Why We Share the Tools We Do
Hi — this is David.
I want to take a moment to share some context about me, and why the tools we talk about here matter so much — not just for kids, but for the people they grow into.
As a child, I knew I was different. Not in a dramatic way — just a quiet, persistent sense that I experienced the world differently than most of the people around me. I felt different long before I had any language for why.
I loved to read — not simply for the sake of reading, but as a way to escape my own mind and, at the same time, to understand the world better. Before second grade, I had already read through my father’s entire National Geographic collection, books on plants, insects, and weather, and yes — the Bible. Reading wasn’t an assignment for me; it was how I oriented myself in the world.
At school, I moved quickly through whatever material interested me. I skimmed most of the first-grade library, selected what caught my attention from second and third grade, and read many fourth- and fifth-grade books before the end of fourth grade. Once I had exhausted the school library — and lost access to it during the summers — I turned to my brother’s science-fiction collection. By the end of fifth grade, I had read everything he owned, including The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.
New schools in sixth and seventh grade brought new libraries and new books, but reading was only part of how I learned.
I was also very active. I rode bikes constantly and taught myself how to work on them. I learned to fish from my brothers and took apart fishing reels to understand how they worked. At home, we had a collection of old lawn mowers, and I began dismantling them piece by piece, learning how engines function simply by observing, experimenting, and reassembling.
I didn’t specialize — I explored. Poetry, gardening, animal care, mechanics, astrophysics, theology, philosophy — if something existed to be learned, I wanted to understand it.
At the same time, I was labeled as having a learning disability.
I was dyslexic — but not in the way most people expected. I could read upside-down and backwards. I demonstrated this by holding pages upside-down and reading them in a mirror. Yet there were moments when information didn’t line up the way teachers expected. In math especially, I was told I was “doing it wrong,” even when my answers were correct.
More than once, teachers asked me to show them how I arrived at my answers — not because they suspected cheating, but because they genuinely didn’t understand my method. I did my best to explain what I saw. They didn’t always understand it either, but the results were correct, and eventually they accepted that I was solving problems differently, not incorrectly.
Socially, my world was small.
It wasn’t that other kids disliked me. They just didn’t understand me — and, truthfully, I didn’t understand them either. I was quiet. Observant. Not antisocial, but not social in the ways people expected. Connections were rare, and fitting in never felt natural.
I wanted to be with other kids. I just didn’t know how to meet them where they were — and they didn’t know how to meet me where I was.
Even now, at 61, that feeling hasn’t entirely disappeared. I still don’t feel comfortable with most people. I still feel like I don’t quite fit. I still see things in my mind as if they’re laid out in an exploded view — systems, relationships, mechanisms — but I often can’t translate what I see into words that make sense to others.
This work doesn’t exist in isolation.
My wife, Dawn, experiences the world through a neurodiverse lens and lives with complex, chronic health challenges that have shaped how we both think about environments, learning, and support. Where I tend to see systems and structures, she feels — very directly — what happens when those systems fail the body and the nervous system.
Dawn is currently writing a memoir that explores neurodiversity, environmental illness, and resilience through lived experience. Her perspective grounds this project in reality rather than theory. Together, our experiences shape how we evaluate tools, environments, and approaches — not as solutions or fixes, but as forms of support.
If I had access, as a child, to the learning, sensory, and STEM tools that exist today, I don’t believe I would be a different person. But I do believe I might have been able to express myself more clearly, regulate myself more calmly, and interact with others in a way that felt less exhausting and less isolating.
That’s why we care about the tools we share here.
They aren’t about correcting people. They’re about reducing friction — between minds, environments, and expectations — and making room for different ways of thinking, learning, and being in the world.