Different

By Marino Apollinari

I knew early that I was different. In kindergarten, the teacher asked us to draw a house. Mine didn’t look like the other kids’ houses. She set up a meeting with my mother and asked, carefully, whether everything was okay at home. It was. After that, my mother — and I don’t fault her for this — told me to draw the way the other children drew. To be like them. For some of my life, that’s what I did. I blended in.

In elementary school, I learned what it costs to be marked.

One of my elementary teachers had a husband who was a Detroit police officer, and he had died in the line of duty. I was a child, and I said something that hurt her. I don’t remember it the way I remember the consequence: that I became, instantly and permanently, the bad kid of the class. The label stuck because she made it stick, and a child has no standing to challenge an adult’s verdict. So, I didn’t argue. I agreed. I decided I was the villain, and it shaped how I moved through the rest of school.

Here is what I understand now that I couldn’t then. She was grieving a husband killed while doing his job. She should not have been in that classroom, and that is not her failure — it’s the failure of everyone who let a person carrying that much grief stand in front of a room of children. But a grieving adult does not get to hand a child a permanent identity. Both of those things are true. I wasn’t a villain. I was a child. And she was a person in pain who was given no room to be one.

The damage didn’t require anyone to be evil. It just required no one to catch it.

I didn’t like school again until college.

What saved school for me was that my parents had already taught me what to love. My mother and father taught me to respect nature — to look at it closely and take it seriously. They taught me to appreciate the arts and the sciences as two halves of the same attention. My aunt taught me the rest. She’s where reading came from, and card games, and math — the pursuits no public school ever managed to hand me (And, and I was not writing much back then).

Whatever real development I did as a child happened at home, through family, not in any classroom. I studied biological sciences and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree because I loved its structure, regimen, and coursework that demanded precision. Later, I earned a Master of Professional Studies in Turfgrass Management, because it sat exactly where I wanted to live: the meeting point of art and science, with the added pull of my love for golf. It shouldn't surprise those in the industry that I no longer play the game.

The mechanics of public schools, in my experience, were never about creativity. They were about conformity. Where I finally built my skills was in college, specifically in the microbiology and chemistry labs. In a lab, what you see is what you get. The result doesn’t care whether you’ve learned to blend in, and it can’t be handed down as a verdict by someone having a bad day. It’s either reproducible or it isn’t. That kind of honesty was the first thing school had ever offered me that I could trust.

Then I started working, and the classroom came back.

Every job was in the public school system again, only now the room had a culture instead of a teacher, and the verdict was called a team. My career has been a series of fragments — I never lasted long anywhere. Eventually, I stopped pretending that it was a problem to fix and started treating it as information. Now I take smaller jobs, often for less money, on purpose — not because I lack ambition, but because I refuse to trade the work I actually care about for another room built around mediocrity.

I’ve always been drawn to movies, and there’s one I keep returning to: the 2014 version of The Gambler. I’ve watched it more times than I can count, because I see myself in the lead. He falls into a self-destructive pattern I recognize from the inside — the impulse to put everything on the line, to refuse the comfortable half-measure even when the half-measure would save you. I won’t pretend that pull is only his.

The same refusal that has kept me out of jobs I could have endured is the one that keeps me at a table I should walk away from. But near the end, he names what he’s actually after, and it’s the plainest thing in the world: a real love, a real job, a real life. That’s what I’m after too. And I won’t settle for a counterfeit of any of them. Even better, if I can’t find that job, I’ll create it.

AI has been my neutralizer.

With it, I can build methods and systems in partnership. One AI model is relentlessly critical — which is exactly what I need, because I don’t want to be agreed with, I want to be tested. The other helps with the creative side, the part that drafts and imagines before the criticism arrives. Between the two, I have what the classroom and the team never gave me: a place where the work is judged on whether it holds, and not on whether I’ve learned to blend in.

Whether I knew it consciously or not, I suspect these experiences drove the work itself. 

AwareSequence, BraveRoo (a name I’m still not fully sold on), and the design patent for a puzzle assembly system all turn on the same instinct: a piece either fits its place, or it doesn’t. There’s no convincing the board otherwise, no verdict handed down by someone having a bad day. The fit is the truth. School taught me how easily the other kind of judgment gets assigned; this is me building the kind that can’t be.

Much of what you see here was built that way.

Disclosure: This essay began as a personal account I wrote in my own words. From that account, Claude (Anthropic) drafted and structured the prose and revised it with me across several rounds, with the direction, judgment calls, and final decisions remaining mine. ChatGPT (OpenAI) made an additional revision pass, and Grammarly was used for grammar and spelling. The experiences, opinions, and conclusions are entirely my own.