The word they gave me crumbled

There’s a very specific brand of silence that lives in a classroom.
You’re called to the front, and you already know—before the chalk even connects with the blackboard—that this is going to end badly.

It isn’t just embarrassment. It isn’t even quite fear.
Looking back now, my word for it was “paralysis.” But back then, the word they gave me was “lazy.”
But when you’re eleven and no one offers you the right label, you just slap on the one they give you. You wear it until it starts to feel right.

I’d fallen behind in maths twice, both times for the same boring reason: I got sick, I recovered, and the world kept spinning without me. My teachers weren’t monsters, for the most part.
They didn’t know I had surgery. We didn’t tell teachers about that kind of thing back then.

But the “logic” of that classroom had already decided: a kid frozen at the blackboard meant he wasn’t trying.

I remember one afternoon vividly. I instinctively pulled my hand back as the cane came down. The blow landed at a weird angle. I was still clutching a piece of chalk; it shattered into white dust.

I couldn’t decide what was worse: a hand that hurt, the need to find a new piece of chalk, or the sheer, stupid absurdity of it all. The mind stores that memory and remembers that particular flavor of “bad” that is also ridiculous.

That era didn’t leave me with a fear of numbers.
It left me with a contaminated brain.
For years, the phrase “I don’t understand” was hard-wired to the accusation “You’re not trying hard enough.”
To not get something wasn’t a temporary hurdle; it was a moral failure.
Asking for help didn’t feel like a solution—it felt like failure.

The damage from that kind of thing isn’t usually a big thing.
It’s more like dust that never quite settles.

Today, “I don’t understand” is followed by a tiny, heavy-lifting word: “yet.”
I want to be honest about that “yet,” though. It took decades of work to get there. It sounds like a small addition, but it had to rewire a whole bloody circuit that had been gospel since I was a child.

That’s the danger of inherited language.
It doesn’t walk in and introduce itself as a lie.
It just shows up as that quiet voice in your head that sounds exactly like an authority figure you used to be afraid of.

I painted the ensō a few years ago. I didn’t draw it on a blackboard.