kids

Up until the age of 8 or so I was convinced that colors where either male or female. For example pink was clearly female in my mind and blue was male. The even stranger part was that I thought some colors were "confused" and didn't know which sex they wanted to be ... red for example was one that could never exactly decide if it was male or female.

Between the ages of 6-12 I had a fervant belief that I would be a rare survivor in some sort of post-apocolyptic scenario. The scenaro often changed- post-nuclear, post-disease, post-evacuation to remote area, post-whatever.

I had plans laid out for every imaginable scenario. I had itineries. I researched things likie edible plants, and home-made medicines, how to make traps and how to generate electricity.

I really felt it was my destiny.

On several occasions I was even convinced that the end was neigh and the world would change that night, next week, before my next birthday et cetera.

Even now I like to make sure I have bottled water, hypothermia blankets, and long-life dried food around.... just in case.

In the fourth grade my best friend Danielle and I were desperate to be different. So instead of being called Sami and Dani - our nicknames - we started calling ourselves Zani and Zami, insisting that we were from the planet Iggy and were dropped off on our parents' doorsteps as babies. And when people called us strange we argued and said we were merely wierd and calling us strange was purely and insult to our nature and home-planet.

I used to believe that I was the only real person in the world and everyone around me was a robot designed to revolve around me & my life. It was like I was a scientific experiment or something. I also beleived that the world & the universe wasn't real...like, I was living on a chunk of land in space or something. Because I had never been outside of my state. Then we went to england and I was proven wrong...haha.

When I was younger I used to think when I went to bed everyone in the world met up and would talk about me behind my back. And they were all in this secret society I didn't know about. Weird I know.. They all lived around me..

I used to believe that my stuffed animals were alive and that if I payed to much attention to any particular one the others would get really mad and destroy it. To get around this I would line them up in my room and read to them all aloud, however, I would always forget and end up reading in my head, so, to keep myself from feeling too bad about this I somehow managed to convince myself that after I read them a few pages aloud we developed a telepathic link and they could hear the rest of the book through that link.

When I was a child, I would occasionally visit my Aunt's house. She had a life-sized porcelain doll in a glass case inside her living room. It was holding a basket. I thought that in the basket there were knives and axes, and everytime I looked away she would move. I also thought that at night she silently broke out of the case and tried to kill me and my cousins. I have always hated dolls. Now I know that dolls cannot come to life. I still despise them. I am 17.

When I was little, I believe that whenever I wore a dress I was a girl, and whenever I wore pants I was a boy. So whenever I wore a dress at school, I would go in the girl's bathroom and when I wore pants I would go in the boy's bathroom. Everyone tried to tell me I was wrong, but I wouldn't believe them. Thankfully I don't do that any more, or I'd be best friends with the principal!

When I was little I hated dolls! They scared me like crazy! Of course, I was much to proud to admit it. So, my parents,grandparents,aunts and uncles, never saw a problem in buying me dolls....lots of dolls! I had at least 20! I use to think they were staring at me, moving when I didn't look. Or they were planning to hurt me.
So, I tried to hide the dolls random places, hoping they'd go away. I hid some under my parents bed, some i hid in my sisters closet. Onetime i took a bunch of them with me to my grandparents house and hid them there.

But all this did, was make my family buy me MORE dolls!
Let's just say, it took me much longer to sleep then it normally should.

As a child (7-9 years old), I became obsessed with evenness. Every move I did, every step I took, every shot I took in a video game, I always had to make sure I did it an even number of times. It took me, get this, TWO YEARS to break the habit. And even then it wasn't completely broken. When I was doing this, it ruled my actions so much that I used most of my thinking power just to make sure I'm taking an even number of steps. Sometimes (I'm 13 now) in video games, I still find myself making sure that I fire an even number of shots. I was a sad child. Very, very sad.

I still have absolutely no idea how I got it in my head that everything I did had to be even.

As a kid I once thought that I could fashion myself a smashing pair of earrings by sticking some small ball-bearings from a little pinball toy in my ear. I had to go to 2 hospitals to get them syringed out.

I used to believe that if I dropped my stuffed animals off my bed at night, they would get angry and seek revenge. I also thought that my dolls would come to life and hurt me if I mistreated them, so I used to hide my Barbie dolls in a box in my closet at night.

I used to beleive that certain people could read other peoples minds at will. So I would be sitting in a public place thinking something really inapropriate and then think oh no someones going to know I thought that, then I would get worried that if they were reading my mind, they would know I knew their secret, but they would never tell me that they knew I knew, but if I knew to much they would kill me. Then I would think I was silly for assuming people could read my minds, then realized that that is what they wanted me to think, and they were probably laughing as I confused myself.

When I was four or five and was allowed to play in the front yard. I began finding 100's of marbles(I'm sure it just seemed like 100's at the time) buried throughout the front yard, so for the next two or three years I believed that marbles came from the ground which were than found by a marble search team that worked for the retail stores that sold them.

There were nights where I used to come home so exhausted where I'd just throw everything off my bed which included all my stuffed animals. After reazlized what I used to do as tired as I was I would pick myself up and gently hold them to my heart and apoligize as if they were real kissing them goodnight and placing the covers over them making sure they were as comfortable as me. I even remeber there being so many on my bed sometimes I wouldn't get a great nights sleep. I even seem to do it till this day like a weirdo. And I'm 20.. just don't ask.

I used to believe that I was the only real person in the world and everyone else I knew were almost like fake people. Like they didnt have brains and couldn't think...their whole lives were centered around me, since I was the only one with a brain and could think.

Its a wonder I'm not the most self-centered person in the world