Systems Love Uniformity. I Never Did.
image generated by AI Most people grow up learning where the edges of the box are. I grew up walking past them without noticing they were supposed to matter. It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t defiance. It was simply that the box never made sense to me—too small, too rigid, too uninterested in the particularities that make a person who they are. I didn’t know there was a box until other people told me I had stepped out of it. The First Prism In elementary school, the science fair was a parade of store‑bought kits: sleek prisms, polished mirrors, tidy instructions. I showed up with a handful of homemade prisms—pieces of window glass, cut into triangles, and, as I discovered in the process was needed in order to control and direct the angle of the refraction, covered on both sides with black construction paper. They worked! Of course. They were based on the function of light. I made them myself, together with my science fair partner, because we had no money to buy a fancy kit (those ki...