The strongest I ever felt in my entire life… the most confident and in control… was when I was about 6 or 7 years old. I was sitting on the front porch of my house and some of the neighborhood kids were walking down the street past my house. I must have said hello to them or something as they turned to approach me. As they walked down the driveway I realized these were not the regular kids that I knew from around my house. They must have been taking a short cut home from the local park which was a few blocks away across the highway.

One kids walks up to me and says something about stomping on my bare feet with his cleats. Calmly and without hesitation… I said “you can’t hurt me”.  So he steps on my foot and grinds his cleat in a semi circular manner… I remember how the top layer of skin on my foot was peeling off like sunburn. The pain was excruciating but I simply took a deep breath and smiled at him… “I said you can’t hurt me.” No tears. No wincing. Just a deep breath as if it were a sigh. The wannabe bully was astonished and his jaw dropped as he looked back at his friends in disbelief. They were all equally shocked that I didn’t  scream or cry or push the kid away from me.

They all called me weird and left.

True story.

I must have been in the first or second grade so that makes me about 7 or 8 yrs old. My class was coloring pictures… it must have been activity time. Back then I was enrolled in a private Catholic school so it could be strict sometimes. The teacher would walk around the room policing everyone’s activities. I remember that I was drawing something about a landscape with the sun and sky (yeah, pretty original… I know) but there was this urge to make the picture as realistic as possible. Everything looks alright until I’m coloring in the sun… which is normally yellow or orange in the average class of grade schoolers. I sense the teacher is getting closer to my desk… and instead of grabbing “lemon-yellow” or “burnt-orange” out of my Crayola box of 64… I take out… eh… purple.

Immediately my teacher steps to my desk and behind my back asks quietly… “why is the sun purple in your picture?” I look up and say without hesitation. “Because that is what color the sun turns when you look at it long enough.”

True story.