I was known as disruptive at school from the word go, simply because I didn't understand what was going on...I couldn't be made to stand in assembly, I'd go exploring the other classrooms. I was put in remedial, and while that subdued me because I was made to sit still, after I came out even fewer people would talk to me than before. Later, I was the dreamy, looking out of the window in distraction kid, who was really smart but occasionally said really funny dumb things. I actually got on well academically, but I got bullied, and generally at my school when you got bullied, you got a talking to right along with the bullies because it was assumed you must have done something to provoke it. Apparently I provoked it by 'not being sociable enough', because one time I got called into the principal's office and given a long lecture about it. (That was after I was standing on the sidelines at a school disco reading a magazine, someone demanded to read it, I politely refused and she swung me round the room by my hair. Obviously, if you're sociable, people don't do that to you.)
At home, it was a different story...I was a very good kid because I was scared stiff of my mother, and later my father. They didn't hit, but they yelled a lot. I was actually a pretty good teen, as teens go: no drinking, smoking, drugs, vandalism or illicit sex - I wouldn't have dared, or in the case of sex, wouldn't have known how (although I still got victimized, perhaps because I didn't know, and then got blamed for it). Yet apparently to my parents I was still incredibly difficult to deal with, never known such an awkward kid, don't know where she gets it from, never had this trouble with your brother, we never argued till you came along, useless, will never get on in life, no common sense...all that...because I liked to stay in my room, (that was deeply suspicious, obviously), and preferred reading to styling my hair for hours like a 'normal girl'.
Oh yes, and I occasionally repeated things my folks had said in private to other people, to whom it turned out they'd told a completely different version. My mother was a stickler for 'truth' (aka her own brutal opinions), but when it came to me unknowingly stating things other people weren't supposed to know, she wasn't so keen. Also, when someone gave me something related to a special interest and I showed them other things I already had to do with that interest, my mother would go ballistic. She said it looked 'ungrateful'.
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"Grunge? Isn't that some gross shade of greenish orange?"