I spent my childhood in lanes.

Swimming lanes. 5 AM practices I scootered to in the dark, the only kid on the road at that hour. The smell of chlorine so permanent it lived in my skin for years after I quit. Flip turns where I'd push off the tile and feel, for exactly one second, weightless—before the clock started counting again.

Every race was the same equation: you against the water, you against the time, you against whoever you were last week. If you lost, you could trace it. Your turn was .2 seconds slow. Your stroke count drifted on the third lap. You got lazy in the kick. The clock didn't lie and neither did the split times, and that was the only kind of honesty I knew how to trust.

I loved it. Not the winning—though that was good—but the unbearable clarity of knowing that every outcome was authored by my own hands.

Later it was StarCraft. I played Zerg. I still remember the loss that taught me what competition actually was: a 4-gate I should have scouted, watching my base burn because I was too greedy with my expansion timing. The ladder dropped me twelve points. I sat in my chair in our family kitchen on a tiny laptop and stared at the number and thought: that's exactly what I'm worth right now. No teammate to blame. No lag excuse. Just the gap between what I thought I knew and what I actually knew, rendered in numerical form.

I played for six more hours that night. The number went back up. Then higher than before.

That's when I understood what my brain needed: systems where the feedback was immediate, the rules were legible, and the fault was always, inescapably, mine.

That brain followed me out of the pool and away from the keyboard. It followed me into jobs and relationships and conversations. And somewhere along the way, I discovered that the same wiring that made me a good competitor made me a suspicious communicator.

A few weeks into a new job, my boss flagged one of my messages as potentially AI-generated. Not because it was wrong—though it was, partially, and I owned that immediately. But before the accuracy issue came up, the concern was simpler: This seems like it was written by a machine.

It wasn't. I'd just thought about it and written it clearly.

I reread what I'd sent, trying to find the seams. Was it the structure? The lack of hedging? The fact that I'd organized my thoughts before I started typing? What was I supposed to do differently—leave in the false starts? Add "I think" and "sort of" until it sounded sufficiently hesitant?

I'd failed a test I didn't know I was taking.

The first time a colleague sent me a correction on a technical document, something clicked.

No softening. No "I might be wrong, but..." No three-paragraph preamble establishing that he respected my expertise before daring to disagree. Just: "This is incorrect. Here's why. Here's the fix."

I stared at it and felt my shoulders drop. Oh. This is how my brain already works.

Later I'd notice this thought pattern was common in certain cultures—Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland. Directness isn't aggression to them. It's efficiency. It's respect, because it assumes you're an adult who can handle information without emotional scaffolding.

But the recognition came after. The relief came first.

I'd spent years being called "blunt" and "intimidating" and "a lot." Not because my content was wrong. Because my form didn't match expectations. Because I said things plainly in a culture that treats plainness as aggression.

The revelation wasn't that I was broken. It was that I'd been speaking a different dialect all along.

My brother Max was nineteen when he killed himself. I was sixteen. That made me the oldest overnight, a position I never asked for and couldn't refuse.

Max could see. He saw everything—including the demons. The sight became the blade he turned inward. He wasn't kind enough. To himself.

Twelve years later, my best friend Truman killed himself in September.

Truman saw everyone else's pain with perfect clarity. Could walk into a room and tell you within thirty seconds who was performing and who was present. Could hear the thing you weren't saying underneath the thing you were. Could sit with someone's pain without flinching, without trying to fix it, without making it about himself.

He saw me. Actually saw me, in the way that almost never happens—where someone gets the full architecture, not just the presentable rooms.

But he couldn't see his own demons. He was too kind to turn the lens around.

Both clear. Both gone.

I knew before I knew. Both times.

When Max stopped answering his phone, we were driving home from the snow in northern Arizona. "Jumper" by Third Eye Blind came on. I didn't know, but I knew for a fact.

The day Truman died, I'd written a story that morning about a man deciding whether to live. Some part of me was already tuned to the frequency. Some part caught the signal before I knew there was a signal to catch.

That's the tax. You see what others don't, and you can't un-see it. Not even when you'd give anything to be wrong.

I've been to two memorials for people who saw too clearly.

At Max's, I was a kid. I saw the dissonance—the gap between who he was and how they were describing him—but I didn't call it out. I didn't have the language yet. I didn't have the standing.

At Truman's, I was an adult. I watched people give eulogies. They said he was tender-hearted, philosophical, goofy. All true. All utterly insufficient. I sat in the back and finally saw grief for what it is: a performance people put on for themselves, not for the dead.

The playlist was wrong. The order was wrong. The whole architecture was wrong.

And I couldn't unsee it. Couldn't just let it be a nice service. Couldn't stop noticing that clarity and presence—the things that made Truman Truman—were exactly what his own memorial lacked.

There's a word for this. Several words, actually. None of them work.

Neurodivergent sounds like a hospital bracelet. Clinical. Institutional. A term designed for intake forms and HR accommodations, not for describing how it actually feels to live inside this brain.

Autistic has been captured. I watched a man with a massive platform use it as a shield for years—"I'm autistic, so I can say whatever I want. I'm autistic, so you can't hold me accountable for impact. I'm autistic, so my cruelty is actually just honesty and you're the problem for having feelings about it."

That's not what this is. The words have been weaponized by people who want accommodation without obligation.

So I'm making a new one.

Neurospice.

Sight that obligates. The perception others can't access, and the weight of being accountable to it—not above it.

If you know Dune, you know the spice grants prescience—and prescience doesn't excuse Paul Atreides from anything. He sees what's coming and still has to choose. Still bears the cost. The vision makes him more accountable, not less.

That's the move. That's what the other words don't capture.

If you see more, you owe more. To kindness. To staying. To holding what you see without letting it become the reason you leave or the blade you turn on others or yourself.

The spice doesn't save you. It might be the thing that breaks you if you can't reconcile the seeing with the staying.

Max couldn't. Truman couldn't.

I'm still here. That's not virtue. It's just the current data point.

There's a version of this that becomes cruelty. I've seen it.

The person who uses their perception as a weapon—who cuts people open because they can see exactly where to cut. Who mistakes clarity for license. Who thinks "I'm just being honest" excuses the wreckage they leave behind.

That's the shadow. That's what happens when you carry the spice without accepting its weight.

Neither Max nor Truman did that. They turned it inward instead. Different failure mode. Same outcome.

The standard isn't whether you see clearly—lots of people see clearly. The question is what you do with the sight. Whether you can hold it without it holding you. Whether you can stay.

My son is seven. He's starting to show the patterns.

Not in his words yet. In his actions. His nonverbal cues. The way his face moves when something doesn't match. The way his body responds to dissonance before his mind has language for it.

He's going to spend his whole life learning to translate. Learning that some people say things to be kind even when they don't mean them. Learning that noticing doesn't give you permission to call it out every time. Learning that the gap between what people say and what they mean isn't a flaw in the system—it's the system.

I don't know how to protect him from what's coming. I don't know if I should try.

Here's what I want to tell him, eventually. When he's old enough to carry it:

You see things others don't. That's not a superpower and it's not a disability. It's a weight.

Some people will call you intense. Some will call you difficult. Some will call you a lot. That's them telling you they can't handle the frequency you're operating on. That's information about them, not about you.

But here's the part they don't tell you: seeing clearly doesn't make you right. It doesn't make you good. It just makes you responsible.

You'll be tempted to use what you see as a weapon. To cut people with your perception because you can. To mistake honesty for kindness when sometimes kindness means staying quiet. To let the sight become the exit.

Don't.

If you see more, you owe more. If you notice what others miss, you're accountable for how you use that knowledge. The spice isn't a shield. It isn't a weapon. It isn't an exit.

It's an obligation.

There are people who see differently than you will. Who carry their own sight, their own responsibility, who perceive things you can't. Your mother is one of them. I trust her with my soul. You can too.

Carry it well, or it will carry you somewhere you don't want to go.

Max is dead. Truman is dead. The clearest people I knew—one who saw demons and couldn't be kind enough to himself, one who saw everyone else and couldn't turn the lens around—they're gone.

My son is showing the patterns before he has words for them. My brain is still getting flagged for being too precise. The world still treats directness like aggression and clarity like a character flaw.

But I have a word now. For myself. For the kid who'll spend his life learning to translate. For everyone who can't look away, can't unsee the structure, can't pretend the thing works when it doesn't.

Neurospice.

Not a label. Not a shield. Not a weapon. Not an exit.

A weight.

The spice obligates.

If this is your brain too, you already know.