The same is true with friends who laughed at my inability to pronounce words. Despite all the difficulties that I experienced during the school seasons of the year, I almost did not hold back the anger at them. In the end, when we matured, they were able to change for the better.

However, the old memory of numerous acts of ridicule did not leave me.

But there were also cases when, after returning from the village to Moscow, I not only spoke and answered during school lessons without any problems, I also myself raised my hand for an answer – I would become so confident in myself. In one period of my life, I was full of enthusiasm to wake up in the morning and go to school, because I liked the learning process and the fact that I could speak perfectly, like all other people.

Moreover, during such periods of my life, I was by no means taciturn. So, I remember my mother's story how she rode in the same tram with me and Anton, my childhood friend, and she said that I was constantly chatting then. We did not know that my mother was in the car and just decided not to interfere with our conversation.

But sooner or later, confidence always went away. The reasons could be very different. For example, I remember how one day on New Year's Eve, when I was still in high school, a man rang the doorbell of our apartment. He rang other people in our corridor too, as he was just looking for a company to celebrate the New Year. I think that our neighbor, an elderly woman, recognized him as a resident from the adjacent block of our apartment building, and mom agreed to let him into our tiny one-room apartment. He behaved completely normal and adequate, but this could not console my appearing concern for my mother. I simply could not know what could happen next, and I was worried about this unexpected situation and the unknown. After he left, he rang the doorbell again after a couple of moments to ask if I would like to walk with him sometime. At that moment I felt very embarrassed for my father, and I felt like I was betraying him, just by being in this situation. My mother and I politely refused. After this moment, I had to go out with my Moscow friends to celebrate the New Year, as we did in previous years. But when my best friend came after me, I spent several minutes refusing to go out, because I was afraid for my mother, afraid that that man might come back again. At that time, I could not tell the whole truth to my friend, as I was ashamed. I simply kept refusing to go outside for celebrations, until he was finally tired, and he went to celebrate with the rest of the friends without me. This was the first moment when my touch with friends began to break. Having returned to school after the holidays, I again began to have problems with speech and again became insecure – which I constantly remembered about. As for that man, I never saw him again.

However, there was another case in elementary school when I lost a friend for an absurd reason. He was my classmate, and we often walked together after school, or played Dendy at his home. He lived far from school and, I think, because of this, he started going to another. One day I came home after being outside for a long time with friends and the telephone rang. It was that same friend who called me to go outside. Then, without thinking, I said that I had already been outside – I understood how my “I had already been outside” sounded when it was too late. He hung up and never called again. We had an old drum phone without a caller ID at that time, and I did not have my friend’s phone number because, as I recall, he did not have a phone before. I could not contact him in any way, and thus I lost my first friend. I am not sure exactly, but maybe many years later I saw him and his grandmother while riding in a tram not far from my school and home. He also saw me. If that was really my old school friend, then he clearly remembered me and, judging by what reached me from his conversation, he remembered our very last telephone “conversation”. Perhaps I should have approached and apologized, explaining the misunderstanding, but then I was not in the best shape, and I was not sure if it was him because more than ten years had passed since we saw each other.