I don’t remember exactly when I started feeling that something was wrong with me. I suspect that this feeling had been there for quite some time. My mother tells me that I was a very easy baby – most of the time absolutely content and calm. She wondered why there was all this fuss about raising children. I learned to speak and haven’t stopped talking since. My favorite thing was to ask my grandparents about almost everything. I loved their old hardcover books, which they would take off the shelves to answer my endless questions. I had a rich inner life; I told myself stories based on complex inner worlds, with imaginary characters, places, and events that overlapped and developed throughout that time of daydreaming. In the early years of my life, my mind was a sacred space where I liked to dwell. But how did things change?

The more I saw around me, the more new experiences I lived through, the more cautious and scared I became. These feelings intensified at school. Most children seemed carefree and worry-free, but I was so anxious that I couldn’t even climb trees with them. I often cried silently during third-grade Math because I didn’t understand anything. That was also when I had my first nosebleed; I hid my face in my hands because I was very ashamed to draw attention to myself. When the teacher asked me to lower my hands, thick blood had spread across my face and palms. I felt very ashamed. Later, I was diagnosed with dyscalculia, a learning difficulty that makes understanding numbers very hard, as well as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), which makes concentrating quite difficult unless the subject is of interest to me.