I perfectly remember the first time I really wanted the Earth to open and eat me, right there and then. 

I was volunteering before the school would start and I was 10, feeling very important. In just a week I would start having different teachers for every subject in place of one for everything.. In other words I was a grown up.

One of my to-be teachers scared me to death: The Chinese. He looked a bit Chinese, hence the name. Teaching mathematics, older children told me he'd be very "mean" and "serious", he would always give very bad grades and throw with the chalk if anyone dared to move in class.. I would later find out that, of these,  none but the last one was true - and his aim was scary good..

As faith wanted, at that moment in time I found myself in his volunteering team and he asked me to calligraph a certain poster for the teachers.

Of course, I said, with my knees trembling - and I proceeded to ask for a sheet of paper. 

As you may know, I am originally Romanian. In Romanian, a sheet of paper is called "coala" or "foaie" and while I could not decide on the spot for which one to ask, my terribly nervous brain made a combination between the two and I said:
I'd like to have a paper "coa-ie".

You know, not everybody is searching deep for their purpose.. We’ve learned a lot of things along the way: some things are still helpful, some are less helpful and some are down right harmful to the people we are right now. Most of the things we “learned” became patterns along which we act and/or react and, to be again completely honest, most of us are scared (to death!) to look at our patterns of behavior.