A personal essay about divergence, survival, and reclaiming the voice I was told I didn’t have.
Author’s Note
This essay was originally submitted to the Writer’s Digest Personal Essay Challenge in the fall. It didn’t place, but the piece stayed with me. It felt unfinished only in the sense that it hadn’t yet found its true home. I’m sharing it here as part of my creative nonfiction archive — a space where I explore the stories that shaped me, the systems that misread me, and the long journey back to my own voice.
If you’ve ever been mislabeled, underestimated, or rearranged to fit someone else’s idea of who you should be, I hope this piece meets you where you are.
They Called Me That Too: This Is How I Know
The classroom had three round tables, a desk, and bookshelves that smelled like mildew and neglect — like forgotten stories and damp silence. I was seventeen, living with a friend’s family, already loathing the ritual of cutting and pasting long before the tech boys made it a feature. Lazy. Stupid. That’s what they called us. Worse — silly, insecure, unwanted. Shame piled on like wet laundry.
The classroom wasn’t just about round tables — it was a place where boys received individual attention while girls stayed unseen. Boys got one‑on‑one help from the teacher. I was told to sit at a table, cut out sentences, rearrange them, and glue them down. By the time the bell rang, after forty‑five minutes of torment, I’d stare out the floor‑to‑ceiling window, watching students walk by like ghosts of a world I wasn’t part of.
On a cloudy day, I sat in the “Classroom of Glass,” cutting up sentences, cement‑glue wand dripping over my page. I was finished.
“How are we doing over there?” the teacher asked, tilting her curly blonde head toward me while still focused on the boy she’d spent most of the class helping.
I felt like an afterthought.
I twirled the wand, watching the glue drip, drip, ignoring the silly sentences that didn’t fit into my broken mind.
When she finally stood and walked over, she said, “Christine, you must pass the state English exam, or you won’t graduate. That’s why you’re here.”
She was annoyed — I could hear it. She hated this room as much as the kids who walked through its doorway. The Classroom of Glass reeked of failure, and she didn’t want it on her.
Sometimes I wondered if she genuinely disliked the girls. The boys seemed to inspire her — destined, in her eyes, for great things beyond the glass room. Not so much for me. I sensed it in the subtle nod toward the round table near the window, the unspoken instruction to sit, cut, rearrange, paste.
I packed my notebook and pens into my backpack, slung it over my shoulder, and approached the bookshelf. A label with my name in black permanent ink reminded me that I apparently needed reminders of my identity. I didn’t. I needed someone to assure me I wasn’t broken. Yet every textbook and unanswered question told me otherwise.
Falling Behind
There has never been a time when I didn’t feel like I was falling behind, as if understanding was a door I couldn’t find the key to. I never imagined writing would become my haven. Back then, I thought it was only for the bright ones — the ones who raised their hands, answered correctly, got noticed.
In the early 2000s, I blogged for nine years. Rearranged my sentences. Rearranged my life. Tried to make it profitable, palatable, academic. I acclimated so deeply I disappeared. People saw me, talked to me, but they didn’t understand me. They couldn’t. They weren’t built to.
I was a mother of four, divorced from a lineage of silence and survival. I had endured domestic abuse, generational trauma, and the kind of shame that stains everything. And still, I believed the world’s lie: that I was broken. That I was nonessential.
But I know differently now. I’m not broken; I am divergent. The world still hasn’t caught up with this perspective.
Still, I enrolled in my local college. I wasn’t after academic recognition; I was looking for a voice — one I could no longer keep reshaping to fit.
Between the Fracture and the lie
Somewhere between the fracture and the lie, the truth was hidden. I wasn’t prepared for the journey ahead.
The lies I believed all my life were wrong.
Those tiny fractal pieces weren’t flaws — they were the puzzle. And as I started to assemble them, I realized how carefully, how thoughtfully, my autistic mind had been constructed.
Not for the world. For me.
I clung to the lie that “mediocre” defined me. Dreaming felt impossible because my dreams involved writing words that connected and unified into worlds I envisioned and brought to life.
The American education system discouraged me from dreaming by giving me nothing — no knowledge, no tools, no belief. Macroaggressions about learning followed me into adulthood. College was for the wealthy, not the poor. For the bright, not the broken.
“Listen, maybe college isn’t for you since you struggled through high school,” my stepmother said as we sat around the round table at Talk of the Town Pizzeria. She had a degree — and a habit of talking down to me, sharp as Damascus steel, honed to cut where it hurt most.
Her favorite jab: “Chris, is that what you really think, really?”
It left an indelible mark, making me distrustful and prone to self‑doubt. Even when my own voice whispered, “Yeah, if I said it, I must believe it.”
My Foundation
My foundation was fractured long before I sat behind a computer and created my first blog — a book review of one of my favorite Australian authors who transported me to faraway places.
In other writers’ books, it was easy to let go of my dream of becoming an author. Mastery eluded my broken brain, which couldn’t piece it together. But in fleeting moments when I wrote and posted, I felt slight validation — until comments told me otherwise.
A foul, cryptic taste of school lingered on my tongue. But if I wanted my blog to succeed, I needed education. My daughter was enrolled at the same university. I remember the mix of excitement and fear as we walked across campus to my first class.
“Mom, you’ll do great,” she said, hugging me before I stepped inside.
Her smile reminded me of her first day of kindergarten — the bus doors opening, her tiny legs climbing the steps, her face turning back for reassurance. “You’re going to do great, Whit,” I’d said then.
Now people were watching me.
Beyond The Diagnosis
Two years later, with my degree in hand, I still struggled to understand the inconsistency of the world around me. It would take another three years, at age fifty, to confirm what I had always known.
My AuDHD diagnosis didn’t reveal anything new. It only confirmed what I’d always felt but couldn’t articulate. It didn’t remove the shame, the exhaustion, or the years of adjusting myself to fit in. It didn’t make others understand me. It didn’t make the world gentler.
If anything, the diagnosis deepened my shame. It didn’t flip a switch and say, “Christine, you aren’t broken.”
Correct — I wasn’t.
My Existance
Everyone who made me believe I had to acclimate — family, friends, educators, strangers — was a broken fragment of a larger puzzle. Not me.
The universe wired my brain with a design that constantly has me questioning who I am — asking, Where do I fit? Why does society want to make my existence vanish? I was chosen to live in a world that viewed my existence as insignificant — and still, I persisted.
There was no freedom in the diagnosis, only validation of a life that stood on the verge of excellence but was told to hide in the shadows of mediocrity.
Until.
Flip the Switch
At fifty‑four, the switch flipped — that internal light bulb moment when everything snapped into place. Words are powerful things.
When I finally unlocked the mysteries of language, shutting out the world’s noise — You don’t fit here. You’re a broken cog. You were never wanted. “Lies,” I told myself.
My diagnosis didn’t free me. I did, when I realized I was never broken — the world simply wasn’t built for me.
I wasn’t the fractured one. I wasn’t a fragmented fractal of missing pieces. I no longer needed to cut, rearrange, and paste with a glue wand dripping, drip.
The tables had turned. Being broken was just a label written in black indelible marker by people hoping I’d never discover who was truly broken.
I no longer rearrange myself to be understood. I write to be heard. I mother with clarity. I speak without apology. I sit at round tables, taking up space.
The glue wand is gone. The label peeled off. The ink is mine now.
I am not broken. I am built. And I will not disappear.
A Rebillion
I am fifty‑six now, and I still disappear into words — my words. Ironic, since I was told writing wasn’t for me. But I found healing in slowly evaporating into the ether of stories, where a young girl who never fit in could exist.
“You’re stupid and lazy, Christine,” they said. Echoes of the past still cloud my present as I write my ending.
But I’m still writing.
Writing was never just a tool to form sentences. The American education system drilled that out of me. It became a refuge. A rebellion. A way to rearrange the world without rearranging myself. I didn’t write to be understood; I wrote to remain.
They called me lazy. But I was exhausted from surviving systems that never saw me. They called me stupid. But I was decoding a world that refused to speak my language.
Divergent By Design
The Classroom of Glass taught me how to disappear. Writing taught me how to stay. I no longer sit at round tables waiting to be seen. I built my own.
I write now with ink no one else can erase. I mother with clarity. I speak without apology. I take up space. And if you’ve ever been rearranged to fit, know this: your voice was never broken. It was waiting.
They underestimated me. But I’ve always been strength in motion — resilient even in the most fractured times.
I am divergent by design. I do not conform — I create. I no longer wait for the world to make space. I build it. I write it. I remain.
A Quiet Closing
This piece continues my exploration of divergence, identity, and the quiet resilience that shapes a life. I write creative nonfiction alongside fiction, each informing the other and revealing a different facet of the same voice. Thank you for reading, for witnessing, and for remaining. If you’d like to explore more of my work, you can visit my Portfolio page before you continue reading on Substack.
- exploration of divergence
- creative nonfiction alongside fiction
- visit my Portfolio page
- continue reading on Substack