Samantha Harper's poem is addressed to someone who hasn't started listening yet. Its title works like a sentence-starter, the kind of prompt a classroom exercise might set, and the speaker takes it literally, filling in what usually goes unsaid. The central idea is that what a teacher sees (a student who struggles with homework, who seems checked out, who is shaking at a bus stop) is not the same as what that student is carrying. What looks like attitude is, in the poem's own word, fear.
The opening stanza is built on a steady climb. "I wish my teachers knew" is followed by three lines that all begin with "How," and the adjectives rise as the lines lengthen: "hard," then "difficult," then "painful." The last of these lines is the longest, and it is the one that turns inward: "to want to be normal, knowing you were made differently." The sudden "you" is worth noticing. The speaker slips out of "I" for a moment, as if the sentence is too heavy to say about herself directly. "Made differently" is also a gentle phrase, closer to self-acceptance than self-blame, and it sits oddly against the pain around it.
Then comes the poem's most defensive passage, a run of denials: "I am not crazy / I am not lazy / I am not faking / I am not standing at the bus stop shaking because i want attention." The rhymes are the sharpest sound in an otherwise unrhymed poem. *Crazy* chimes with *lazy*, and *faking* with *shaking*, and each pair sets an accusation beside the truth. The speaker defines herself by what she has presumably been called, which suggests how often she has had to argue against a misreading. The final denial breaks the pattern by running long, and the physical detail of shaking is the one thing here that can't be performed for show. The body is telling the truth, and nobody is reading it.
After this comes the quiet admission, "I am just scared..", and the poem answers with a list. "Scared of change / Of homework / Of failure / Of disappointment / Of rejection / Of simply not being good enough..." The list begins with the ordinary (homework sits right beside change) and moves toward the existential. The effect is to show a school problem and a deeper one as the same problem. Fear of homework turns out to be fear of failing, and fear of failing turns out to be fear of not being enough. The trailing dots give the sense of a list that could go on.
The middle of the poem trades argument for testimony. "From" repeats four times, each time naming a source of trauma: a "toxic ex," bullying, sexual assault, a mother's abandonment. There is almost no figurative language here, and the plainness is the point. The one metaphorical phrase, that her mother "tore my family apart," is also the one place where the speaker assigns blame. "All the while" matters too. It tells us these things did not happen politely one at a time, but piled up together. The unpolished surface, with its typos, its casual lowercase "i," and its uneven punctuation, adds to the sense of something written quickly, without being tidied for an audience. Notice, too, that the confident capital "I" of the denials gives way to lowercase "i" as the painful details arrive. That may only be how the poem was typed, but it has the effect of the speaker shrinking as she speaks.
The ending carries the most quietly moving shift. "But, i also wish" brings in effort: "I am still trying my best / Even though it my not look like it." The poem's real complaint is that effort can be invisible. Then "wish" gives way to "hope," and "teachers" to a direct "you." The poem stops being a list of requests and becomes a plea to the reader. "I'm still just a kid" is the simplest line in the poem, and it lands hard after everything that came before it. The last line moves the fear forward in time, "of what's to come..", with the emphatic capitals of "so SO scared" and one more unfinished ellipsis. Nothing is resolved.
That refusal to resolve is part of what makes the poem matter. It is not polished, and it does not need to be. It shows school readers how a few hard words, such as *lazy* or *attention-seeking*, can sit on top of a life they don't describe at all. It asks adults to treat behaviour as a form of communication, and it asks peers to remember that the person next to them may be trying harder than they appear to be.