I was a weird kid. I was obsessed with checker-patterned clothing, and for a time I rode a checkered bike, wore checkered Vans, checkered shorts, a checkered shirt and to top it all off, a checkered hat. I loved the television series “Roots” and took to calling myself Kunta Kinte. I would shower only in my socks. I decided one year to pee only in the corner of the extra room in our house. No one noticed, which gives you a sense of the general level of cleanliness in our home. I memorized all the dialogue in “Trading Places” — the 1983 movie about class warfare starring Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy that was definitely not for children.

When I was in third grade, I couldn’t sit still, so I spent a lot of each day chilling out with the janitor in the hallway. I struggled with reading, especially reading out loud, so I often hid in the bathroom. Then there was writing. I asked my teacher what seemed like perfectly reasonable questions: Do we really need there, their and they’re? And can’t we just agree when I write “how” instead of “who,” or “who” instead of “how” that he could still get the gist of what I was trying to say?

Eventually I was found to have multiple learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, anxiety disorder and depression. It was helpful for me to be able to identify the challenges I faced, but the language used to describe me was, and still is, inherently negative. It was clear that in the eyes of society, I wasn’t just different, as my mom liked to say, but deficient. I wasn’t just not normal, I was abnormal. And to be labeled abnormal is to be told that you should be other than you are. Eventually the round peg, made to fit the square hole, breaks.

Sometime in October 1988, during my sixth-grade year, I felt as if I were in the corner of a room watching myself. I started to rub my eyebrow raw and became obsessed with my split ends and would pull out any irregular hairs. I thought I had cancer, and then AIDS, because I found some white spots on my tongue. That year, a teacher assigned us the task of writing a story. I figured this was my chance to prove them all wrong. I wanted to show them that I was more than my speech problem, my chicken-scratch handwriting and my fetus-level phonic awareness.