First Psych-Ed Assessment, Age Four

Diagnosis is a funny thing.
Feeding your printer
            paper molehills, it spits
out unchecked boxes

            perfect squares rimmed in grey. They salivate for pen ink.
Symptoms are arranged
            numerically, like

we’ll start out with something you don’t think
                                                                                    is too fucked

then move to something that makes you feel small:

so small you are a black-fly
glued to sliding doors
                        knowing space does not belong to you,
            knowing when you claim it
your mother might prod you & say

            this is not an appropriate time;
                                    your pacing makes me nervous.

You are seven when she
reprimands you, limbs malleable, your externalities
                        pretzeled into neat boxes marked always,

marked shame —
            a bloodied weight
crawling in blisters down your throat,
            tincturing sternum —

& you are sixteen, not knowing where you
            begin, where the world ends, what you mask &

what you have forgotten you ever had to,

                        asphyxiating pencils, shading boxes halfway.
Wondering does a symptom still count if I
            beat it out of me? If I mutilated it

so many years ago
            the memory has begun to fold back in on itself?

Nowadays you find it funny:
            you only learned watching others could make
            you truly nervous
when you learned that by watching others
            you might discover everything
            you had once
done wrong.

Cate Freeborn is in her second year at the University of Victoria, studying Writing on the unceded traditional territories of the Lekwungen peoples. She is the winner of the 2020 Walrus/Amazon Youth Short Story Award, and her work has been recognized by the Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest and Pandora’s Collective Poetry Contest. She is passionate about amplifying the stories of disabled and neurodivergent writers, and enjoys hiking, true crime podcasts, and concocting oat bars in her spare time.