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votes
When did you realize you were different?
"Different" can be interpreted in any way, in any context, for any magnitude.
When did you realize you were different?
What prompted it?
How did you feel about it then?
Has the difference changed over time?
Have your feelings changed over time?
I realised I'm trans when I was ~3 years old
Believe it or not, bottom dysphoria. Let's say someone may have tried to cut their wee wee off with children's scissors while nobody was watching. Didn't work but it still ended up bloody.
I didn't actually know what it really was (i.e. that it had a name and that it was a thing other people also felt) until I was maybe around 11. All I know is that everything felt wrong, I ended up independently creating labels for my self that the rest of the community also ended up popularising, always imagining myself as a girl, and legitimately expecting to go through female puberty.
Yeppers.
I was originally terrified of having to transition because I was paranoid it'd do fuck all because my body was cursed by a wicked witch or some shit. But hell yeah buddy I love being a woman
As an AMAB child, I didn't really consider gender. Sometimes I'd end up associating with girl things without thinking about it, and then "corrected" and shamed for it. Sometimes I'd see something like Ash cross-dressing to sneak into Erica's gym and think "I wish I could just go hang out in that nice safe girl space with our plants and plant pokemon." My parents tried to get me into every sport you could think of, but none took, and often I'd be outcasted and bullied by the boys.
When puberty hit, I really didn't vibe with the changes. How many teens do? So I didn't see it as too different yet, but I did grow depressed hand in hand with the changes. I would have thoughts like "am I a girl that likes girls, like a lesbian?" and then feel as though I was being disrespectful or fetishizing and lock it down. Where I was from, attitudes towards queerness were basically "gay is ok, but trans is weird" (quoting my dad, liberal for the area). I had guys I'd talk to at school, but never really friends I'd relate to, spending most my time in video games, until finding queer folk in high school, finally finding friends and community.
As a young adult, I'd pretty well asserted that I wasn't a man nor would ever be one, identifying as non-binary, just "accepting the body I've got," and allowed myself to be gendered as masc. Even when it felt ick to be called sir or mister or wear masc clothing (especially formal wear). Despite my best attempts, my depression persisted.
Mid to late twenties, going off for grad school, things turned into a wreck. I'd wanted to teach. I'd even had thoughts of how neat it would be if I could be transfemme representation in my overwhelmingly masc field... Without going into detail, the school was a bad fit for someone like me, as were the established folks in my niche. I fell into alcoholism. My dysphoria worsened. I'd feel strongly that testosterone was a poison in my veins. I still wasn't getting it, but I was able to kick the alcoholism and improve my depression between reconnecting with old, true friends and ketamine treatments.
One day years later, someone on Tildes shared a link to genderdysphoria.fyi and I'd decided to open it up and start reading. I don't know what I expected, I felt I'd understood what trans folk had communicated about dysphoria. Reading the site was hard at times, I'd have to put it down and come back later. And the more I read, the more I related. During this time, I'd started up a new RPG, pulled up the character creator, was faced with "body type 1/2" and said to myself "of course I want to be a lady, why would I pass up any opportunity to be one?" And then went OHHHHHH, fuck.
That was 7ish months ago, I started transitioning shortly after, and I'm happy. Scared and angry about how politicized my existence is in my country. But happy.
I relate so much to almost everything you said... And I wish it never had to be that way for any of us. I come from and live in the very transphobic parts of Europe, and I get how you feel. Times are definitely tough right now, but there's light in the distance...
Yet no matter what any dumbass out there thinks about you and/or tells you, know that there's a person out there who's extremely fucking proud of you, and wishes only the best for you. A fellow stranger who cares about you without knowing you in the slightest.
Every time I learn about one of us finally figuring it out, cutting out the self-destructive behaviours from our lives, and starting transitioning, I'm happy. For once in our fucking lives, we deserve to experience joy. And it's fucking priceless.
Funny how fast some things change. A short while ago I was a completely different person; majorly an opposite to who I am now, in so many ways. Nowadays, I'm a whole different person, physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally. And I'd not sacrifice this for anything. It was not even scary and exhausting like I was expecting for so many years! If anything, I might as well have done this sooner and spare myself all the trauma.
Hell, transition can also be rather funny sometimes... I visited my hometown once, for the first time after starting my transition, where I was recognised by... nobody. Not a single soul. Not even people that were seeing me up close every day for years.
I wonder who that may be ;)
Dear stranger online,
Thank you.
i relate to so much of what you've written here <3
started my transition a little more than 3 years ago and life has never been better.
I saw this (Tiktok) today and it made me think of folks in this subthread!
From the Story Of The Stone (Dream of Red Chambers), there's a scene in chapter 3 where Bao-Yu, born male, who grew up in a mansion full of women, meets his cousin Dai-Yu. David Hawkes translation:
It's been decades since I've read it, but I still remember the commentary pointed out that there's a bit more going on here with the stone/jade/yu than just something he was born. (Bonus Confucius nonsense from Granny here also a treat.)
The grandma's line triggered a mixture of disgust and dysphoria, but it otherwise felt like a pretty neat metaphor to me.
Analysis link for the interested
Being Asian in a very white town, it was made clear to me that I was different. I also came into kindergarten with a large vocabulary (I managed to make a girl cry by remarking she knew how to write in "cursive," but she thought "cursive" was something bad probably having to do with cursing) and was deemed gifted by first grade. I may have been borderline autistic or neurodivergent; I often felt like I was in my own channel and was always surprised when someone told me that whatever X I was into was weird. All that was pretty much over by university, though, when I was like every other college student cramming for tests and drinking lots of coffee.
Same experience being Asian and then going to school and seeing the vast majority were White. There were some Black students and handful of Latino students. But I don't remember any fellow Asians students from like Kindergarten to 3rd Grade. At least in my classes. I'm sure there were a handful in other classes and grades.
That messed with me for a long time, especially in middle school when girls and boys were starting to "date." Girls -- of any race -- had crushes on my White guy friends, but never on me (that I ever knew). I could be friends with these girls, but never anything more. Though by high school, finally met more open-minded people.
And kinda had a similar experience academically. My mom was a SAHM through at least like 2nd grade. So before Kindergarten, before my younger brother was born, we were just constantly playing school. I could count to 100. I could tie my own shoes. I knew the alphabet, I had basic reading skills already, I think I was ahead of the game on telling time with an analog clock. I was never deemed "gifted" (I don't think the schools I went to had those programs) but I was certainly always place in advanced classes.
I vaguely remember being surprised at how "dumb" my classmates were. I never said that to them, but I'm pretty sure I thought it. But by middle school, I came across other students who excelled academically as well, and we'd engage in friendly competition, which was fun.
By Sophomore/Junior year of high school, I was still ahead of the average, but there were many more students who were playing the academic game that I was kinda done with. I did well by the end, but it's not like I graduated at or above a 4.0 GPA. And yeah, college disabused me of any notion that being "smart" mattered.
My mom was a SAHM as well and was tutoring us from a young age. She would take us to the county's educational resource center and check out materials for us. We had a large set of illustrated children's encyclopedias that I loved reading, and I remember being thoroughly impressed at her ability to draw a perfect circle to make a clock. But yeah it all evens out later on.
I've had a similar experience as my family moved around. I'm an Asian American myself and my elementary school was dominated by Asian Americans so I felt like I fit in. However, as I was wrapping up elementary school, my family moved to my parent's home country in Asia and I immediately felt like an outsider. All the kids in my class were fascinated with how tall I was and how I spoke English with an American accent. I felt like an outsider, despite looking just like everyone else and speaking the same language. My family then moved back to America but to another state where the majority of the population is Spanish-speaking Latino-American immigrants. I then felt like even more of an outsider as I was one of like 4 or 5 Asian Americans in my entire school. This was all during my early teenage years and I'd gotten mildly bullied during this time so I eventually grew to just keep to myself mostly. My family later moved back to our original home state and metro area when I got to high school and my university major and career industry is dominated by Asian Americans so I no longer feel like a major outsider but my earlier experiences have had a long lasting effect on me.
This is gonna be one of those topics where I feel I'm not adding much because my experience echoes so many others here. I'm making myself post anyways, I think it's gonna be fine.
I don't think I actively realized I was different or weird until much later than others, when I had a sort of "Aha!" moment. I think I was around 10? I'd moved a lot in my life, three different countries and half a dozen schools by that age. I never really developed proper social skills with kids my age as a result. The fact that I'm ADHD and likely also Autistic didn't help much, but I was a very smart kid and got along fine with adults so no one thought anything was wrong.
I struggled a lot in middle school to fit in. I had very few friends and they were mostly outcasts and misfits. People who put up with each other because no one else would. I was lucky (unlucky?) enough to have access to the internet at an early age and I discovered when I was young that people online were much more forgiving of my quirks. I could be whoever I wanted to be. I'm still friends with some of those folks from a forum I joined 25 years ago.
Come the middle of high school, it was time to move again, from the Midwest to a place that oddly enough, would accept my weirdness - Boulder, CO. I thrived there. I reinvented myself, and found people who accepted me as I was in real life and they were cool and popular and I became cool and popular by extension. This was a huge boost for my self esteem. I truly believe that without that experience, I'd be a sad mess of a person.
I still struggled in many ways though. I had figured out friendships and how to get along in society, but I struggled with love. A lot. I had a string of short, meaningless relationships. I was always ready to dive in 100% and I think that scares people, but I know no other way to love - either I give it my all or I'm out.
In the middle of my college years, I had a mental breakdown after a breakup and nearly ended my life, several times. I gave up on relationships for nearly a decade. To this day, I still have had only one relationship last longer than a few weeks. I don't know that I'll ever figure out love.
At least despite my weirdness, I've got a rich social life and a happy job. I love teaching - one of the most rewarding parts of my job is when I see other weird and struggling kids and I have an opportunity to give them a place, a space, or a person to talk to that understands them. I run a chess club in my building that might as well be "the weird kids club" and I love it.
Weirdness should be celebrated.
I'm so glad you found an environment where you weren't just tolerated, but celebrated.
That kind of sucks to hear about relationships being a challenge for you, though. I hope it eventually happens that you run into another fun, kind, awesome, quirky person who also goes all in 100% immediately. Then it'll feel like your whole lives both of you were just waiting for that one day to cross paths.
Not enough people consider how clinically, horrifically boring life would be if everyone was “normal”.
'Realization' isn't the right word. I don't think it ever crossed my mind when I was a kid that I would be the same as anyone else or that they would be the same as each other.
Maybe it's because I mostly grew up in a community of immigrants from different places around the world, but I've never really understood what people meant when they talk about fitting in or not fitting in, as distinct from the concept of simply having friends.
I'm 40 now (and, admittedly, now an immigrant in my own right, which could color my perception) and I still don't know that I've ever met a normal person. Everybody I've had any kind of in-depth conversation with has turned out to have some wild opinion or have gone through some crazy experience, and usually a bunch of them. I think if I met the most 'average' person in the world, who's never thought or experienced anything unusual, they would come across as super weird to me for exactly that reason — like they grew up in The Truman Show or something.
It started with being from a different country, I thought I didn't fit in because I was an immigrant. People were curious, but not super welcoming when I was a little kid (with some exceptions).
Then I thought it was just not fitting in with most of the people at school. Perhaps I was just unlucky?
For a while I was sure it was to do with my religious beliefs, and perhaps to a degree it was, but that wasn't really it either, not fully. Plus the schools I attended were supposed to match my beliefs anyway.
Once I started working, I thought it was a skill I was missing, so I tried to pick it up. I practiced with clients, colleagues and bosses, with everyone I met, but somehow I never quite got fully accepted by most people.
It was only once my kids had started to grow up, and with a little gentle prodding from my wife, I finally got a diagnosis for Autism, and everything suddenly made so much more sense.
To answer some of the remaining questions: For so long I kind of felt like an alien in a human body, playing the part only at a surface level. I don't think that's gone away, but I understand why, and can navigate the consequences better.
I can relate - my son got his diagnosis for Autism a couple of years ago, and a few months later the penny dropped. I now also have gotten my diagnosis.
For me it is now mostly an embarrassing re-living of plenty of awkward moments in my youth and afterwards professional life. Up until before I would have mostly said the world has gone mad and I'm the only sane person, only now it starts feeling the other way around - something I'm still struggling with. (This showed when my son was still being diagnosed: I found him to be perfectly normal, while my partner saw the diagnosis coming from far away.)
Like you I tremendously appreciate the explanative power, and it has helped a lot in anticipating difficult moments.
Well if it helps at all, I don't think you're mad. Brains just work differently for different people. You and I have a rarer brain but that doesn't mean it's broken, just that the world was built for the most common type, not us. Like living in Japan as a tall person, or trying to reach the top shelf as a short person.
At least, that's how I see it. But regardless, thanks for sharing, it's hard to find people like me.
Good questions. Can't have been more than 4 or 5 when I had my first experiences of not fitting in, or that's as far back as I remember anyhow. Didn't fit in then, and don't think I ever have since. If anything the difference has gotten worse with time and so have my feelings about it. I more or less nowadays accepted that I'll never have a life resembling anywhere near normal and to be honest I'm noticing the past few years becoming really a bitter person.
Uh, it was the usual nerd stuff. It was probably in kindergarten when they made a big deal out of already being an avid reader and being able to count as long as they're willing to listen. I got praised for it and it seemed like a good thing. And later, being bad at sports was embarrassing. But I pretty much just accepted that this was who I was and that other kids had different strengths. I didn't question it and didn't think I could become good at non-academic stuff too.
Ever since I could remember.
I was ostracised as a child for being weird. I remember adults and other children not wanting me around because I was annoying.
I don't remember being annoying though. My memory starts when I was already always sitting in a corner trying to be as still and quiet as possible, not wanting anyone to notice or be mad at me.
As an adult, I finally saw footage of me as a child running around and playing and it validated my experience of otherness.
Then I got diagnosed wirh ADHD as an adult. Although I wonder if it's AuDHD.
For me, it happened during PE when we were all changing and some of my classmates came up to me to ask me whom I had a crush on. I didn't have an answer because I thought "Aren't we still too young for this stuff?". So I just said nobody, which they thought was weird. Then, a few of the boys talked to me about related stuff, like masturbating, which I found pretty gross, and that's when I realized that they hadn't just been joking around with all that crude stuff all the time but were actually serious and that I'd never been sexually attracted to anyone before (tbh I still can't imagine what it feels like).
So I'm pretty sure I'm asexual. I don't have any particular feelings about it because it's how I've always been but I guess there's a label for it. Although I do feel relieved to know I don't actually HAVE to be in a relationship with someone if I don't want to.
A teacher in highschool told us that on average, teen boys think about sex every 7 seconds. The teacher was very wrong (snopes) but none of the boys seemed to be outraged or disagee, so it was at least within an order of magnitude of being correct, I guess. It wasn't until I was a very much older adult that I realised what people mean when they think about sex is usually accompanied by desire: that it isn't like, I thought of Rome today, or I remembered an old trivia. That when people leer/oogle/stare they are actively imagining specific acts with the desire to make it reality only inhibited by opportunity/circumstances. And that when people view pornography it's not like viewing animals through a zoo window or reading a magazine, they use the pornographic material.
I vividly remember the first time I realized something was wrong with me that would turn out to be an anxiety disorder. I was in 3rd or 4th grade and I was walking back from the bathroom at school and just felt overwhelmed with this sense of dread about going later in the day home. And I remember asking myself "why?" and I ran through a mental checklist of usual reasons (I'd gotten into trouble before school, something I wasn't looking forward to was happening after school, etc.) and there was nothing. I just felt anxious for no reason at all.
I didn't have a bad home life either. I mean it wasn't amazing or anything, but nothing that would warrant actual dreading going home. Home was way more fun than school, at least! I don't remember how long that feeling lasted, maybe it was gone before I got back to my desk, maybe it was gone as soon as the final bell rang, idk. But I've always been very introspective about my anxiety/depression and for some reason that memory has stuck with me and it's what I identify as the earliest example of my anxiety disorder.
Many years ago, on the day I became aware that I have the rare ability to listen to understand, rather than listen to reply.
99% of the people around me do the exact opposite.
well it all started when I looked at an apple one day, and thought it looked really, really delicious...In terms of neurodivergence, I can't remember a specific moment I became aware. My parents were on top of getting me proper support, and never hid my diagnoses or anything. Like, I attended many sessions with a specialist all about properly interacting with people. For me, it was "normal" though I knew it was different from other kids.
One memory of realizing I'm different was the revelation that I'm asexual. I don't even remember how I stumbled upon the AVEN site (Asexuality Visibility and Education Network), but I spent a whole night in high school just reading multiple FAQ pages and feeling my mind blown at how everything clicked into place. I'd never been interested in sex scenes in books, and I'd never even experienced a crush like most girls my age. The idea of sex had honestly always been gross to me.
It was a bit of a shock to have these details slot into place, I honestly spent the next couple days just processing. Even thought about talking to our school's counselor, but decided against it after reaffirming her job was more geared towards educational advice (though she did try to encourage me to talk to her anyway). The downside was that I was in a relationship at the time. It was fairly casual (at least, in my mind), the sort of relationship where it felt like the "next step" in our friendship. So, got to harbor some mild guilt because it felt like I was lying to them. I broke up with them pretty soon after that, but thankfully we're still very close friends.
On a brighter note, I figured it out fairly early. A lot of people only realize it later, often after dealing with the weird societal pressure to have sex in college. So I got to avoid that whole mess, and kinda chuckle from the sidelines at how frantic some people were about it. Was nice to go into college without having that anywhere on my mind as a potential pressure, especially as I saw at least one friend particularly stress over it.
I still have confusion over where I sit on the romantic spectrum though. I'm 90% sure I'm aromantic, but... eh, not really a concern to me.
Well, this is an interesting one......I guess, as soon as I started school it became really obvious, should have been more obvious in hindsight.
I was already fully literate before kindergarten, and could read novels and understand them at least somewhat, I wouldn't struggle with words or sentence structure or grammar, and anything I didn't know I learned to look up. I also learned math rather quickly and would get perfect scores on tests etc. I was quickly identified as gifted and moved into the programs that took me out of classes with my peers, so when there's only 5 of you in the cohort.....you can't really think you're like the other kids when you are being given special treatment. We would go off campus for special classes at the university or at NASA here, it was a lot of fun. I also went to a specific gifted middle school.
So that's one thing, but even in middle school I started to realize I wasn't quite like some of my peers that were very academically minded, or anxious about grades or college or similar. I was pretty relaxed, I guess some of it was just confidence? I'd already been interacting with adults, I had a reasonable idea of the working world from my parents, I was good at interpersonal communication. In High school and later college, I no longer really cares about academics, puberty definitely hit me pretty hard, exacerbating some of my less desirable traits.
I am like single digit percentage agreeable, I lioe arguing, I love playing devil's advocate. This has caused..... numerous issues that really started to fray at teachers/faculty especially once I was older and more developed, I was no longer a cute precocious boy, I was a difficult and stubborn young man. You're treated a lot differently, high school and college are less about learning per se and more about conscientiousness, which I also lack. It took me a long time to more or less tame my personality, get used to my own biochemistry and develop good habits.
I guess, I always feel a bit different, a lot of the stories here, especially experiences of other gifted burnouts.....I can't really relate because I never got burned out, I'm also definitely not autistic, I don't struggle to communicate, maintain eye contact, or empathize or understand others. Any friction I cause is because I wanted to, when I want to be mean I'm mean. I can be a difficult person to work with because I am so serious, I sometimes feel like my coworkers abstract away the bigger machine we operate in, whereas I'm usually very aware of the downstream consequences or externalities, but sometimes when I bring these up people look at me like I'm crazy or weird.
I could go into more details, about my personality, about having some schizotypal issues, but the older I get (I'm 36) the more different I feel, rather than finding ways to relate to others. It's not really something like protagonist syndrome, I actually prefer having a low key life, I'm not aspiring to do some great work or anything. It's just that I'm different in a mundane way, it just means how I view things is a minority, or the experiences I have don't necessarily track with others, etc
There is something in the tone of your comment that resonates a lot with me, and this:
Bangs a big bong!
I wonder if you share an experience I often have that is that it seems (maybe feels?) like I get and can articulate the big picture, the small picture and I can be quite certain that they are connected but I can't quite articulate the connection, I just kind of know it is there.
It's like I can see the tube, and how it is connected in the big picture end and the small picture end but I can't describe the tube itself.
It looks to me that other people are very good at thinking and communicating about the tubes themselves but not about the big or small picture or how they all fit together.
This is something that frustrates me a lot, and that frustration is a big reason why I don't really enjoy talking to people (even friends) about things that interest me and I care about.
I also feel the need to add that I understand that I'm often wrong about the big and small picture and that they are connected, this is jot about correctness this is about thinking and communication.
I can relate a bit, at least for me I work/have worked in healthcare for the better part of two decades, oftentimes I cause friction at work because I always ask before I get started on any project basically what is the value or impact, and whether it's necessary or not to spend the resources, because at least on my end, the dollars are not infinite, and time spent pursuing something worthless is money that could have gone to patients. I've always felt this way, but often people get too in the weeds or are focused solely on the departmental picture, as you said: the small tube.
I have a phrase I use a lot at work, and is another where I get pushback usually in the form of "we're paid to do work/something", which is that doing nothing is always an option, and often times a valuable one. Because very frequently you can try to improve something and make it worse, or you can move one needle but totally fuck up another. In healthcare very many metrics have mechanical connections, so when someone says "we want to reduce readmissions and also length of stay" and I have to retort "these measures have a non-zero amount of negative correlation, since a day before discharge is a day that patient could or would have readmitted but can't" I'm looked at like some kind of psycho, of course we have to work to reduce both metrics, of course we want to try to intervene in a way to do that, but then it's trying to get blood from a stone, and you waste a lot of resources if you were already at a local maxima.
I'm actually changing teams right now, in my two weeks with my current role, because I could not make my personality and seriousness jive with my manager/team, I was too frustrated that I thought we weren't acting quickly enough or that it'd take too long to make decisions -_-
It’s happened to me a few times.
The first time I was explaining to my catechism teacher that I wouldn’t be able to keep going in high school because it was at night and I needed to shower and be in bed by 9. She laughed and said I could skip the shower. I just stared at her, that would not fly in my house and I had no idea other people didn’t live that way.
The second time I was at work after being on call and called in the previous night. I called across the room to a coworker, telling him he’d forgotten to lock the door the previous night. My boss later pulled me aside to steal me that it was NOT OKAY to shame a coworker in front of the department head. He thought I was trying to get ahead, in reality I was oblivious and didn’t know about social rules like that. I just wanted coworker to know it had happened so he’d be more careful next time.
I moved schools in 2nd grade to the better school system, my mom was concerned about my sister entering middle school in the bad neighborhood. I went from being a "normal" but as my mom liked to say "busy" kid, to actively problematic compared with my peers. My mom came in when we dissected a cow's eyeball and noted that while all the other students were attentively dissecting theirs, I was pretending to be Zorro and brandishing about an exacto knife. I was just... extra. The school wanted to get me tested but my mom had seen other kids who had been medicated with bad outcomes so she just continued to say I was busy, well that and get me extra tutoring for dyslexia. I had a pretty hard time in school, got my ADHD diagnosis at 30, and still have friends who think of me as the frenetic one.
You guys were given scalpels in grade 2?!
The problem with being "busy" and "extra" that our well meaning parents didn't think about, was that we become too busy and too extra to be productive, in a society that provides us with necessities in exchange for productivity.
My parents also knew, but they weren't seeing grades suffer and did nothing. By the time the grades did suffer, they suffered catastrophically: I was years behind in discipline of being able to concentrate on work and get assignments done.
I wrote a much longer and somewhat rambling post of reminiscences, then thought better of it after posting and deleted it.
More succinctly, I might say: unlike some other posts here, I was not someone who was seen as advanced for my age early on. I had a tendency to develop differently. I didn't speak at all until long after other children my age were speaking, then just suddenly started speaking normally. When I started first grade I was seen as being heavily remedial in reading; with no clear explanation for the change, by midway through the year, I was toward the top of the class. I don't think I was seen as particularly advanced in math or science in those years.
I did have trouble interacting with other children, and I think I tended to see myself as normal and them as different. I also don't think I really cared, except inasmuch as other children annoyed me for being childish. I just spent most of my time interacting with adults, or just being on my own, or on the (in hindsight, completely implausible) computers I tended to have from when I was too young to remember, I assume as a result of academic parents and discarded equipment.
It was only in fourth grade that, by chance, I was in a mixed class of normal students and gifted program students, with the idea that some instruction would be shared and some would be separate. The teacher had specialized in gifted education; I don't think we knew that the programs existed. I was one of the normal students. But she recognized that I was very different, and was probably the first teacher I had who knew what to do with me that would actually be helpful. Despite it being nominally a test-based, school- or district-determined designation, she unofficially treated me as one of the students in the program, and included me in everything. She was likely the one who made me start to realize that I was the person who was different: that other children were normal children, and that I shouldn't be angry with them for being children. She made me, and my mother, realize that normal classes were not well suited to me, and started my exploration of alternatives that would lead me on the unusual paths I took.