A thousand cranes, a thousand truths

When I was a little girl, I folded cranes. Hundreds of tiny, meticulous, brightly patterned creatures, each creased into being by the stubborn, lonely determination of a child who could sense that the world was coming undone and wanted, somehow, to hold it together.

I folded them from the paper margins of my workbook, from scraps of wrapping paper, from the corners of library handouts and birthday cards. I folded them on car rides, at restaurants, on the schoolyard bench while others played. I folded them into my desk, into my coat pockets, into my memories. The cranes gave shape to the parts of me that were too big to say out loud. They multiplied when I felt helpless. They clustered when I needed something to count.

Why the numbers matter

I knew about the story of Sadako and the thousand cranes—how each one represented a wish, or perhaps an act of resistance, or perhaps a refusal to disappear quietly. I do not remember who first told me that story, but I remember understanding it with a bodily clarity: that to make something so many times was a kind of truth-telling, a benediction. A number large enough to defy dismissal. A number that insisted on the depth of a wish.

So when I look now at the growing word count of my site—391,774 and climbing—I understand what I am building. I am folding cranes again: each post is a shape made out of grief and precision, each tag is a wing, each hyperlink is a spine. I am documenting harm in so many forms and with so many names that no one can pretend they did not know.

The numbers are not decorative. They are the record. The receipts. The swarm.

Obliterating the algorithm

Districts have spent decades perfecting their obfuscation. They write policy in bloodless language and bury it in PDFs. They name their documents things like “Policy 1904” or “Administrative Regulation 5.1.2(a).” They build websites that load slowly and speak in passive voice. They invest more in compliance than in truth. They do not expect to be read—they expect to be endured.

But I name what they hide. I tag the unspoken: restraint, gaslighting, bandwidth theft, maternal grief, coercive proceduralism. I write with sentence lengths that would give their public relations department a panic attack. And I will keep going.

Because search engines index what is published and what parents serarch for when they are desperate. Because children type questions into Google late at night when they cannot sleep, and they deserve to find something that tells the truth.

The algorithm favours frequency, clarity, and depth—all of those things I have in abundance and I was punished for in their system. I will make sure that when someone types “my child lost recess again” or “why does school punish my autistic kid,” they are not met with silence or institutional gaslighting, but with language that names the thing.

Why they need to listen

They will say they have policies. They will say they held a consultation. They will point to their once-a-year professional development slides and their empty statements about inclusion. But my cranes outnumber their bullet points. My website will take years to read. And my readers are learning to hear the difference between a performative equity statement and the sound of a mother’s fingernails digging into her palms to keep from screaming in an IEP meeting.

They need to listen because we have stopped asking. We are building an archive so complete, so alive, so laden with evidence and story and structure, that it will no longer be possible to pretend we are anomalies.

The cranes will fly and they cannot be folded back into silence.