For so long ...

For this month's challenge: Describe yourself as a child;
https://the-lilypad.com/forum/threads/lynns-may-2024-challenge-describe-yourself-as-a-child.92800/

I used the Bee Curious collection (which is half price for May)

Thanks for looking!

I was the ‘weird kid’. Painfully shy, unable to understand how the other kids - or the world - worked. But at the same time, happy to be amusing myself with my own creative endeavours and imaginative play that I didn’t need anyone else for. I remember my mother dutifully organising birthday parties but I just wanted them to end so that I could play on my own with my beloved paper dolls! I loved finding out about history and geography, pouring over my “Look and Learn” magazines and dreaming of the world so far away from provincial NZ. In those days you had to hunt out knowledge and store it up like a squirrel. I got a sense of pride and identity from knowing the facts that the other kids had no interest in. Around them I felt misunderstood and out of place, but alone I was content. I identified so much more with my English heritage, and it was getting my poems published in the Puffin Club magazine or getting a letter all the way from London from a historical fiction writer that really mattered to me. I was nearly always ‘the teacher’s pet’ - on two occasions awkwardly so, but thankfully the attention from those male teachers was at least relatively innocent. I didn’t understand how pretty I was, as no one was going to tell me and I had no interest in appearances, clothes or suchlike. I’d happily wear whatever my mother sewed or bought for me, even though it soon became way ‘too young’. I’d throw on my school uniform in the weekends just because it was familiar and comfortable. I just ... didn’t get it. But I didn’t really doubt myself because the world inside my head and in my books was just so rich and all-absorbing.