The I'm Joanna Garzilli. You're watching life stories. Today my guest is Mike Surnievich filmmaker author and journalist Mike welcome to life stories

My pleasure. Thank you for having me. So I'm going to dive right in.

We're going to start at childhood.

Between four and six years old, what is the most impactful memory that comes to mind.

Impactful memory is hard because I don't know that I have a formative memory

from that age.

I do remember being in kindergarten and sitting on this big mat it had the ABCDs on it and all the kids

would sit on a different letter.

But otherwise...

What letter did you sit on?

I don't know. Yeah, I don't have much of a memory before first grade.

Then I have a memory. So childhood memories before I would say six years old not much stands out.

So kindergarten, right?

That's when you really started to have a sense.

What was the primary feeling that you had on a day-to-day basis at that point?

I would say I always felt a little bit isolated, a little bit, a sense of

disconnection probably. There's when you hear people talk about and I learned

now was introversion versus actual version but I just

had a sense of I didn't necessarily belong and I didn't dislike people people

didn't dislike me but I didn't feel, I give you an example when I was in the first

grade during a break, the teacher would, we had records back then, and she would play music and the kids would all get up and dance and I just sat there I thought why are people dancing this doesn't make any sense to me

Seemed weird so I just very often felt that other people were very strange and unlike me.

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