For a long time I was listening to everyone but myself.

Not because I had nothing to say. I always had too much to say. Teachers told me to be quiet. The world told me to be practical. A guidance counselor looked at my grades and saw a problem.

What none of them could see — what I couldn’t fully see either — was that there was already a signal underneath the noise.

It showed up in eighth grade, when I tore the logo off a Pepsi bottle and spent hours freehand-lettering it in pencil, then painted it in neon because neon was what I had. It showed up in an electrical class, when the whole room missed a circuit problem because everyone assumed it was complicated. The current had a path that bypassed every resistor. The answer was zero.

Electricity, like truth, takes the path of least resistance.

It showed up at night, in my parents’ house, on a computer I built from parts — teaching myself HTML while failing my coursework. Nobody gave me permission to care about that. The discipline that never arrived in a classroom showed up the moment I had something worth staying up for.