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Being an only child did contribute toward me developing into a loner, which is a trait I have to this day. From an early age I seemed to build up a resistance against loneliness or boredom by acquiring this strange world of my own. Like most children, I had imaginary playmates but these would occupy an unhealthy amount of my time. Today I am not so sure they were imaginary at all and I doubt children’s creative abilities stretch that far. Nevertheless, the activity kept me occupied and as always the interaction was pleasant enough to keep me coming back for more. Whatever it was I interacted with knew exactly what it was doing and had a lifelong agenda planned for me. This hidden activity would prove to cause problems for me later on, particularly when I began school. Years later, a teacher described me as having too much activity going around in my head. I would often get into trouble for being miles away and “tuning out” at the most inconvenient moments. Being in a world of my own meant I would regularly get reprimanded by the teachers who at one point thought I was hard of hearing. Iremember when I was about 7 years of age, a specialist was called into the school to test my hearing abilities. After a tedious test of repeating words spoken to me both clear and muffled without saying “pardon” once, it became obvious that there was nothing wrong. This led to the obvious pondering and humming adults do when pretending to understand. They could only diagnose me as being persistently “miles away” which was something that would follow me through my schooling and adult life. Having a label of being a daydreamer would have been acceptable had there been some evidence of academic success to compensate for it. The trouble is, there wasn’t, and within the black and white reasoning of children (and sometimes teachers) this meant quite plainly that you were thick. This stigma was worse as it led to a kind of despondency where I would opt out of studying and go further into my world of magic. My whole attitude to study eventually became one of “why bother,” particularly when there was this head full of strange activity that made the absorption of new knowledge a huge task. I can remember times where I would find it agonising just to try to digest so much as a paragraph of a textbook when it didn’t appeal to me. I could describe it as a bulimic mind: it simply wouldn’t accept information, especially if that information didn’t match what was within. If this was some fault of the aforementioned programming rather than just a lazy or feeble mind, then someone somewhere possesses some frightening uses of mind 13 without anything and cannot claim the nobility of being poor.