I regarded it as a fraud..................

 

My problem was that for my first ten years in school, I was at the back of the class.  In the end, I came to see myself as my teachers saw me and as everyone in my class saw me.  Without knowing it I made a compact with being last.  And when, eventually, my exam results showed that I was first, I regarded it as a fraud.  Nothing so trivial as a fact could give the lie to an old sense of self.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village