There are no college courses to build up self-esteem or high school or elementary school. If you don't get those values at a early age, nurtured in your home, you don't get them.

In elementary school, I did well in science, but I was a poor writer. When I got to high school, I failed all my courses.

When I wrote my stories in elementary school, I signed them all 'Karen E. Bender' with the squiggly 'E.' I wanted, from an early age, to be a writer, and that name - that E - was a way of pretending I knew how to do it.

In late elementary school, early high school, I started losing my hair in chunks in the shower. It was one of the scariest things. It got to the point where it was visibly gone.

I was a very awkward high schooler, especially in early high school.

I was an elementary school teacher.