Having no Mom and no Dad did present some disadvantages, but if you look at it differently you can see some of the disadvantages can be turned into advantages. Let me explain how one of them turned out for me. Since I was living with an alcoholic just out of prison we were very poor, so poor that we had no electricity or gas, luckily the apartment was centrally heated with steam heat from radiators. Since we had no electricity there was no TV or radio, so what's a kid to do? Read, read by kerosene lamps. Of course we didn't have any money to buy and books, but I did earn enough doing choirs for neighbors to buy comic books. How can reading comic books turn into an advantage? It doesn't really matter what you read, comic books help you develop your reading skills, they also require that you interpret the visual images along with the narrative. So what did I gain? I had one of the highest reading scores through out grammar school. That's just one example of turning a disadvantages into an advantage. What in your life did you change to turn a disadvantage into an advantage?

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