The first thing I remember about that world is the feeling of heat pressing against everything. Texas light, the hum of air conditioning, the strange stillness that can settle over a room before anyone says a word. Some memories do not fade. They just sit in the background, waiting for you to notice them again. When I think about where my story begins, I do not think of a milestone first. I think of atmosphere.
I was small, still learning the rules of the rooms around me, still figuring out what kind of child I was expected to be. Life felt bigger than I was, louder than I was, and somehow also harder to read than it seemed to be for everyone else. I did not have language yet for sensitivity, overwhelm, curiosity, or the strange ache of feeling slightly out of sync with the world I had landed in.
What I did have was observation. I watched tones change. I watched faces. I watched the temperature of a room shift before the conversation caught up. I learned early that survival was not always about being the loudest or the strongest. Sometimes it was about becoming attentive enough to notice what was coming before it fully arrived. Even then, some part of me was already studying the world like it was a puzzle I needed to solve in order to stay safe inside it.
Looking back, I can see that this was the beginning of almost everything: the pattern recognition, the emotional weather-reading, the need to build meaning out of environment, the way I still notice atmosphere before facts. I did not understand any of that then. I only knew that I felt the world strongly, and that feeling it strongly made me different in ways I could not yet explain.
At the time it was just childhood. Now I can see it was the opening note of the whole Book of Joey. Before the projects, before the personas, before the mythmaking, there was a child learning that the world could be beautiful, strange, and overwhelming all at once.