Note to readers: I have gotten a response from a publisher who has asked me to make changes to my novel and resubmit it. I am very excited and for the next few weeks I will be busy revising my novel, so I am spreading out this post into three parts. Enjoy.

In the first grade, something strange happened. As I was eating my lunch at school, I raised my head to find the entire cafeteria quiet and empty. Only a moment ago, it had been buzzing with talking students. Now it was just me and two of my classmates, girls who were wiping down the table with rags.

One of them asked me why I was still there. I did not know. I walked back to class with them where my teacher asked me what I had been thinking. When I could not explain, she yelled at me and made me stand in a corner. I had never stood in a corner before.

Usually when I was spanked or yelled at, I understood why. But what had I done wrong? One minute the lunchroom had been crowded and the next minute, empty. It had been a little scary.

Throughout school, similar but milder incidents were always happening. I was inattentive at all the wrong times. At Vacation Bible school, I would sometimes get confused about where I was supposed to go and end up in the wrong class. I was always missing instructions and announcements. I had trouble concentrating on lectures. I daydreamed. While the teacher was talking, I drew pictures of my dog .

I could focus to read but when I was really interested in a story, the rest of the world disappeared, and pulling me out of my altered state required force.

I was not disobedient. I never misbehaved, at least not on purpose. I was a thwarted conformist. I desperately wanted not to call attention to myself. I wanted to be like everyone else.

My saving virtue was that I was creative. In almost every class I was considered The Artist. I drew. I wrote stories. I had a box of art supplies that I kept under my bed.

Socially I had always lived on the margins of acceptance, never a pariah but nowhere near popular either.

But in the sixth grade, it got worse: I was bullied. Afterward I decided not to try to be like everyone else anymore. I decided that I did not like the bullies anyway; why should I try to be like them? I decided to go ahead and be weird. Weird kids were more interesting anyway. Being normal was stupid.

In grammar school everything had been determined by other kids: what to wear, what to be interested in, what music to like, what sports teams to love or hate. Now I refused to wear brand name shoes.

I stopped sunbathing, which I had always hated. Whereas in elementary school my grades had been awful, I now immersed myself in studying. I was just waiting for someone to call me a nerd so that I could direct my scorn at them. I made an A in every subject. Afterward, I decided at 15 years old that I had found my true calling: I would devote my life to the pursuit of knowledge.

I imagined my adult self living in a quaint cabin in the mountains on a precipice overlooking a rolling ocean. I would have an office lined with bookshelves and a giant picture window overlooking the sea. I would read and write and lead a reclusive lifestyle with my dog. In the fantasy there was always a dog

I had a different fantasy, in case the first one did not work out. I would have a coterie of intellectual friends. We could all sit around sipping Earl Grey and making fun of the kinds of people who had bullied me in the sixth grade, and I would not be lonely anymore.

But the new obsession with learning made the loneliness the least of my worries. I had fallen in love with biology. At the same time my belief in God had fallen away, leaving me with a ton of questions. The universe was more of a mystery than I ever knew. I was curious. I was learning. I was happier than I had ever been.

Everything was going great until my bipolar disorder knocked me out of school during my senior year, forcing me to spend the last part of that year on a home-bound program. I graduated from high school but I never attended the ceremony.

I graduated from college with a major in art, after changing my major in the middle of my junior year. When I graduated, I had no idea what I was going to do with my art degree, so I enrolled in a two-year training program at my local hospital to become a radiologic technologist.

Bad idea.

(To be continued)