I was an introverted, bookish kid, a teacher’s pet, a nerd, a geek, Honor roll person. In high school they called me “The Guru.”
NoClueBoy: Goo-roo. Get it?
Fat, short, ugly. I had no confidence and used to think that I was as thick as two short planks, although everyone else had long ago decided that I was the geeky freak. I was very bookish, and still am.
Now, I’ve changed, think of Pratchett’s Angua, but not as attractive, and without a tendancy to turn into a wolf at full moon
I have very nearly managed to suppress all memories of my childhood. It’s taken years of dedicated drinking. From what I do remember, I was quiet, well-behaved, and overly sensitive.
I was a horribly unstable twit who found was generally annoying to be around and would do anything to try and socialize with people. My eyesight went from 20:20 to “everything farther that one foot away is a blur.” I had immense trouble waking up in the morning, caught strep throat annually for about five years in a row, was prone to anxiety attacks and fits of rage, made inappropriate wiseassed remarks, and was generally thin-skinned. The odd thing was that at least two girls liked me back then. I wish I’d been sensible enough to do something about it. (Being in Junior High at the time, I probably wouldn’t have done much.) I also mastrubated almost daily and hated writing.
During high school I managed to purge myself of most of my mental instabilities and grew a thicker skin. I also discovered I loved writing.
No improvement on either the wiseassed commentary or the mastrubating, however.
I’m still embarassed… :S
A little bollocks. Well that’s what I heard a lot
I was born a true hippie. I had long white hair and ran around naked most of the time until I was about 4 years old. I also hated wearing shoes. I always wore sandals and even then I usually didn’t put on any socks. I didn’t even start wearing pants regularly until I was about 11 or 12.
I was painfully shy as a child. I got generally good grades in regular classes, but I never took schoolwork any farther than that. No extracurriculars, sports or anything like that. I was interested in photography and movie making and owned about 5 or 6 different cameras at any one time.
I was always slighty small for my age and usually looked a couple years younger than I really was. I had more than my fair share of bullies, but I loved to fight and they usually regretted ever crossing my path. By the time I was high school aged, they disappeared completely.
During high school, I had low self-esteem and was still pretty shy. I had acne. I only had a few friends, who I usually didn’t see outside of school. The weird thing, though, is that I was a babe magnet! I knew way more girls than guys. One time I even had two girls ask me for a date on the same day! (This gave me a few ideas, yes, but I never carried them out) What they saw in me, I’ll probably never know.
Nowadays, I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing sandals, my hair is short, I don’t run around naked anymore (sorry, ladies) and I have outgrown most of my childhood insecurities, but I am still a babe magnet
I was a spoilt, irriatating brat… then my little sister was born and I had to grow up a bit lol…
Now, I’m utterly fantastic (of course lol)…
I spent much of my childhood with yojimbo. We were a pair of little bolloxes;).
I was bright but lazy in primary school. I have got steadily less bright through the years but the laziness has persisted. I was also pretty awkward and had an overactive imagination. In my teenage years, my overactive imagination blossomed and I became a compulsive liar. I was scrupulously dishonest and completely untrustworthy. I was also extremely selfish and quite vain - I had long hair I was ridiculously proud of and even considered getting a ‘Jon Bon Jovi’. I wasn’t all bad though - I think I was pretty good company and I was up for anything. I’m glad I did most of the things I did.
I think I’ve grown out of most of these traits but they’re all still there somewhere. I now have a baby daughter of ten months. She looks very like me. I’m worried;).
Ahh memories 
I wish you had of got the "Jon Bon Jovi’’ that and your stripy strides would have been hilarious.
I was every parent’s dream child up until the age of 10. I was a child prodigy, 3 years ahead of my class (I even “invented” trigonometry at the age of 7 without being told about it!) I was gorgeous looking… cherubic with white blonde hair and bright eyes and really really long eyelashes, I was captain of the football team and always the one the girls used to go for in kiss chase! And then it all fell apart…
I received a blow to the head when I was 10 (in awful circumstances which I won’t go into here) and contracted a condition known as aphasia, which is a lesion on the brain that hampers your language skills, making it next to impossible to communicate, or understand anyone. Couldn’t read, write, understand or speak more than 1 word in 10.
Slowly it got better but I was at boarding school and was known as a retard for quite some time. I read text books and played computer games and surfed for things to do (couldn’t read books with plots in them coz I would get lost too easily, with text books I could skip bits if I didn’t understand them)
Missed a whole lot of growing up and social interaction with my peers and I’m only just recovering from that now (at 29), luckily the surfers down in Cornwall were quite a friendly bunch and accepted me even though they thought I was a mute.
Later in my teens when my condition had all but evaporated, I took to coke and pills to bring me out of my shell, but stopped that when I went to uni.
But… despite all that, or maybe because of it, I’m now a pretty well adjusted, friendly, successful individual… although I’m still incredibly shy! (People at Brumdope… if you see a guy wandering around looking lost, seemingly afraid of his own shadow, that’ll be me :> )
I was the shortest kid in school. I could sleep through class and get straight A’s. I had bright red hair and glasses. I was an awesome athlete, setting school records for everything except long-distance running which would leave me a puking wreck. I was the only person in school who not only read, but was reading to others in class in Kindergarten. And I would wipe the floor with anyone who picked on me.
Therefore, I was a social pariah.
You’re sure they didn’t outcast you for your modesty?
And Yojimbo, I can SO picture you being a little bollocks. Heh.
I think we should all be a little bit kinder about ourselves as kids. We were kids, after all. And we all felt like dorks and did stupid things and once jumped off the back of the sofa thinking we could fly and landed face first on the coffee table and broke our two front teeth and had to endure our grandparents singing “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth” at us for three years.
That last one was just me. But anyway, my point is - you made it through childhood. You can’t have been that bad. Give yourself a pat on the back for surviving growing up.
The first-born of two, I was very smart and well-behaved, an avid reader of practically everything, and extremely imaginative. I had absolutely zero interest in associating with other children, as I considered them a bunch of rampaging animals.
As far as I can recall, I was naturally careful and never deliberately misbehaved, although I occasionally did things that made sense, but later turned out to be unacceptable to others for some reason. “If you wanted me to do it your way, you should have told me so earlier!” sums that up pretty well. I got in a lot of fights, because I refused to fit in with the other kids, but that stopped after I opened up a guy’s head with a stapler at 15. (I will admit to a violent temper, but only when seriously provoked.)
As a teen, I had no desire to do anything typically “teen-like” (I considered them all lunatics), and was indifferent to popularity. Oddly, my total disinterest in being “cool” made me somewhat “cool”. People respected me because I didn’t give a damn what they thought (and because I was a good source of homework advice). 
Basically, I was exactly the same then as I am now, except that I’ve gotten more disillusioned as I’ve learned more about the world.
No wonder we’re all here at the SDMB - I find a lot in common with many of you.
I was always stupidly skinny, but I was strong as a ox, so I reckon the best term would be “wiry” (or wirddd-y) to you fans of “The Replacements”). I was tremendously hyper, had problems at home, and eventually simply settled into a simmering hatred of all life and waited for just the wrong moments to explode.
As I was (interestingly) just thinking about last night, I missed much of everything in the early '90s - to this day I am completely oblivious to what bands were cool, what fashions were like, and what other kids my age usually “did” for “fun”.
I sat in my room in the basement, turned up the local classic rock station and read comic books and gaming sourcebooks for about five years.
By the time I was 17 I was dissolusioned, angry, cared not what others thought of what I did or said and was not particularly interested in girls because none of them liked me anyway.
But that was all a long time ago and beer has helped me get better.
Very bookish, and inclined to daydream – the sort of child who would spend all morning tracing patterns in the wallpaper, or watching ants. (I liked insects a lot, and wanted to become the world’s first veterinarian specializing in them, until I figured out that nobody will pay a vet to treat insects. 'Tis a cruel world.)
Although I was a fairly quiet child, I also had a contrary streak and a firmly ingrained dislike of authority, following orders, and Doing What Everybody Else Did, which meant that I found school just barely tolerable up through sixth grade, and sheer hell after that. Elementary school was OK because we had recess, a fish tank to stare at, and the occasional opportunity to sneak off to the library, and the other kids were reasonably tolerant of my eccentricities. All that ended in the seventh grade, and almost the only thing that made junior high bearable was smuggling in my writing notebooks (I started a lot of novels, even finished one once).
High school was a little better, but not much. But since the question was not “What were you like as a teenager?” I am mercifully spared from having to recall it.
I’m the oldest of two and have a mild hearing loss that was more severe when I was little. Until the time I was in first grade most people couldn’t understand a word I said. (I started speech theropy in 1st grade.) It also created some interesting social inconsistancies. At home with friends and family I was an outgoing, creative, bossy, know-it-all, control freak of a child. At school and out in public I was painfully shy. My second grade teacher marked me present for the entire week I was out with the chicken pox. I spent most of my school career being invisible. Which was convenient as I never did a lick of homework the entire time. Some of the better teachers would punish me and make me catch up, but my 4th grade teacher told my mother at the end of the year that I was so quiet that she didn’t notice I hadn’t done any homework until it was too late to do anything about it.
I wasn’t a great student. The afore mentioned lack of completed homework, combined with a healthy dose of daydreaming and complete lack of ability to read text books prevented me from excelling in school. What I lacked scholastically I made up in social responsibility. I always followed the rules. To the point that if I hadn’t been given instructions I froze, completely unable to progress until someone came and told me what to do. If I believed something to be morally wrong, I avoided it like the plague. Which is why when I got to college I was still very much a child (for about a semester.) I’d never been on a date, let alone been kissed. Never used drugs and only drank wine with the family on holidays. I never stole anything.
When I was about 7 my grandfather died and my grandmother came to live about 6 blocks from us. She was appalled that my parents had let my religious education slide and started taking me to the local baptist church. I spent a lot of time with the church while growing up and it formed a lot of my founding beliefs. Some that I’m still coping with. Lets just say that I spent nights up wondering if my best friend (she was Jewish) was going to hell because she didn’t believe that Jesus was the son of God.
Yeesh! I’m glad I’m not a kid anymore.
I’m quite convinced that you look exactly like Calvin, only taller.
Hmm… I was always a loner. I usually only had about one friend at a time and they were almost always school-only. I can count on one hand the number of friends I’ve had that I socialized outside of school with.
I was also the kid that never lived up to his potential. I’ve always been of above average intelligence and was in the gifted program for two years but you had to just about glue me to my chair to get me to do my work. I had a 127 IQ in 5th Grade but had been making Fs since 3rd.
So far as my siblings go, I was always the good one. My oldest sister gave my dad fits and had two kids by the time she was twenty… my next oldest sister gave my mom fits and if she hadn’t had fertility issues, probably would have wound up pregnant too. I, on the other hand, stayed at home and read books, watched TV, and did all other sorts of uninspiring stuff. Other than a “smart mouth”, I’ve never done much to give my parents a headache