In elementary school my teacher told us to write an essay about natural disasters. Each student chose a different natural disaster. I chose earthquakes. We spent one class period researching how to predict our disaster, but at the time there wasn't a warning system for earthquakes yet (they're working on one today, but that wasn't the case back then). I told the teacher I couldn't find anything, and she pulled me outside and yelled at me for ten minutes straight about how defiant I was. She went back inside and looked it up on her computer to prove me wrong... and discovered that I was right. She sent me back to my seat without an apology.

Then we had a project where we had to work with a partner to pick some poems out of a book. I think she was mad at the time so she told everyone to be completely quiet. I found a really cool poem and wanted to point it out to my partner, but he wasn't getting the hint without my words. I whispered, "read this one" and the teacher went ballistic. I got detention.

One semester later, she gave the class an array of books to choose from for a large project. She had already read every single one of them except the sci-fi one. My group decided to read the sci-fi book because it looked cool, and the teacher thought it was going to be all about spaceships and fighting aliens and stuff like that. Turns out, it wasn't like that at all. The whole story centered around a shed where time moved faster, and how the protagonist lived inside it for one year (which was only a few hours outside the shed) so he could be a year older when he came out. The book was about psychology and isolation inside one room for a year, not space battles. It was really fascinating. One part of our project was writing about the antagonist... but there wasn't one. My group told the teacher that the book simply didn't have a bad guy, and again she took me outside (and not the rest of my group for some reason) and chastised me once again. This time there was no quick proving to her that I was right, so my group ended up lying about a side character being the bad guy, when he was actually just a normal side character. Still angers me to this day.

The last straw was when we had to decorate the classroom for an event at the end of the month. The walls of the classroom were coated in bright orange paper. By some horrible luck, that's when I first developed optical migraines. I get really painful ones too, and I'm practically blind when I have them. Bright colors in large quantities are one of my triggers, so I got them every single day, and she refused to let me go to the office every single time. I cried every day, and I cried hard. I had no idea what was going on. My parents didn't believe me. I started falling behind on my work because I couldn't read the questions. The worst part is that everyone knew I was the smartest person in the class. I finished my assignments long before other students reached the midway point. I did my work fast, and I did it well. I used to be the fastest person in the class, and I had turned into the slowest. It took me literal hours to complete a twenty-minute assignment.

I remember a long reading test where we had to read a few pages the teacher printed out for us, and when we were done we got to watch a movie. A few pages was way too much for me. Everyone got to watch the movie, while I struggled with a clump of words that popped in and out of my vision. My head felt like a railroad pike was being driven into it, and I wanted to rip out my eyes to stop the needle-like pain behind them. A curtain separated the working area from the movie area. The teacher walked through it, saw I hadn't even started on my questions, and said, "Why don't you just do your work?" I knew she wouldn't believe the same thing I had been telling her for the past month. I tried overriding that feeling of helplessness, and that I was somehow doing something wrong and breaking the rules by being so sick, with happy memories... and realized that it didn't matter how happy I got; I would always feel so much worse later. There I was, at age 10, having my first suicidal thoughts.