Rittaen has heard from Personnel (indirectly via the second-rank Keeper reporting to a sixth-rank Keeper and then back to himself, very strong links individually but he does not neglect to notice the chain) the hypothesis that Merrin doesn't want to be 'special', in some sense of specialness that Personnel doesn't know how to pin down exactly, and suspects of maybe possibly being not the sort of thing that has a straightforward truth condition on states of reality.
So Rittaen flips on his person-as-machine Sight, and considers Merrin and her fear.
...If you were to translate Rittaen's conclusions back into language that ordinary dath ilani understand, they would not be very exciting conclusions. The hidden truths derived of secret knowledge usually are not, in fact, exciting, because it is usually the nature of correct conclusions that they end up merely real. If you know that the Sun does not circle around dath ilan but rather dath ilan rotates - as is forbidden to tell young children before they work it out on their own - you don't thereby know that the day tomorrow will be twice as long as the child expects. It all adds up to normality, and the question is just what is normal and how the adding-up occurs.
What does it mean, to Merrin, to be 'special', that is so very terrible? The evidence doesn't suffice to pin it down precisely, but as is often the case, the multiple hypotheses consistent with past data about Merrin tend to all make pretty similar predictions about the future too. Merrin's neurodivergence is known to include her being a face-recognizer, and that in turn often goes along with the condition of status-heaviness where the human sense of status takes on greater weight within the mind and becomes a reified order of the universe, such that disorder within it is directly painful; Merrin has a sense of how much status she is supposed to have, and for her to have more status than that is disorder and That's Terrible...
Only it isn't, of course, anything like that simple, real human beings are not that simple; it's more that there was that potential structure and instinct in Merrin, and then it attached to other thoughts and experiences.
People are built, not with an instinctive fear of snakes, but with neural structures that are ready to latch on to a class of stimuli that include snakes, and learn to fear things in that snakelike class much more rapidly. If you raised children in a way where they were sometimes threatened with tentacles - not even hurt by them, maybe, just seeing other people scream and run away - then those tentacles might be, to them, snakes, in the sense that the snake-identifiers would have latched onto those.
Rittaen can guess, as one hypothesis among many non-mutually-exclusive ones, that Merrin has sometimes talked to people whose behavior and reactions struck Merrin as their expecting Merrin to be more verbally fluent, and being disappointed that Merrin wasn't. Maybe some kids actually said that to her, as a kid, when Merrin wasn't in a selected cohort of other kids with similar subject fluencies and learning speeds. Maybe Merrin just imagined the disappointment, the underlying potential structure and pseudo-prior of her brain prompting her to imagine that people were thinking that, imagine disappointment that they might or might not have really felt. It'd be the same pain to smol!Merrin either way. And that's one of many kinds of stimuli that this potential latent structure in Merrin - the recognizer of getting-above-your-place, as is more heavily powered in her than in the average dath ilani - might have latched onto, and said to Merrin over and over, "This pain, now, this is your punishment for other people thinking you had more status than you had."
Rittaen can also guess, based on Merrin's externally visible behavior within this very conversation, that Merrin also considers people of status to have duties; and that Merrin has in the past been compelled by a sense of obligation to perform what she sees as her duties, and made sacrifices for that, which other parts of herself resented; and this also was internally bound as a kind of pain that happened to her because she went above her place, swiftly learned as a fear; and so now the cluster of everything learned this way is partially opposed to Merrin's morality; which is turn is a kind of stress that diminishes to the extent that Merrin does not internally consider herself to be higher; and this reinforces a mental motion against that.
And that the higher Merrin is, the lower Civilization is relative to her, and that she has a sense of safety and wholeness and comfort in being surrounded by Civilization, that it is to her something like a parent but not a parent that let her down the same as some of her other parents.
(The rearing of an average child is heavily optimized to avoid predictable formations of tangled fears like these in average children. But Merrin is neurodivergent, and human-attention is a sharply bounded resource in Civilization. If there'd been Keepers following smol!Merrin around, thinking through every consequence of events around her, they could have prevented her from being tangled in a way that an average dath ilani wouldn't have been; but Civilization does not in fact have that kind of money.)
(And also to be clear, it's entirely possible, on this model-cluster of Merrin, that she'd have ended up with very similar scars if she'd been born at +3sd g instead of -1sd g. The thing inside her that was hyperprimed to learn a certain fear quickly, might have just found something else, but similar, to latch onto - some other unpleasant experience that could match the neural criterion for 'this bad thing happened to you because you have an objective place and other people thought you were above that'. While people are ultimately shaped by their experiences, their brains are often very ready to be shaped in particular ways.)
...the point being that while Merrin may have started out as genetically neurodivergent in a simple way, her sense of not-wanting-to-be-special is now in fact this enormous tangled cluster of past pains and fears learned too quickly, some based on false models of reality and some parts on true models too, that were all latched onto by the same neural structure that wanted to very quickly learn to avoid things like that. The details are hard to guess exactly because her past behavior doesn't distinguish them, which means that all those different possibilities mostly imply similar future behaviors and can be mostly integrated out.