My Brain

My brain tends to work differently then that of most people. I know that everyone's brain is different and the perceptions and interpretations of our brains shapes how we see the world but I can seem to escape then fact that my brain is just that extra little bit different. Honestly I am glad I grew up in the late 80's in a VERY small rural town that had never heard of things like ADHD, asperger's or physc meds  for kids cause I am sure my teachers would have loved to dope me the heck up.

I think at least part of the difficulty comes from being a) an only child and b) a miracle child. My mom tried for a long time to get pregnant and while she was pregnant had a myriad of complications that basically almost cost of both our lives. So when I was born it was something like a relief to all involved. Unfortunately both my parents were older, no friends having kids for play dates and I spent the majority of my time before I went to school with adults who delighted in my ability to soak up and remember damn near everything. They thought I was great, a baby for a lot of people that either had difficulty having their own babies or whose babies had already grown up and left them.

By the time I started school I was loud and obnoxious and my brain just worked at about a million miles a minute. I remember being able to do all my school work in about 1/2 the time it would take my friends then being bored out of my mind so that I would talk and talk and disrupt class. Whoops. Eventually (like 3rd or 4th grade) they figured out that if they gave me something else to do that I enjoyed (usually reading or small desk games) I would shut up but it was pretty brutal in school for a while.

Add on to that what I affectionately refer to as the Kindergarten Mafia, basically a loosely defined set of cliques that were responsible for "facilitating" all the trading that usually goes on between children (anyone that has children will tell you that they can go to school with one set of belongings and come back with another) I was somewhere between Don and Enforcer, mainly because even though I was the shortest kid in class I had an overdeveloped sense of vengeance and very little fear of children who were twice my size.I never got into trouble because what self respecting boy was going to say that the 3ft terror beat the heck out of him?

The problem being that I was basically ostracized socially, the first time I got invited over to another kids house I was 12 or 13. I got really good at being alone in my own head and entertaining myself, I had an imaginary friend and little to no filter in anything I said - I actually told my teachers that when I grew up I wanted a rich husband, when asked why I said something along the lines of "So I can do what I want and have fun, duh" - again my parents adults friends found this delightful and everyone else cringed. Then my sister was born