Something I'm Starting to Realize...

I have always had a strange relationship with the world. I never thought it was at all out of the ordinary and thought what went on in my head was commonplace. That everyone else thought the same.

I never thought about the world in a childish way. Up and down were always there. I am told I never displayed many behaviors young children are supposed to exhibit. I could add (and possibly subtract) at one year of age and nobody taught me. I taught myself to read at age four/five. At eight I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia and all the books we had by Louisa May Alcott who was my favorite author at the time. Yet I could never say the alphabet all the way through without the song to help me until I was eleven or twelve. I sometimes wrote my letters backwards or with extra limbs. It wasn't dyslexia because I knew what they were supposed to look like, I just sometimes forgot that an 'E' only had three shelves rather than four or five. At seven years, I could multiply and divide a little, but I've always had trouble putting math work on paper even though I can do it in my head fairly easily.

I have been both homeschooled and publicly schooled. At home, school was more like unschooling most of the time. At school, I played around and still passed every test and got straight A's. I have been the only person able to teach me because no one ever understands my questions. Probably because they're not normal questions most of the time. Most of the time they deal with a little, little detail that I wonder about after researching every other side of the subject. One little detail covered nowhere else because it's not important to anyone else...or maybe it never occured to anyone.

My relationship with teachers has always been unique. Other students treat them as authority figures to be outsmarted, kissed up to and/or obeyed. I have always treated them as equals paid to teach.

I am starting to realize that the ways I am different is a positive thing. I didn't notice the differences at first and when I did, I hid them because of other people's reactions. I still hid a lot of my discovered capabilities because they scare me and because I am trying to mostly fit in. I have never been able to hid enough, though. People label me smart and I hate it. I'm "intelligent" not "smart."