When I was a small child I longed one day to become so famous that I did not have to hide how odd I was—how unlike other people. Few people really held my attention. It was birds and mammals, reptiles and insects that filled my dreams and eternally whetted my curiosity.

I just wanted to be different. I wanted to be seen.

My earliest memory is of feeling different. My parents told me that I wasn't like other children.

When I was a little girl, I believed that my life would somehow be different from the lives of everyone around me

I wanted something different—something to make me stand out and for people to notice.

I didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing at the time. I wanted something unique, something special, something challenging, something that would be fulfilling.

Early in my childhood, when I was about six or seven, I began to get the feeling that there was something different about me.

I was about 14 when I realised I didn't have the same personality type as the people I grew up with. I wanted to be a really amazing artist – I wasn't like, humble, you know? I don't really have a logical comprehension of other people, I don't understand how other people are. I knew I was never going to be normal: white picket fence, get married, have three babies. I just wanted to nurture animals and have a miniature pig and miniature horse and a little cow and a couple of puppy dogs. That was way more interesting.

I've always felt quite like an outsider. I don't really belong in the mainstream, and I quite like that.

How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.

I wanted to be the exception to the other kids, but in the right way. We have a lot of suffering in our part of the world, but that suffering is, in a way, a blessing. Obviously, I could not afford to go to school without a scholarship, so that meant I had to excel in order to get one.

Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in my head.

I thought it was normal, that’s the thing. When you’re little you think everything is normal. If your mother had a pointed head and green ears you’d think it’s normal. Only when you grow up do you realise that not everybody is like that. Gradually you can even come to learn that the time you are living in is strange too, that it hasn’t always been like this. The more you feel uncomfortable and unconfident and want to find a way to be like everyone else and fit in, the more normality runs away from you because there isn’t any such thing. Or if there is, you have to find someone else who’ll agree with you what it is. Which I seem singularly unable to do.

When you're a little weird, you aspire to be normal; when you're very weird, you aspire to be recognised for it.