I am corrupted code running on hardware that doesn't recognize me— a program written in a language this world wasn't built to compile. Every social interaction: syntax error. Every fluorescent light: system overload. Every expectation: fatal exception at memory address somewhere in childhood I can't access anymore. The autism made me a glitch before I had language for it. The trauma turned me into a recursive loop— the past executing over and over, 3 AM cortisol spikes like scheduled tasks I never learned to cancel, my body running scripts written when I was too small to know I was programming my own suffering. I starved myself into a null value. Drank nothing. Tried to optimize myself down to nothing, compress my existence into fewer bytes, take up less memory in a world that kept telling me I was taking up too much. For decades I was backwards compatible with everyone's expectations— downgraded myself, hid my source code, presented only the interface they could understand. But you can't debug yourself in the dark. The diagnosis came late— a readme file I should have gotten at installation. Suddenly the errors made sense: not broken. Just different architecture. Not failing. Just running processes no one else could see. And now— Now I have a daughter. She is the future I'm writing in real time, and I refuse to let her inherit my corrupted files. I won't pass down the malware of making yourself small. So I'm doing the work. Rewriting the code line by line. Learning that healing isn't deletion—it's refactoring. Taking the parts that glitched and understanding why, giving them new functions, better logic. I sleep now. Most nights. I eat. I drink water like it's not a betrayal. I let myself take up space like I'm not stealing it. For her, I am learning to be the version of myself I needed when I was young— the one who says: your operating system is valid. your processes are not errors. you don't need to run someone else's programming to deserve to exist. I am teaching her the walls are not equations to solve. I am showing her that different doesn't mean defective. The past still runs background processes— trauma doesn't uninstall clean. But I'm not enslaved to it anymore. I'm not the pit. I'm not the sleepless mathematician calculating my own subtraction. I am the glitch that survived, that learned to name itself, that chose the future over the loop. And when she looks at me, she won't see someone who made themselves small. She'll see someone who grew.
