When children of any kind are just born, they look to their parents to show them who they are. I would say that the first ten years are when your brain installs its operating system, the structural code that everything else is sorted by. Gender, name, race, nationality, religion, morals, taboos, and other constraints, all those things that are not passed down by instinct alone are hard-wired into a child's system through constant exposure of life’s little subtleties, whatever they may be. That is the process of imprinting. If a duckling hatches in sight of a dog, it will imprint as one. After a while a person begins to think for themselves the imprinting stage ends, having served its purpose. But what if there is no imprinting? What if life’s subtleties are too subtle for a damaged person to observe and rationalize into anything? By the time I awoke, my imprinting session had closed. It's like this; If someone comes up to you thirteen years after you're born and tells you you’re an alien, maybe after a while you may believe it, but will you really Know it in that indescribable way that you know yourselves to be human? I never can, because I never did, and despite anyone’s best efforts, never will, not for really real anyway. You can only brainwash someone so much. To this day I don’t really recognize my name as my own. I don’t have any of those basic labels like gender and nationality. This made for a unique opportunity, to consciously Learn the world with an adult mind. As a result I grew on my own accord and fell out of sync with the humans around me. Nothing was taken for granted. Trees were giant plants, authority figures only became so by getting others to believe they were, and leg warmers were much more effective on the arms. I wasn’t trying to think outside the box, rather, there was a box and I tried to explain it the best I could with the little knowledge I had picked up along the way. It was usually wrong, or if my explanation was right, it sounded really bizarre. Eventually I decided that if it made sense to me then that was good enough and concepts that didn't fit logically were rejected or modified. Many things in my new habitat seemed a waste of time and rather counterproductive, like make-up. People would know you were wearing it, so using it as an enhancer of the natural state of the face seemed pointless. On the other hand, if the person put on makeup to enjoy their own appearance in it, then it was a different story. Which is why I periodically dye my hair blue.I was about 15 when I bought my first article of clothing at a store by myself, a sweater with a stripe on it. Buying clothes was slow going before the Balance, as I really didn’t know what humans my age wore. Then it became an issue of not wanting to. For some reason their clothes felt odd and alien. It made me feel like I was wearing some kind of a costume in an attempt to be something I wasn't. I am still terribly behind on pop-culture. At the time, I didn’t even bother. There were more pressing matters, mainly, figuring out why no one seemed to like me much. I eventually had to abandon this as well. Shortly after I arrived on Earth, they tested me.