(They didn’t support you. They labeled you.)
Write. Laugh. Hope.
You weren’t too much.
You were mislabeled.
Because too much energy, too many questions, too much emotion—
was never about you.
It was about them not knowing what to do with you.
They didn’t ask what you needed.
They asked how to keep you quiet.
How to isolate you.
How to make you less visible
to the test scores and the funding charts.
And so they gave you
a room,
a label,
and a lowered expectation.
You weren’t supported.
You were segregated—
from potential, from peers,
from believing you were anything but a problem to be managed.
They called it “individualized education.”
But you learned more about shame than reading.
You learned more about exclusion than algebra.
You learned that being different
meant being dismissed.
It wasn’t your mind that needed fixing.
It was the system’s obsession
with conformity.
You were never the issue.
Just the excuse.
Write. Laugh. Hope.
Because what the hell else is there?
