I was at an unattainable height, which is precisely why they could not swallow me like the others.

 I was hurled, in my adulthood, into the midst of those hulking brats whose “self-confidence”—the very thing I had shrugged off and laughed at in childhood, the showing-off with money and social status—comes from such hollow sources. I alone mocked the fact that their crude and primitive happiness sprang from those things, because I alone, though physically caged, was mentally in entirely different universes. For this gift—usually defined as “cognitive dissonance” and generally condemned by mainstream psychologists and conventional psychiatrists—I took into myself as though it were a homeless, orphaned child on the street, and I raised it, nurtured it, made it my own, until it became my very identity. I was at an unattainable height, which is precisely why they could not swallow me like the others. But I sacrificed relationships and communication for that; that is how elevated I had become.