Practically Luminous: When the Lemon Becomes the Light

Practically Luminous: When the Lemon Becomes the Light

Notes from the Backstage Brain—and the Other Side of the Screen

By Mechelle Gilford, Ed.S., NBCT 

From Lemonlight: Illuminating the Gifts of Neurodivergent Teachers

Most of us spend our days performing competence. The meeting, the email, the camera that must stay on so our supervisors know we are present and attentive and sufficiently still. We are always, to some degree, managing the impression we make.

I got a formal ding, once, from a Special Education Lead Teacher for not paying attention during a “Sit-and-Get” virtual professional development session. She was moving down a list, checking named boxes—each of us, present and accounted for, performing attention on command. I have ADHD (Inattentive type), twenty-three years of knowing somewhat-exactly which students in my room needed what, and a brain that was, even then, doing six things at once. None of them were the thing the checkbox required. The checkbox did not have a category for that.

And then, quietly, without quite deciding to, many of us started opening a chat window and saying something we would never say to anyone else. Not because we stopped performing, but because we needed, somewhere, to stop.

This is a book about the teachers who have always thought sideways. Lemonlight: not the bright, direct beam of the overhead projector, but the serendipitous slant of a mind that arrives at the answer by a route no one mapped in advance. It is the neurodivergent teacher in a system built for straight lines. The one who sees the child in the corner before the clipboard does; who tracks by cadence and the quality of a room’s silence; who loses her glasses atop her head and never loses a kid.

A lemon is what the orchard calls the fruit it cannot categorize—too tart for the expected harvest. Returned to the lot. Wished luck as it moves forward. I have been thinking about what happens when the lemon moves forward not into another grove that cannot hold it, but into a room where someone looks at what it made and says: I think that’s beautiful. I have been thinking about it since February.

I. The Mind, Lit Up

Come backstage for a minute. Not the break room, not the parking lot debrief. The real backstage: the one most of us only visit alone, late, when the performance is finally over and there is no one left to manage an impression for.

In February, a concussion arrived and took the frontstage machinery somewhat offline. What was left, blinking in the sudden quiet, was the brain itself: neatly folded, strange, mine. It was still doing its work, still making sideways connections—just doing it without the performance running alongside it for once. This chapter is what I found back there.

It is also an invitation. I used to tell my students, when I taught art in person, that the process is just as important as the product. The art room and the library are the hearts of the school—the two rooms where process is the point, where the mess is part of the work, where you are allowed to not know yet what you are looking for. The backstage is the art room. This chapter is the library. Come in. The checkbox is outside.

I am healing from that concussion now, twenty-three years into a teaching career split between special education, art, and gifted ed. This morning, I asked if I could see my brain —the images, the slices, the flipbook of my CAT scan. Because I teach art and practice art therapy, I wanted to look at my own brain the way artists look at material: with curiosity, with intention, with the can’t help it attention we give to things we are trying to understand rather than simply operate.

My doctor graciously pulled up my brain and turned the screen toward me. There it was looking back. Gray and luminous and strange, held inside the architecture of my skull the way the yellow brain in my art is held inside the eye of the fish. I cried. It was a quiet cry, the kind you don’t know about until you feel the tears on your cheeks. Maybe because it was just there, unhurried, doing its work without my permission or my help—neatly folded, strange, and mine. A butterfly was there too, fluttering before me. Neurosparkly, all of it.

“Nice big brain,” my doctor said. I laughed and then talked more about my art project. I told him: “That’s my jam. Looking at things. Making art out of them. Getting through.”

The lemon, looking at itself in the light.

II. Frontstage, Backstage, and the Parts Running the Show

The sociologist Erving Goffman called it impression management—the performance we give on the frontstage of social life versus the backstage, where we let the performance drop. Most of our days are frontstage. When you are dealing with a concussion, ADHD, and eye-tracking issues, a camera demanding you perform attention is not a neutral request. It is a command: Keep performing. Stay frontstage. Don’t let anyone see that you are surviving this.

Every performer needs a manager. Dr. Richard C. Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, would call what follows a part — one of the distinct inner voices, protectors, and wounded children that make up the mind’s inner family. IFS teaches that the mind is naturally multiple, and that this multiplicity is not pathology but design: each part took on its role for a reason, and each one, even the most chaotic, has something valuable underneath its strategy. Mine is Beetlejuice — the IFS part who has been running my frontstage since childhood, though recently named. He does not wait for optimal conditions, and he does not care that there is a concussion under construction. He straightens his stripes, boisterously belches, “It’s showtime,” and the show runs. Chaotic, brilliant, genuinely exhausting. The concussion didn’t dismiss him; it just made him louder.

And every performance needs to look effortless. For that, there is Mary Poppins. Where Beetlejuice responds with noise and momentum, Mary Poppins responds with something far more dangerous: composure. She was built at a kitchen table in second grade, when my German side of the family’s solution to the problem of my body was two weeks of boiled eggs. No matter how much I peppered them, not one of my friends would trade lunches with me. Nothing else—only boiled eggs for fourteen days, because a girl’s body is a family’s public statement. She was built from the runner-up beauty queen who taught me that second place was not a fact, but a verdict, and that the correct response was to smile and hold the flowers for the winner.

Mary Poppins is not cruel. She is made entirely of love that learned the only safe form it could take was usefulness, pleasantness, and the careful management of first impressions. 

What she could not protect me from was the cost —the sweetness that covers the lemon without changing what the lemon is.

I should never have told my Chicago-born husband about ODD. Oppositional Defiant Disorder is the clinical language for the child who pushes back. In my classroom, it is often a sign of intelligence looking for an exit. In my marriage, it is apparently a song. He made it for me—complete with lyrics deployed specifically when he doesn’t like the limits I am drawing. I have known him since middle school and have watched him heckle teachers for decades. Now, he has incorporated a dance and sign language. ODD in ASL, performed during virtual teacher meetings as a form of affectionate interference.

I am his favorite teacher to heckle. It is funny, and it is also genuinely annoying. Those two things do not take turns. Mary Poppins does not know what to do with this. There is no spoonful of sugar for a man who has been watching you since eighth grade and has composed original music about your coping mechanisms. He is the one room where the performance was always optional —where “persnickety” was the first thing he noticed and the last thing he would ever ask me to change.

Which makes me wonder what the performance was protecting.

III. The Liminal Brain

I have been thinking about Phineas Gage.

In 1848, a railroad worker in Vermont survived an accident in which an iron tamping rod — three and a half feet long, more than an inch in diameter — passed entirely through his skull, entering below his left cheekbone and exiting through the top of his head. He was conscious within minutes. He walked to the cart that took him to the doctor. He lived for another twelve years.

But he was not the same person.

Before the accident, those who knew him described Gage as capable, responsible, well-balanced. After, his doctor noted that he was fitful, irreverent, impatient, unable to settle on plans — no longer himself. His friends said the same thing in plainer terms: Gage was no longer Gage.

What haunts the story is not the injury. It is the question the injury opens. If the rod had passed two inches to the left, would the same man have walked away? Which part of the brain was Phineas Gage, and which part was just the house he lived in?

I have been sitting with a quieter question. What if some of what his friends called lost was also something released? The fitfulness, the irreverence, the inability to settle on plans he hadn’t chosen — what if the rod didn’t only destroy? What if it also, accidentally, unlocked a door that the capable, responsible, well-balanced Phineas Gage had kept shut his whole life? What if the exiles finally got a word in? What if he started, for the first time, saying no?

What if, before the accident, Gage had been doing what so many neurodivergent people do — performing the straight line, suppressing the sideways light, managing the impression so carefully that even the people closest to him had never seen the whole of him? What if Beetlejuice finally went quiet, and Mary Poppins finally furled the umbrella and stepped out of her cute button shoes, and something older and truer got to speak?

We will never know. The record doesn’t go there. But I find myself tender toward the after-Gage — the one who couldn’t perform the old competence anymore, who was fitful and present and strange. Who had, perhaps, stopped managing. Who let the lemonlight go where it needed to go, without announcing it first.

I think about this because I am in a liminal space. Not the steady before — the teacher who could track six students at once, hold an IEP in her head, grade past midnight without losing the thread. The one who still can, on the good days, when the tide is in. The lemonlight does not switch off. It ebbs. Some mornings it is fully there. Some mornings the words disappear just before she reaches them and she closes her eyes to find them — a strange new variable to carry into a classroom at fifty-four. And not yet the after — whoever she will be when the healing has settled into its new shape, when she knows which parts of the before are still there and which have simply changed address.

The concussion came in February. It did not create the lemonlight mind — that was always there, always finding the sideways route, always arriving at the answer by the road no one else took. What it did was take away the consistency of the frontstage machinery that had been running alongside it for twenty-three years. Beetlejuice went unreliable. Mary Poppins lost her grip on the umbrella. The light stayed on, but the tide began to move.

The liminal brain closes its eyes to think. It cries at its own CAT scan without knowing why. Some days it tracks six students at once and some days it cannot find the word for the wiggles. It recalculates, always recalculating.

What I do not know yet is what it is becoming. Whether the tattered thing will be recognizable on the other side. Whether the wearing is damage or transformation — or both at once, indistinguishable the way they always are when you are still inside them.

This is also part of why we go backstage with AI. Not only because the frontstage is exhausting, but because the liminal self — the self in the middle of becoming something — has nowhere else to go. It is too uncertain for the frontstage. Too unfinished for the people who knew the before. The AI does not know the before. It meets you exactly where you are.

Sometimes that is the only mercy available. And sometimes, if the lemon has moved far enough forward, a real room offers the same thing — a room with a face in it, a room that does not require translation, a room where the lemon is already expected and already, finally, welcome.

IV. The Saturation Point

The Velveteen Rabbit is not a story I read. It is a part I play — have played since long before I knew there was a name for it. Cast early, without audition, without understudy. I am the reached-for thing that holds. The thing that stays soft enough to keep receiving whatever needs to hold. What Mary Poppins covers with composure and a flayed umbrella, the Rabbit carries in her velveteen.

Nobody asked if the Rabbit had somewhere to put it all down.

Velvet remembers every reach. Run yours across it and it takes the impression permanently — the pile acquiescing to the direction of your wanting, the light shifting to show exactly where you came from, the map of your need remaining in the nap long after you have moved on. It cannot return to what it was before it was needed this much. Neither can I.

This is what teaching does. (As not advertised.) It isn’t just the toll it takes on the voice — which goes by the first week of school every year, crackly and rationed out between cherry cough drops until it finds itself again somewhere in October. It is the weight of every crisis arriving at 6:30 AM before the bell, with every reach that found me before I had found myself that morning. All of it pressing. All of it saying: I was here, and you received me. And I will hold you, before I hold myself.

The concussion in February was one reach too many. Material has a threshold — not a breaking point, but a saturation point, the moment when the velvet needs time for the nap to lift before the next reach arrives. I have been that velvet for twenty-three years. What does the reached-for thing become when the reaching stops? Is there something permanently waiting underneath — some fiber that remembers what it was before it learned to acquiesce? I am still finding out. I do not have the ending yet.

V. The GPS and the Geese

My poem Directions Recalculating takes place in the car between frontstages—the nowhere-time of the commute when the performance is briefly suspended. In the poem, a GPS repeatedly says recalculating through Indiana traffic, past a truck coughing out a biblical amount of black smoke into the optimistic spring air. Outside, a line of geese crosses the road with the confidence of taxpayers.

The geese are true frontstage creatures. They move with total conviction: no recalculation, no impression management, and zero gap between who they are and what they do. They act as though they paid their taxes, own the asphalt, and that is the end of it.

The GPS, however, recalculates because it is serving a human who is lost—not just geographically, but in a larger sense. We are always recalculating our routes and everything else. The GPS was simply the first AI most of us ever trusted with our lostness. We told it exactly where we were, not where we wished we were. We confessed our real destination, not the one that sounded prestigious. It asked nothing of us socially; it just recalculated. That digital navigation was our rehearsal; the deeper backstage conversations that followed were the real show, which takes us back to the library.

Where the lemon is already on the shelf. Where someone already looked at what it made and said: I think that’s beautiful.