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control. Having said all of this, there were times where my awkwardness would triumph and signs of this hidden world would prove to be an asset creatively. Whenever there was the opportunity to express my mind rather than develop it, people seemed to take notice. Writing stories from my own initial ideas was always a success at school and many times I would be asked to read my stories to the class. Looking back there were some funny ideas that I would incorporate into my writing which would baffle teachers and often myself. I seemed to have these preconceived ideas about how things were rather than the way they were factually. So many times I would be challenged on facts: “Steel isn’t organic like wood and cannot be grown, it has to be welded.” I would grow up dismissing these strange ideas as a part of my undisciplined imagination or as something odd from my dreams. What I wasn’t aware of was that these ideas were developing more into fixations. Like most things, I kept them to myself and had learned the art of what not to say, particularly if it would alarm or embarrass. Quite often they would manifest in my schoolwork and I found that teachers would either keep very quite about my odd theories or assume that I picked them up somewhere. This would happen when I was old enough to do science at school and had to write why you thought things were as they are. This first happened early in my secondary school during a particular exercise in the science lesson where we would be asked to write about a certain question, the answer to which remains unknown to this day. Something about why a multitude of different colours would always appear beige when spun around at a certain speed. I didn’t really know the answer but I wrote something to the effect of “the light reaching you from the spinning object only allows you to see a vague combination of the primary colours while the others absorb into the speed of the wheel.” This may have seemed a plausible, albeit advanced explanation for an 11 year old, but take into account I didn’t really understand what I was saying. The teacher didn’t pursue this written theory although she casually remarked, “Who’s your older brother doing physics in the fifth year?” 14 Could I have had a separate education coming from elsewhere? “But there aren’t any monks who practice magic” “How can you fly over the Earth without the use of a spacecraft?”