I would say, up until the age of 10, I was very extroverted. Hard to believe now, but it's true. I learned to keep my mouth shut at about that age when I started public school. Having been home-schooled until then, I finally got my way and got to go to school (which I had been begging for for quite some time). However, I shortly learned that my knowledge and understanding of things was either wrong or VERY different. Not necessarily because of home-schooling, but because of a wonderful thing called dyslexia (which I wouldn't learn until much later in life). It was impossible for my mom to home-school me since I refused to read or do anything with books or numbers (pretty much anything to do with schooling). Unfortunately, dyslexia doesn't just cause letters to move around, which is what it is mainly known for. There are many symptoms because it effects the part of the brain that deals with word organization/formation/memory of words and sentences/writing/spelling etc... Since many people associate these basic word skills with "intelligence", often someone who is dyslexic is labeled "stupid". However, dyslexia does not effect intelligence. In fact, most dyslexics have above average intelligence. Anyway, I thought I would preface this with some information in defense of my "stupidness" below.
Shortly after I started 5th grade, my teacher asked some biology questions. After pointing to her armpit, she asked "What is this called?" for which the correct answer would be "Armpit". I eagerly raised my hand because I "KNEW" the answer to this question. She called on me and I eagerly and confidently gave my answer. But it wasn't "armpit", no, instead I shouted "That's your Tickie!" Everyone looked at me with confused looks and said "You call that what???" and I explained "Since that's the main spot people get tickled, that's called the 'Tickie'..." I remember being completely shocked that I was wrong on this. The logic made complete sense:
You put Toast in the ToastER.
You dry things in the dryER.
When it rains, it's RainY.
You put fries in the fryER.
In my logic, if you took most verbs or nouns and added an "EE" or an "ER" sound to them, it became the thing that created that verb or noun. So the main tickling spot on the body is obviously be the "TickIE". I learned from observing what things sounded like around me and put 2 and 2 together. It just didn't equal 4.
I used this logic for many things before realizing it didn't work. For instance, an outlet was called a "ChordER" because you plugged chords into it. I remember being confused about lighters. A lightER to me was anything the created or produced light, including light bulbs. Needless to say, I had a long road of corrections ahead of me. I recieved many confused looks when I would say things like "Turn the lighter on!" or "Put it in the chorder"... They all made perfect sense to me, but usually ended up with someone saying "You call that what?!"
