My First Scream and the Cartography of Resistance

I was born into resistance.

Before breath. Before words. Before my body had even finished forming... I was already being managed.

My mother was medicated during pregnancy. Not her choice, but “doctor’s orders.” That was the 1970s. So my first inheritance wasn’t just DNA. It was chemistry.

Even in the amniotic dark, the Rule-Makers were at work ... building their fortress walls inside me.

Quiet this child. Soften the spark before it arrives.

That was my earliest encoding. Not rebellion, not choice… survival. My cells absorbed both nourishment and constraint. At the same time I grew fingers, toes, lungs, I also grew the knowledge that this world would try to contain me.

The Birth Border

Birth was my first border crossing. Naked, ripped from warmth into cold, my arrival was greeted by strangers with clipboards and gloves. A stamp: boy or girl. Two syllables to decide a life.

I screamed. Not only because of the cold air in my lungs, but because something in me already resisted being reduced to that binary. That scream was my first “no.”

And that scream has never ended. It only changed shape.

Living in the Citadel

As a child, I quickly saw where the rules came from. Teachers, doctors, elders, bosses… all agents of the citadel.

The Rule-Makers offered safety if I would comply. Wear the uniform, raise your hand at the right time, speak only

when invited. Do as we do and you’ll be protected.

The citadel was alluring. Its smooth roads and fertile valleys promised belonging. But I never fit. Even when I complied, the walls pressed in. My curiosity didn’t stop at their gates. My questions overflowed. Something in me would not shrink small enough to fit.

The Mountains’ Call

So I went looking for the Resisters’ mountains. Their air was thin, their slopes jagged, but at least I could breathe. The mountains held no rulebook, only questions:

Why this way and not another? Who says? What if we start again?

Every climb was punishing. Sometimes lonely. But the view was mine. Up there I could feel the truth of myself, unsoftened.

I wasn’t alone, though it often felt that way. History is littered with mountain climbers… people who refused the easy roads.

Einstein, who couldn’t stop asking what light really was. Curie, whose curiosity about invisible rays burned her hands raw. Turing, who built machines to imagine thinking itself, and paid the price for living outside the citadel’s codes. Musicians who screamed into microphones, their lyrics a howl against the suffocating order. Revolutionaries who chained themselves to gates or stood in front of tanks.

Each one paying dearly for the same refusal: I will not stay small.

Their resistance, like mine, wasn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It was survival. It was the scream.

The Drift Zone

Of course, you can’t live only in the mountains. I spent decades in the Drift Zone, between valley and peak. Negotiating, compromising, trading silence for a paycheck, swallowing medication for the sake of “functioning.”

The Drift Zone is exhausting. You never quite belong anywhere. Too loud for the citadel, too softened for the mountains. You wake restless, always in-between.

Medication became the truce. The pills took the edge off, kept me moving through the citadel without blowing its circuits. But they also reminded me every day that I was being managed. Containment disguised as care.

It’s a strange thing, to swallow your survival in tablet form. To know that the spark inside you, the one that screamed at birth, is still deemed “too much.” Fifty-one years on, I am still told this in subtle and blunt ways. Too

intense. Too restless. Too unwilling to play by the script.

And yet… I am still here. Still drawing my map.

Cartography as Survival

Over time I realised that my role wasn’t just to wander these terrains, but to map them. To mark the contours of valleys and mountains, to sketch the citadel walls, to chart the Drift Zone’s shifting plains.

I carry this map in my body. The valleys feel like weight pressing me down. The mountains feel like thin air, sharp but clarifying. The citadel feels like a hand on my shoulder, both steadying and restraining. The Drift Zone feels like half-sleep, never at rest.

Mapping gives me a strange kind of control. If I can see the terrain, I can survive it. If I can draw the borders, I can choose when to cross them. If I can name the poles… Rule-Makers, Resisters, Pleasers… I can recognize their voices inside me too.

The Inheritance of Resistance

Children arrive with resistance in their bones. They touch hot stoves, not to defy, but to learn. They fall, climb, ask endless questions, test yes against no. That’s how they build their maps.

I was no different. Only my map carried the extra coding of medication and control. My trial and error was shaped by hands that wanted to keep me still. Yet I learned anyway. Hot, cold. Yes, no. Speak, stay quiet. Each misstep etched another line into the cartography of myself.

And the truth is, I was never just mapping for me. Every question I asked, every rule I pushed against, placed me in a long lineage of resisters. People who couldn’t sit still in the citadel. People who risked comfort for clarity. People who sometimes changed the world, and sometimes were broken by it.

Still Too Much

Now, weeks from my 51st birthday, I can say this: my scream never ended. It simply evolved. It became words, frameworks, stories, equations, songs. It became maps of compliance and defiance.

I am still too much for this world. And that’s not a flaw… it’s proof that I’m alive. Proof that the fortress walls never managed to extinguish the fire. Proof that containment isn’t the end of the story.

Because in the end, my resistance is not only to the citadel’s rules or the pills in my pocket. It is resistance to being turned into another brick in the wall… slotted neatly, nameless, interchangeable. I was never meant to be mortar for someone else’s structure. My map isn’t theirs to pave over.

The Open Question

The Rule-Makers still hold their citadels. The Resisters still climb their mountains. The Pleasers still tend their valleys. The Drift Zone still stretches between them all. But I know the terrain now. I have walked it since before birth.

And when I scream, even quietly, I know I am not alone. I am part of a chorus that includes every curious child, every restless mind, every scientist who bent equations into truth, every artist who set the world on fire with a song, every thinker who broke the binary and wrote their own code.

That scream began in the delivery room. It hasn’t stopped. It has only found new shapes.

This is my inheritance, my burden, my map. And this is why I resist.

But maybe it isn’t only my story. Maybe you have felt the citadel walls too… maybe you’ve climbed the mountains, drifted between valley and peak, swallowed what was handed to you, screamed in your own way. Maybe you’ve raged against machines of different kinds, scribbled your maps in equations, in music, in code, in silence.

If so, then this isn’t just about me. It’s about all of us.