To most people at that school, I was a quiet kid who caused problems. That's the whole picture they had. What they didn't see was the actual person underneath — because that person was never available to them in the environment they were watching me in.
What they saw
A student who didn't speak in register. Who had his laptop taken repeatedly and somehow kept ending up in trouble. Who found a data breach and got framed as the problem for finding it. Who went quiet in a way that made a teacher comment on it in front of the class. That's the entire file they had on me — a series of incidents, filtered through an environment that was actively making everything worse.
What they didn't see
They didn't see the person who builds and manages real infrastructure. Who runs servers, writes backend code, thinks in systems, solves genuinely hard technical problems for fun. Who talks constantly, articulately, at length — just not there, not in that building, not through that channel. Who documented the SEND breach carefully and transparently specifically because he wanted to do the right thing, not the wrong one.
They didn't see someone who has a whole functioning life, a whole personality, a whole way of thinking — happening entirely outside the range of what that environment could access.
Why this matters
Being judged entirely on a version of yourself that isn't the real one — or isn't the whole one — is a particular kind of erasure. The conclusions people drew about me were based on a fraction of who I actually am, and they treated that fraction as the complete picture. That's not really their fault individually in every case — the environment made it hard for the rest of me to be visible. But it doesn't make the mismatch hurt any less.
Where the real version lives
Here. This blog. The code. The conversations with people who actually know me. The version of me they never saw is the version that exists in basically every space except the one they were watching. I don't need them to see it now. But I wanted to write down, clearly, that it existed the whole time — it just wasn't visible to the people who decided they knew who I was.