Dmitry A. (SLE) - The need for one’s own territory, attention to objects and sensory details, Love for Puzzles

A child needs their own corner or their own territory. Absolutely. I had such a place—it was my “shed.” People could go in there, but I made myself a hiding place. I dragged in something like a safe door and made myself a fake safe. I closed this safe with that door. And while everyone thought the secrets were behind the door, in fact all the secrets were in the door. The door had a false bottom, and nobody suspected it. Things like that were enough for me. If I had secrets, I kept them there. No one hides things better than a SLE.

Try this: you have an empty room and one stool, and you need to hide a knife. Where would you hide it? You need to stick the blade into the underside of the stool. Who would guess it’s there? No one.

I hid better than anyone. If there was someone stronger and more agile than me, I always watched that person and eventually did it better than them. When we played hide-and-seek, everyone got tired of looking for me. I read books about ninjas, about the art of being invisible. They weren’t actually invisible, but they knew how to blend into the landscape so well that they became invisible. I did the same. For example, if it’s getting toward evening somewhere, the sun is setting, it shines straight into your eyes, it’s uncomfortable to look against the sun, you can’t see anything—then that’s exactly where you need to hide. It seems like an open place, but nothing is visible.

<...> As for thinking, I really liked various tasks in magazines. In Murzilka you had to find ten differences between two pictures. I waited eagerly for each issue.

There was a lot of interesting material in the magazine Science and Life. Various logic puzzles. They had even more interesting things, for example, seeing something three-dimensional in something flat. That just blew my mind. It completely changed my worldview. Thank God we subscribed to Science and Life at home. I loved it very much.