EPTIf that's too abrupt of a beginning for you, let me start over. My name is Sheffi Ben-David, and I'm 14 years and 7 months old (the months are important; remember them). I was born in Israel on August 19th, 1997. I lived in Israel for a bit over 3 years before we moved to the US (My mom, my dad, my brother and my sister). While in the US, I went to kindergarten and 1st grade. In kindergarten, I learned to read so quickly that I sometimes read our ABC book to the class instead of the teacher. In 1st grade, I started reading full-length novels when the class was only reading The Magic Treehouse. The longest you can live in the US with a work permit is 3 years, so that's how long we were there. The plan was to move back to Israel, but at that time a war started, and we decided to move somewhere else instead.
That place was Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. We arrived there only 1 month before my 7th birthday, and I spent that time swimming in our pool in the backyard; nothing else. When school started, I quickly discovered that I didn't fit in. Everything I did, how I talked, everything, was out of the ordinary. I was horrible at (and hated) gym and art, and excelled at (and loved) math and english. When we started learning French, it was soon apparent that I excelled at that too after only about a week.
What happened was that the teacher effectively taught us french by teaching us sign language (translating english to sign language and sign language to french). One day. She said to everyone, in sign language, to come sit on the carpet. Everyone but me understood and went to sit on the carpet. Only I stood there for several seconds not understanding how they all knew to go to the carpet. The next day, she told everyone to go to the carpet again, but this time in french. I was the only one who understood and went to sit on the carpet.
The teachers considered me a genius, the kids considered me a stuck up jerk, and I considered myself lost. So much so that my mom one day went to talk to my teacher about me. He said many roundabout things, until my mom finally said, "Ok, so what you're basically saying is that my son is a weirdo?" He nodded. The next day, my mom got an email that I should go try to get into the Gifted school that was in the area. Basically kids in Grade 3 went there for one day a week for a month, and do all kinds of strange work that made no sense to us at the time, to test if we were abnormally smart or not.
I went there, and found it boring as hell. WHO CARES what the answer to your stupid riddle is? I come to school to learn, not to fool around! The only actual fun part was when we had to write a riddle ourselves. The people at the school were shocked to see my riddle, and how high level it was compared to my age. Later in the course, we has to read a mystery story full of pictures (that I didn't get the point of, a story is to read not to look at pictures). It was so blatantly obvious who the criminal was that I quite literally facepalmed, shortly before I discovered that the answer was quite the opposite of obvious to everyone but me. We wrote our own mystery story shortly after, and once again the teachers there were amazed at the level of writing that I had as a child in Grade 3.
I was the only one from my school who got in, but I didn't want to go, because their style of teaching was "boring". Instead, my mom found me a private school that prided themselves in having good teachers. At first I was iffy about it, until the principal had the absolutely brilliant idea (I have no fucking idea to this day from what magic hat he got this out of) to let me talk to the teachers in private. We amazed each other, me being amazed at how good the teachers seemed and them being amazed at how good I seemed. In the end, I went to the school, and had a lot of fun in the lessons. The thing is, just like at my old school, I didn't get along with the kids, who thought of me as a stuck up jerk. I now know that it was rightly so, because I was indeed a stuck up jerk, but that's beside the point. I no longer felt lost.
I had a great 2 years in the school (though not getting along with the kids) until one day I started playing WoW. No, I didn't stop having fun at the school, quite the opposite. I was aware what the kids at my school thought of me, and I decided to use WoW, where they had no idea who I was in real life, to start anew and find out what I did wrong to make them hate me. I started over anew many times in WoW, rolling new alts both because I was an altoholic in general and because my guildies thought I was childish. I got better, though, and people started guessing my age at 16.
Thats when I discovered thottbot. If anyone remembers this old site, high-five. I joined the forums, and over two years developed my 'mature attitude' until it became who I was irl. Around this time I started making friends at my school, and I was an even more happy person than before.
Unlike my old school, teachers here didn't think of me as a genius (except for my english teacher). The subjects I always was best in since the beginning of time are english and math, and still are to this very day, but my math teacher didn't think of me as a genius (I got rather average marks in his class and I was never very talkative) until we had a math competition at our school. Now, this math competition was supposed to be a Grade 9 math competition, but our school got both Grade 8s and Grade 7s (I was in Grade 7) to do it. I insisted on participating, even though my math teacher thought that I wouldn't do very well and that I shouldn't, but he was proven wrong when I got the highest score in our school and one of the highest scores in the region.
Meanwhile, in english class, I wrote stories like no one else in my class. My stories had long words, proper grammar/punctuation, and varying sentence structures, the latter being something no one else had at the time. My writing capabilities only really showed in Grade 8, though, when a couple of things happened. The first was that I started writing WoW fanfics online. I showed these to my teacher, but though she complimented my writing, she couldn't say much more because of her lack of knowledge about WoW. The second was that we started reading a story in our class called Home Truths, a brilliant book about bullying if anyone wants to read it. When we finished the book, the author came to our school and talked to us about the book.
We asked her questions, and she answered all of them perfectly and with interesting answers until I stumped her with a weird question. "How does the writing process really start? Do you have an idea for a part of the story and develop from there, do you draw up one character and let the world draw itself in, or something else completely?" This question stumped her so hard that the entire class couldn't stop staring at me for at least 5 minutes. Later, at the book signing, I told her that I myself write stories, and that that's why I could ask a question like that. In class we had time to write her a thank you card, so I wrote the following:
" 'At the middle of the power generator stood a large humanoid creature. Its outline suggested it was once human, but now deep blue scales covered its entire body, so deep a man could go insane just by staring at them. From his back protruded two giant wings, just as blue as the rest of his body. Like two twin red daggers in the great sea of blue were his eyes, radiating a look of power, of majesty, but most importantly, the look of a killer.' Thank you for visiting our school. Sincerely, Sheffi."
Though I never heard anything from her, it was refreshing to show my work to a real writer. At the end of the year, we had graduation, and many tears were shed as I parted from what was now a group of friends that happened to be my classmates. I wasn't going to high school with them next year; I was going to Israel.
I had known about it a year beforehand, and so had my class. The plan was to be in israel for one year, for reasons that I didn't understand, and come back to Canada. On my 14th birthday, we landed in Tel Aviv, Israel. Great way to celebrate a birthday, don't you think? Starting a year in a different country you barely speak the language of, right as you're supposed to start high school, and... right as your parents divorce.
The divorce had nothing to do with moving to israel. It was that my dad apparently cheated on my mom with one of his students. After a few extremely hard months for me of hearing my parents constantly fight, they decided to just forget it happened for my sake. Though my parents don't live together (I live with my mom), they don't fight anymore either. I have had different hardships here in israel, though. The language is very difficult for me, and even though I'm good at masking it, every sentence is a struggle. I don't fit into the israeli culture. I don't have any real friends here in israel (though I had many in Canada). I tried once to explain to a friend of mine from Canada what the advantages/disadvantages of being In israel were, and noticed that I couldn't come up with even one.
Here's the thing; I recently found out that my mom felt the exact same way that I feel about israel, except she feels it about Canada. My mom wants to stay here forever, and I want to go back as soon as possible, but neither of us wants to be without the other.
I don't know why I took the time to write all of this, but I just needed to vent. I don't know what to do anymore. If any of you read the whole thing, thank you.
TL;DR I moved constantly throughout my entire life until we settled in Canada for 7 years, now we moved to israel and I want to go back, but my mom doesn't.
