jump, jump—”Six!”—and I’d have to shout “Four!” Jump, jump—”Three!”—”Seven!”

The goal was to rewire my brain. To build new pathways. To force the left and right hemispheres to work together.

Another tool was called the Blue Book. I still have my copy. It’s a small blue booklet that breaks down the English language into sounds and patterns, each one attached to a key word. The sound of a long A connects to “cake.” The I-G-H pattern connects to “light.” When you see a word, your brain is trained to flip to the right “page” and decode it.

During therapy, if I misspelled a word, the therapist wouldn’t correct me. She’d ask: “What page in your Blue Book handles that pattern?” And I’d have to sit there, visualize the page, figure out where I went wrong, and fix it myself. It was called mediated learning—forcing the child to do the heavy lifting of thinking about how they think.

For a kid with processing issues, ten minutes of that felt like running a marathon.

The Coping Mechanism

Here’s something I learned early: if you play dumb, people eventually stop expecting things from you.

It was a survival strategy. If I didn’t know an answer, I’d say something random—”bob” or some nonsense—and the teacher would move on. If I acted confused enough, sometimes they’d just do it for me. If I seemed helpless enough, the punishment was lighter. Playing dumb was easier than trying and failing in front of everyone. It was easier than the shame of getting it wrong again.

By the time I got to the special school, this was second nature. I had years of practice.

But the therapists there had seen it before. They worked with kids like me every day—kids who had learned to hide, to deflect, to disappear inside themselves rather than risk being seen. And they didn’t let me get away with it.

Mrs. T, especially. She would stop me mid-session and say, “No. Go back. Sound it out.” She wouldn’t accept the nonsense answers. She wouldn’t let me slide.

One of the teachers, Mrs. McC, said something to me once that I’ve never forgotten. She said: “It’s like every time you get close to somebody, you open up this little box of light—and we can see the light—but the moment we see it, you shut it away.”

She meant my potential. My intelligence. The part of me that was actually capable, actually bright, buried under all the years of shame and failure.

I didn’t want anyone to see that light. Because I had learned—through every spanking, every failed test, every humiliating moment in front of my classmates—that showing what I had inside only led to more pain. If I was smart, then I should be able to do better. And if I couldn’t do better, then I was choosing to fail. That’s what it felt like everyone believed.

So I hid. I played dumb. I kept the box closed.

The special school forced it open. Not gently, not all at once, but persistently. They wouldn’t let me hide. They wouldn’t let me give up on myself. And slowly, over three and a half years, I started to believe that maybe—just maybe—I wasn’t broken.

Mrs. Smith

Every school has its challenges, and the special school was no exception.

There was one teacher I need to talk about. Her name was Mrs. Smith. The rumor was that she had been brought in specifically for me—that I was so difficult, my first sixth-grade teacher quit halfway through the year, and Mrs. Smith was her replacement. She wasn’t from the NILD background. She was an older teacher, experienced but learning this world as she went.

At first, she tried to be tough with me. She thought she could be hard, and I would fall in line. When that didn’t work—when we ended up toe-to-toe, neither of us backing down—she changed tactics.

She started looping me into her life. Talking to me like I was a friend instead of a student.

Eventually, I became her right-hand assistant. She trusted me with things no teacher should trust a student with. I had access to my own gradebook. She would tell me to change my grades—math was a 36, make it a 75; English was an 86, bump it to 93.

I did it because she asked. But honestly? I had no problem with it.

Here’s the thing: Mrs. Smith was an English major. That’s what she had taught in schools before she came here. That’s what she was good at. And because of her, I actually excelled in English. She knew how to teach it, and I absorbed it.

But math? Math was a different story. I was consistently failing. And Mrs. Smith didn’t know how to help me there—it wasn’t her area. So instead of pushing me, instead of finding another way, she would just shrug and tell me to change my own grades. “It doesn’t really matter,” she’d say. “You’re obviously smart.”

At the time, it felt nice. More than nice—it felt like relief. I got to hang out with a teacher who treated me like a person instead of a problem. I didn’t have to struggle through subjects that made me feel stupid. I could just… exist. Change a few numbers in a gradebook. Move on.

I spent nights at her house. I made her doctor’s appointments. She taught me how to balance a checkbook by having me balance hers.

All of this happened in seventh and eighth grade. I was eleven, twelve years old.

Looking back, I can see the dysfunction clearly. A teacher is not supposed to be your friend. But at the time, I didn’t have the framework to understand what was happening. I just knew that someone was paying attention to me, treating me like I mattered, making me feel special in a way that wasn’t about what was wrong with me.

But there was a price. There’s always a price.

As I got older and started to outgrow the dynamic, things soured. By eighth grade, I didn’t need her the same way, and that shifted something between us. She became overbearing. Obsessive. She started lying about me—small things at first, then bigger.

There was one time she hid my therapy books and made it look like I had lost them. With my reputation for being forgetful—”I forgot” had been my refrain for years—everyone believed her. My parents believed her. Of course the ADHD kid lost her books again.

Later that year, she admitted what she had done. She pulled the books out of the back of a cabinet and acted surprised, like she hadn’t known they were there. Then she told me the truth: she had hidden them on purpose. She wanted me to get in trouble so I’d have a reason to stay after school with her.

The relationship was inappropriate—not in a sexual way, but in the way that teachers should never be friends with their students. She crossed boundaries that should never be crossed with a child. She manipulated situations to keep me close. And when I didn’t need her anymore, she turned on me.

The cruelest part? The very reputation that came from my ADHD—the forgetfulness, the assumption that I was unreliable, the whisper that I was probably lying—was the same thing that made me unbelievable when I tried to tell the truth.

The End of Eighth Grade

The special school only went through eighth grade. That was by design.

The whole point of the program wasn’t to keep kids there forever. It was intensive intervention—therapy and academics woven together—meant to rewire your brain enough that you could go back out into the regular world and function. They were training neurodivergent kids to survive in neurotypical spaces.

And eighth grade? Eighth grade was all about getting you out.

Every day that year, it felt like the focus shifted from learning to preparing. They were rounding out the last of your therapy, finishing up your academics, and hammering home the strategies and tactics you would need to survive in a world that wasn’t built for brains like ours.

The teachers would sit you down and say things like: “Okay, when you go to high school next year, you’re going to be in a classroom with thirty kids. How are you going to read your textbook if you can’t get through a whole page?”

And then they’d hand you a tool. I remember this yellow, clear ruler-looking thing—almost like a bookmark but made of see-through plastic. You’d use it to sweep across the page, line by line, and it acted like a highlighter for your eyes. It helped you focus on one sentence at a time instead of getting lost in a sea of words.

“This is something you can use,” they’d tell you. “So you can read any book you want.”

They gave us strategies for everything. How to take notes when the teacher talks too fast. How to ask for extra time without feeling embarrassed. How to organize a locker, a backpack, a thought. They were handing us survival kits for a neurotypical world.

By the end of the year, we were supposed to be ready. Accredited. Prepared to go to any school we wanted—private or public. Most of the kids at there ended up going back to private schools or transferring to different private schools. Because this was also considered a private Christian school education, and because the children there needed such specialized support, public school often couldn’t provide what they needed.

We didn’t have the language for it back then. We said “learning disabled.”We said “She has learning disabilities.” We said “behavioral disorder.” We listed out the acronyms—ADHD, ADD, like they were scarlet letters. Now, in 2026, we say neurodivergent. We understand that brains simply work in different ways, not that some are broken and need to be fixed.

But back then, I was broken. That’s what I believed. That’s what everything around me had confirmed for as long as I could remember.

By the end of eighth grade, I had spent three and a half years at that little house in Braselton, Georgia. I had done the figure eights and the trampoline drills and the Blue Book exercises until my brain physically changed. I had learned that I couldn’t play dumb anymore—that the people around me would see through it, and more importantly, that I was only cheating myself when I tried.

I had learned that the box of light inside me was real. That I was actually smart, actually capable, even if my brain took a different route to get there.

I wasn’t fixed. I would never be “fixed,” because I was never broken in the way I thought I was. But I had tools now. Strategies. Ways of working with my brain instead of against it.

I had spent three and a half years at that little house in Braselton, Georgia. And now it was time to leave.

I was excited. I was terrified. I was ready—or at least, I thought I was.

And I was about to find out if any of it would hold up in the real world.

End of Part One. Part Two coming soon.