People like numbers. Scores. Labels. Clean edges. I didn’t grow up clean. I learned early how to read a room. Not because I was special. Because guessing wrong was dangerous. Tone. Posture. When someone stopped talking too fast. When someone got quiet. That kind of awareness keeps you alive. Doesn’t leave much room for anything else. I didn’t know what EQ was back then. IQ, sure. That one got talked about. I just knew my head never stopped working and my emotions were either too loud or...

Thanksgiving Never understood this holiday. Still don’t. People make it sound soft. Warm. Like the world stops hurting because someone puts a turkey on the table. We had one. A table. Just too small for all the other things in that trailer. There weren’t days off. Pain didn’t take breaks. Neither did they. Teachers used to make us write lists of things we were thankful for. Kids making jokes, rolling their eyes like they had real problems. And me, sitting there trying to pick a lie that...

Don’t get it? Yeah. Me either. The psych says I should write it down. Says it’s safer on paper than stuck in my head. Says my brain wired...