Away, at ten
home to the city
I left home when I was ten. Most kids that age are still learning the short cut to a friend's house and coming back every evening to a warm kitchen. I was packed off from a quiet town to a strict school in the city, shown a hard hostel bed, and left to work the rest out. There was no coming home after class to complain about a bad mark or a tough teacher. You made your bed the moment you woke up. You kept your own time. You washed your own clothes, in cold water, and you learned to do it properly because nobody was going to redo it for you. Nobody sat us down and said that this was the real syllabus, that looking after yourself mattered as much as the maths. You just noticed it one day, standing in a quiet corridor, that you'd been running your own life for years, your schedule and most of your worries included.
The codes
bells, timetables, no privacy
A hostel runs on rules, and the rules don't care how you feel. It doesn't matter if you're tired or homesick. The first bell goes at six, and another tells you when to eat. The timetable decides when you sleep, you share a room, so there's no privacy, and the schedule is never yours to argue with. You learn the unwritten rules fast too, like how the older students rank and where you fit among them. The school believed you weren't simply born clever. It believed you could be sharpened, on purpose, over years, the way you sharpen a blade against a stone, one stroke at a time. At twelve I didn't have words for any of that. I just felt the edge going on, day after day, and a lot of the softness going with it.
The discipline they gave me kept me in line. The discipline I chose later is the one I actually use.
The first real decision
class 9 the pivot
In class 9 I made the first big decision that was entirely mine. I left the hostel and moved into the city to live with my mother, officially so I could join a foundation class for the entrance exams ahead. The other reason was simpler. The hostel had given me discipline, but it couldn't give me time, and I'd started to want time badly. I wanted empty hours at night to build the software and business ideas that had started living in my head. So I swapped the walls and the bells for a lot of freedom, which was exciting and a little frightening at the same time. It's still one of the best decisions I've made. It showed me I could steer my own life, take a real risk, and deal with what came after it without anyone else managing it for me.
