What My School Never Taught Me About Myself

What My School Never Taught Me About Myself

by (inam khan)

I still remember the humming fluorescent lights, the rigid rows of desks, the smell of pencil shavings and disinfectant. I was a quiet student—too quiet, they’d whisper in parent-teacher meetings. I never raised my hand, not because I didn’t know the answer, but because I was afraid my mouth would open wrong, that my words wouldn’t sound like everyone else’s.

By third grade, I learned that silence got me good grades, and good grades made adults happy.

But school never taught me why silence felt safer.

It never explained that my quiet wasn’t rudeness—it was autism. Not a flaw, not a failing, but a way of being. I wouldn’t hear that word until I was nearly twenty-three, and even then, I whispered it like a confession.

In those twelve years of education, I memorized the periodic table, the Pythagorean theorem, the Bill of Rights.

But no one ever handed me a mirror. No one said:

“Here. This is you. You’re allowed to exist like this.”

I am the child of immigrants—first-generation, first-everything. At school, they praised me for speaking “perfect English,” not realizing that the tongue I kept at home—my mother’s Urdu lullabies, my father’s Punjabi proverbs—had been hidden beneath my desk like contraband.

They never asked me what language I dreamt in.

Instead, they clapped when I recited Shakespeare and corrected my mother’s accent at parent conferences. They didn't see the identity I was splitting in half, just to be palatable.

No curriculum taught me that assimilation and erasure often wear the same mask.

They never told me that my struggle to make eye contact didn’t make me disrespectful. That I stimmed—bouncing my knee under the desk, tapping my pen rhythmically—not because I was bored, but because the world was too loud and I was trying not to explode.

School taught me to sit still.

But it never taught me how to feel safe while doing it.

It taught me to “participate” by speaking out loud in front of thirty kids, but it never considered the kid whose thoughts bloomed in quiet soil. The one whose essays glowed with insight, but whose voice cracked under fluorescent pressure.

Instead, I got report cards that read:

“Very bright, but needs to speak up more.”

“Quiet and withdrawn.”

“Shows potential but lacks engagement.”

No one ever wrote:

“Possibly neurodivergent. Possibly overwhelmed. Possibly brilliant in her own way.”

School taught me success meant eye contact, loud confidence, and being able to think on your feet.

It never mentioned that some of us think better when we sit with things. That delayed answers don’t mean lack of intellect. That processing differently doesn’t mean processing less.

My school was a box. A beige one. No windows in the metaphorical walls.

And I—I was trying to fold myself small enough to fit inside.

They celebrated conformity and mistook my mimicry for belonging.

No one noticed how my smiles were rehearsed.

How my “good behavior” was often just exhaustion from masking.

And when I asked—quietly, once—to learn about writers who looked like me, sounded like me, or thought like me, they handed me The Great Gatsby and said, “This is literature.”

They taught me Hemingway, not Hosseini.

Told me to underline themes in Steinbeck, not Sabaa Tahir or Ocean Vuong.

It wasn’t until college, in a single elective class taught by a visiting professor, that I read a story with a name like mine. That I realized I didn’t have to whitewash my voice to be heard.

It cracked something open in me.

What my school never taught me is that there was nothing wrong with me. That I was never broken.

Just misunderstood in a system built without me in mind.

Now, when I write, I write for the girl who sat in the back of the room, chewing her pencil because it was the only thing that grounded her. The one who used big words but never said them out loud.

I write for her, because she was always smart enough.