The Binary Can Make You Blind
If I was already bad, they
did not have to
become curious.
I Know Tings
I Know Tings follows knowledge through neurodivergence, the body, the conditions that shaped it, and the relationships capable of changing what comes next.
This week, I Know Tings enters Monster’s Week—a descent into the monsters people create, protect, obey, and hide beneath familiar faces. It only feels right to arrive here in October, beneath Scorpio skies, surrounded by decomposition, revelation, underworld movement, and all the spooky tings that ask us to look directly at what has been buried.
But these monsters are not costumes. This is not Halloween dress-up. They are beliefs made flesh. Family arrangements that survive by consuming the truth. Masculinity swollen by protection. Faith used as camouflage. People made monstrous by everything they refuse to examine within themselves.
Monster’s Week asks what becomes visible when the pleasant face can no longer conceal the rotting structure beneath it.
My mother told me my sibling received better care because my sibling was not bad. That statement brought a whole arrangement into view: masculine authority, religious obedience, conditional care, and the refusal to recognize my disability. Through Mycelial Sankofa, I return to what I watched and examine the binary that kept deciding what my body deserved.
My OCD mind loops. Before I had a diagnosis, I could write and rewrite and overwrite, trying to find the sentence that would finally make what I knew receivable. Another explanation. Another correction. Maybe this time I could get the truth through.
My mother does not have an OCD diagnosis. But I watched her loop through thoughts regularly, and when I brought her mine, she sent me to the Bible. That was the place she directed the repetition. The fear. The questions my mind could not put down.
I was asking for help understanding what was happening inside me. She returned me to the authority already governing the house.
Now I can see how much of my explaining became another loop. I kept revising my language while their terms for receiving it stayed fixed. I could write a whole life into the account, and they could send it back marked disobedient.
The truth was never going to get through on the strength of one more sentence.
I need to begin by saying that when I call the binary blinding, I am not borrowing blindness as a metaphor for stupidity, ignorance or moral failure. I am naming a material failure of perception: what happens when a mind has been trained so completely by obedience that evidence can enter through the eyes and still be rejected by the system interpreting it. The eye sees. The binary decides what is allowed to become visible.
I am not singular in discovering neurodivergence. I do, however, believe we are living through a singular arrival. Neurodivergence is entering younger generations through language, diagnosis, refusal and public record in ways that cannot be privately disciplined out of sight. The pandemic did not create these minds. It disrupted enough routines, institutions and performances that many people could no longer successfully perform being fine. What families had called difficult, lazy, disobedient, dramatic, gifted, troubled or touched could no longer be kept inside those words.
And I recognize that it is still being ignored.
Black exceptionalism, Black Faith and Black performance sit on an edge of delusion that has been essential to both survival and assimilation. When the state is still negotiating whether you are human, you learn to apply a veneer of ignorance over tings you might otherwise name. You learn not merely to survive what is happening, but to stop seeing portions of it. We have spent generations negotiating our humanity instead of being permitted to live within it.
We say having children is not for everyone, but that has not become a lived legacy within Blackness. Our bodies were stolen and forced into creation for the state. Reproduction became labor, duty, survival, proof and imagined liberation. That history does not disappear because we can now speak the language of choice. Eventually, eyes trained to measure success through the same system that denies us can lose their capacity for discernment. If the child appears successful inside that system, the bodies hardened to produce that success become irrelevant.
Mental health has never been a ting in my family. Neither have the clear learning disabilities and other forms of neurodivergence that remained unnamed because nobody was required to develop language for them. Every lineage descending from enslaved people contains minds and bodies shaped by violence while being denied sufficient language, diagnosis and care. I do not need to diagnose my mother to name what I lived beside. I am looking at more than seventy years of mental health left unresolved and uncared for: looping thoughts sent to the Bible, harm blamed on forces outside the self, men treated as inherently right and accountability continually transferred to a savior.
Unrecognized disability can explain the conditions surrounding harm. It does not erase the harm.
Because if the state can deny your humanity while calling itself righteous, that architecture can fall squarely into the laps of parents. They can deny a child’s reality and call it protection. They can refuse their testimony and call it faith. They can reproduce the state inside the home and call it the best they could do.
The pandemic did not begin this story. It created the perfect atmospheric pressure for what had been buried beneath Black performance, religious obedience and undiagnosed minds to begin arriving all at once. And once those tings became visible, the question was no longer whether my mother could see me.
The question was what her system would permit her to recognize.
The Binary Can Make You Blind
When obedience becomes goodness, who gets to receive care?
After the conversation with my mother in September, I began to understand that the relationship I had been trying to explain myself into required a kind of recognition her beliefs would not allow.
There was always another explanation I could offer. Another memory. Another way to describe my autism, my disability, the harm that came to my body. Another arrangement of words that might finally make the tings visible.
But she told me that my sibling received better care because my sibling was not bad and was not getting in trouble.
There it was. The care had a condition.
She could say that to me without hearing what she had admitted. Without recognizing that she had just described care as something a child earned by being easier for her to manage.
Good and bad were doing work that attention should have been doing. Those categories decided which child deserved tenderness, which child’s distress counted, and which child’s body could be punished without disturbing the story my parents told about themselves.
If I was already bad, they did not have to become curious.
And if they could remain good parents inside their own account, there was very little room for what actually happened to me.
The Woman Beneath the Man
People speak about the strength they found in their mothers.
The bravery.
The moments when watching their mother taught them how to stand.
I understand that those relationships exist. I cannot borrow somebody else’s mother to make mine easier to write about.
When I return to what I witnessed, I find something else.
I watched my mother manipulate and be manipulated. I watched fear govern situations where I needed protection. I watched her pacify the very tings that required somebody to stand up.
We remained in a church associated with men who harmed underage girls, alongside men who overlooked that harm or claimed they did not know. My mother protected the standing of those men. I did not see that same protection extended to the people they harmed.
What does it teach a child when the adult responsible for protecting them keeps protecting the people who make protection necessary?
I listened to how she spoke about people she called friends. Best friends, even. Women whose sexuality was visible. Women who resisted the men in their lives. Women who did not arrange every part of themselves around obedience to a masculine God.
She could make their resistance sound shameful. Their sexuality became something to ridicule. Their refusal became weakness, sin, or evidence that something was wrong with them.
She did not point toward those women and tell my sibling and me to recognize courage.
She did not teach us to admire the person who interrupted harm.
She taught us to inspect that person for the ways they had failed to conform.
My mother’s identification as a woman became bound to the position she maintained in relation to masculinity. That position shaped what she could praise, what she could condemn, and whose account of reality she would protect.
There was a whole arrangement she needed to remain intact.
The man above.
The woman faithful.
The child obedient.
Below.
God available to authorize the positions.
As Above, So Below used as maintenance for the state.
And the people who could not survive comfortably inside those positions became the people she found something wrong with.
Goodness With a Body Count
The gender binary connects here to a moral binary.
Man and woman.
Good and bad.
Faithful and sinful.
Obedient and difficult.
The categories reinforce each other until their assigned meaning takes priority over what actually happened.
A man can do harm and retain his authority.
A child can name harm and lose credibility.
A woman can defend that arrangement and understand herself as righteous.
I am looking at what that righteousness permitted.
My mother says I was only ever spanked or beaten one time.
That is a lie.
I do not need to make that sentence more comfortable for the person who wants to believe a mother would remember correctly. I was there. It was my body.
Her version reduces repeated harm to an isolated event and asks me to disappear inside the reduction. All the other times must go somewhere. All the fear. All the conditions around it. All the information my body retained.
Where does she expect me to put it?
Then the child who remembers becomes the problem again. My account disturbs the identity she wants to keep, so my remembering can be treated as another failure of character.
For her to acknowledge what happened, she would have to revisit more than a number.
She would have to reconsider what she defended, what she allowed, and what being a good mother meant inside that household.
She would have to let the consequences of her conduct enter her understanding of herself.
My parents normalized situations that somebody outside the household could have recognized as disturbing. They made those situations ordinary enough to keep living within them, then treated that continued living as evidence that they had created something acceptable.
But enduring an arrangement does not establish that the arrangement was safe.
Remaining married does not establish that the relationship was accountable.
Having children does not establish that those children received care.
Whatever they thought they created inside their binary relationship, they did not create the safety their story requires.
We Were Watching
Parents sometimes speak as though childhood happened without witnesses.
But we were there.
And I need to be specific about how I was there.
I have OCD.
I have a photographic memory.
My brain was remembering and recording tings in ways I did not yet understand. I did not have the language for all the information I was retaining, but the information was entering me.
The rooms.
The conversations.
The expressions.
The difference between what somebody said in one moment and what they claimed later.
I was watching.
At 3224 Locust St., I witnessed physical abuse between my mother and Ron Curry.
I remember the coins as they flew from her purse and hit the floor,
the pretty copper reflections like lightning bugs
in a summer storm.
Atmosphere now inside.
reverberating between walls and and my mother’s wood floors.
That address belongs in this account because the harm happened somewhere. It had rooms around it. It entered a child’s life in a particular place. It cannot be reduced to a vague suggestion that my household was difficult.
There were numerous specific situations.
There was conduct to witness.
There were words to hear.
There were differences between what happened and what the adults later permitted themselves to remember.
I was documenting who received gentleness and who received suspicion. Which person’s anger became authority. Which person’s anger became evidence against them. What could happen in the house and still be folded into the claim that we were a family doing the best we could.
I knew tings before I could explain the arrangement.
My memory did not begin when I received my diagnoses. My understanding changed. I gained language for the body and brain that had already been there, receiving the household.
And a child does not need a photographic memory to recognize harm. Somebody looking in from outside could have recognized that these situations were not normal. My particular memory is part of how I carry the record; it is not a requirement that anybody else must meet before their account deserves attention.
I remember.
That fact keeps encountering people who need me to remember less.
Religion Gave the Arrangement Another Wall
Ron Curry was not interested in religion for much of the life I watched.
Then religion entered differently.
The household’s turn toward Hebrew Israelite beliefs brought an even more rigid, cult-like binary into the space. More authority. More categories. More ways to arrange people beneath an account that was not available for examination.
I still boil remembering how my mother threw away my groceries. My breads and anything with yeast, specifically because it was some silly Hebrew religious festival and no yeast was allowed. GTFOH.
I cannot narrate the inside of his mind. I can examine what that turn made possible in the household.
A person who had done harm could take up a religious identity while the harm remained unaccounted for. The new framework offered language for righteousness, belonging, obedience, and who was wrong. It did not produce the accountability I needed to see.
That is the part I want held in the frame.
What happens when religion allows somebody to change the story of who they are without requiring them to face what they have done?
Pastor Ron now sitting at the head of the Shabbat table, looking even more foolish than them orating Negroes at the piss-poor churches my mother made us attend.
The person harmed is still carrying the history. The person who caused harm has another identity to stand inside.
A clown.
Now the child must contend with the conduct and the religious authority surrounding it. Naming what happened can become disobedience. Refusing the arrangement can become evidence that the child is spiritually wrong.
Inside and outside.
Chosen and condemned.
Righteous and sinful.
Authority and submission.
My parents’ religious life belongs in this examination because it shaped the conditions under which anything could be understood. The same structure that protected masculinity also gave them ways to reject information that disturbed their position.
How was my autism supposed to become legible within that?
How was my disability supposed to receive attention when difference could be interpreted through sin, disobedience, or a failure to respect authority?
Religion gave them more language. I did not see it give them more capacity to hear me.
The Wall Around Disability
When my mother insists nobody told them about my disability, I hear that statement alongside everything else she has refused to recognize.
How much information can reach a person whose framework has already decided what the information must mean?
A child who needs support can be heard as a child who needs discipline. A boundary can be heard as disrespect. An account of violence can be heard as an attack on the family.
The message arrives.
The category swallows it.
Autism has a strong genetic component, and inherited variation is part of that picture. That matters to the question I am asking about what a family can carry without ever developing language for it.
Autism has a strong
genetic component.
My parents have never meaningfully examined their own mental health or learning needs. What did they understand about how they processed information? About what overwhelmed them? About the difficulties they had turned into rules for everybody around them?
They refused therapy blatantly and proudly.
Why do fools fall in love?
somebody call Frankie Lymon.
What happens when a difficulty remains unnamed for decades?
When coping becomes personality.
When avoidance becomes conviction.
When something a person has never understood about themselves becomes the way they believe life must be lived.
Then a child arrives with needs that interrupt that arrangement.
The child needs adults who can investigate. Adults who can tolerate learning that their first explanation was wrong. Adults who can recognize a difference without turning it into a moral failure.
I was trying to receive understanding from people whose identities were invested in the explanations that had already harmed me.
Recognizing my autism would require them to reopen the category of bad and examine what they had placed inside it.
My OCD belongs here, too.
My memory belongs here.
The fullness of my brain and body belongs here.
I cannot understand my childhood by taking out the very ways I was receiving it.
I am not making disability responsible for their conduct. I am asking what became possible when unexamined needs, rigid beliefs, and authority were allowed to harden around one another.
I can recognize that my parents may have needed support.
I also needed protection.
Both facts can remain in the account. Their framework keeps demanding that one erase the other.
To be clear.
THEY DID NOT PROTECT ME.
The Best They Could Do
My parents have lived beneath standards of success they could not fully access or fulfill. College is one of those standards.
I keep returning to that because of the certainty with which people can claim they did the best they could while refusing to consider what they never learned.
What does best mean when you will not investigate what else is available?
College and graduate school caused me harm, too. I am not placing a degree above a person’s life. Educated people can be committed to the same binaries. Institutions can make a hierarchy more elaborate and call that knowledge.
But learning can introduce another account. Another practice. Another possibility. It can give us language for a need we were taught to treat as failure.
That learning can happen in many places. It requires some willingness to let new information change how we respond.
My concern is the closure.
The certainty that their effort should settle the question, regardless of what happened to the people receiving it.
The limits of somebody’s access can help explain what they did not know. Those limits cannot make everything they did sufficient.
Especially when the child grows up, returns with language, and is still refused.
At some point, nobody told us has to encounter the person standing there telling you.
Liminality Is Inhabited
My parents have lived between what the colonial system demanded and what their lives made possible. They have known the distance between an approved identity and a life that cannot fulfill it.
Yet they have enforced categories that leave little room for another person’s difference.
Living within uncertainty does not automatically teach somebody to honor it.
Sometimes a person becomes so frightened of their own position between categories that they fasten themselves more tightly to the categories. The rule promises an escape from the discomfort. Somebody else can be placed beneath them. Somebody else can become bad.
They can find certainty through the judgment.
I am nonbinary.
I am autistic.
I have OCD.
I am Black.
My body does not become less real where their categories fail to contain it.
The space beyond a binary is inhabited.
There are bodies there.
Relationships there.
Needs there.
There are people remembering what the approved account cannot hold.
My parents have occupied complicated lives while demanding uncomplicated explanations from mine.
I will not keep reducing myself to make that demand easier to meet.
Mycelial Sankofa: Returning to the Relationships
Mycelial Sankofa gives me a way to return without handing the past back to the people who keep rewriting it.
I return to the relationship between tings.
3224 Locust St. and the violence I witnessed there.
The church and the men whose standing remained protected. My mother stood with other weak women.
She was not alone.
She was supported to be complicit.
The women my mother ridiculed and the resistance she taught us to condemn.
Ron Curry’s religious turn and the accountability that did not arrive with it.
My sibling’s better care and the category of bad that explained what I received.
My autism.
My OCD.
My photographic memory.
The child watching all of it without yet knowing how much their brain was keeping.
These memories have connections. I do not have to isolate each one until it becomes small enough for somebody else to dismiss.
Mycelium gives my pedagogy a material reference for branching and relation. It helps me attend to how knowledge becomes perceptible across connections.
Sankofa asks what I need to retrieve from the past to live differently now.
Sometimes I retrieve a warning.
Sometimes I retrieve an observation I was trained to distrust.
Sometimes I retrieve the fact that I had already recognized something before an adult taught me to call it normal.
Returning does not require restoring the relationship.
I can return to what I know. I can retrieve my own attention. I can stop treating reconciliation as the measure of whether I have understood my history.
Within The Wata(ring) W(hole), memory, conflict, regulation, and devotion have relationships with one another. Deep Water carries what I remember. Turbulent Water brings the contradiction into speech. Still Water gives my body somewhere to settle after naming it. Sacred Water holds the commitment to stop making myself disappear.
The Cosmos has room for the fullness.
For the address.
The scene.
The repeated situation.
The body that kept the information. The person who is tired of having to translate a whole life into something more convenient for its witnesses.
I build worlds that stories can live inside.
My own body must be able to live here, too.
I Do Not Have to Become Legible to the Wall
The September conversation gave me something painful and specific: my mother named the rule that had governed the care.
My sibling was not bad.
I was.
She could say that without asking what I needed. Without reconsidering what she had witnessed. Without recognizing how much of my life had been pushed into that category so that her account could remain intact.
I understand now why another explanation of autism cannot, by itself, open this relationship.
It would have to enter a structure that permits my experience to change her understanding.
I cannot supply that permission.
I cannot make my mother examine the position she has maintained in relation to masculinity. I cannot make Ron Curry’s religious identity produce accountability. I cannot make either of them become curious about the child they had already decided was bad.
I can stop spending my life arranging my testimony for a wall.
I know what I watched at 3224 Locust St.
I know that the situations were numerous.
I know that my brain was recording tings long before I understood how to speak about the record.
I know that their normalization did not make the harm normal.
And I know that my need for care existed before anybody decided whether I was good.
The care should have been able to reach me.
It did not.
No longer standing in Binary Boo Boo.
The Binary Can Make You Blind
Cosmos Watershed
The Cosmos Watershed is not a bibliography. It is a relational map tracing where an essay begins, what nourishes it, how its knowledge travels, and which currents it resists.
This essay enters through Deep Water, where childhood observation and remembered harm remain available despite their denial. Turbulent Water brings unequal care, protected masculinity, and erased violence into speech. Tidal Water follows the recurring arrangement across church, household, friendships, and the September conversation. Still Water holds the recognition that I can stop explaining without surrendering what I know. Flowing Water carries attention toward relationships capable of responding to my needs. Sacred Water holds a commitment to bodily sovereignty and care that does not require obedience as its price.
Watershed | Tributaries |
Watershed | Deep Water moving through Turbulent and Tidal Water, with Still, Flowing, and Sacred Water supporting recognition, regulation, and accountable care |
Relationship | Gender hierarchy ↔ masculine religious authority ↔ moral judgment ↔ unequal care ↔ disability recognition ↔ childhood witnessing ↔ present boundaries |
Hom(e)ie | The witnessing body: the child who watched, listened, and retained knowledge that the family’s preferred account excludes |
Origin | The September conversation in which Kiing’s mother stated that their sibling received better care because their sibling was not bad or getting in trouble |
Expansion | The statement enters relationship with protected men, contempt toward women’s resistance, repeated harm, parental self-understanding, and the refusal to recognize autism |
Application | Examine what categories permit people to overlook; distinguish explanations of limited access from accountability; retrieve testimony without requiring reconciliation |
Lineage | Mycelial Sankofa; Black nonbinary embodied knowledge; childhood witnessing; relational inquiry; bodily sovereignty |
Counter Currents | Obedience treated as goodness; care distributed by moral rank; masculine authority protected from consequences; violence reduced or erased; disability interpreted as misconduct; “the best we could do” used to close inquiry |
The Six Waters
Water | How It Moves Through This Essay |
Still | Gives the body somewhere to settle after recognition; holds permission to stop repeating an explanation |
Flowing | Moves attention toward responsive relationships and practices of care |
Deep | Carries childhood observation, remembered violence, and knowledge retained beneath the family narrative |
Turbulent | Names the conflict between what happened and the account that denies it |
Tidal | Makes recurring arrangements perceptible across different relationships and periods of life |
Sacred | Sustains devotion to bodily sovereignty, truthful memory, and accountable care |
Cosmos Coordinates
Coordinate | Placement |
Primary Portal | I Know Tings |
Connected Waters | Deep Water; Turbulent Water; Tidal Water; Still Water; Flowing Water; Sacred Water |
Tings Connections | Trans Learn Tings; Afro Tings |
Primary Methodology | Mycelial Sankofa |
Methodological Practice | Return across childhood observations, remembered harm, religious teachings, unequal care, and present conversation; examine their relationships without making every event identical |
Embodiment Movements | Intuition; Regulation; Integration; Movement |
Cosmos Concepts | Conditional care; binary judgment; witnessing; bodily sovereignty; disability recognition; liminality; accountability; relational knowledge |
Geographic Coordinate | Household and church as connected sites of authority; no specific geographic location is named in the essay |
Relational Coordinate | Whether a child’s needs and testimony can change an adult’s understanding, or must remain subordinate to the adult’s preferred identity |
Temporal Coordinate | Childhood witnessing ↔ accumulated family narratives ↔ the September 2026 conversation ↔ present recognition and boundaries |
Orientation | Perspectival examination of lived experience; the witnessing body remains a participant in the account |
Core Refrain | The care should have been able to reach me. |
Core Inquiry | When obedience becomes goodness, who gets to receive care? |
Expansion Principle | A relationship must permit another person’s experience to alter its understanding; acknowledgment cannot depend on preserving the authority that caused or permitted harm |
Calabash Relationship | The vessel carries memory, testimony, and bodily knowledge without requiring Kiing to preserve the family’s denial |
Wata(ring) W(hole) Relationship | Memory, conflict, regulation, movement, and devotion circulate through the same body; a verdict of good or bad cannot account for that living relationship |
Cosmos Constellations
Constellation | How It Enters This Essay | What It Makes Visible |
Mycelial Sankofa | Childhood observations and present conversation enter relationship through return. | The arrangement becomes perceptible across connected memories. |
The witnessing body | Kiing remembers what they watched, heard, and experienced. | Childhood contains witnesses whose knowledge survives an adult’s denial. |
The gender binary | Womanhood is examined through the position Kiing’s mother maintains in relation to masculine authority. | An assigned position can govern whose suffering a person recognizes and whose standing they protect. |
The moral binary | Goodness and badness become the explanation for unequal care. | A verdict can replace curiosity about a child’s needs. |
The masculine God | Religious obedience shapes judgments about sexuality, resistance, and authority. | Spiritual language can participate in protecting harmful conduct. |
Autism and family recognition | Disability enters a household already organized around blame and obedience. | New language cannot produce recognition when the relationship refuses to reconsider its categories. |
Liminality | The parents’ lives are examined between imposed standards and available access. | Living within uncertainty does not automatically produce openness toward another person’s difference. |
The limits of access | Education, learning, and parental claims of doing their best enter the same inquiry. | Explanation remains distinct from sufficient care and continuing accountability. |
The Wata(ring) W(hole) | The Six Waters hold memory, conflict, regulation, movement, and devotion in relationship. | The body exceeds the verdict imposed upon it. |
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