I was advanced 1 year, never even saw the 1st grade class. Besides being born on the cutoff for enrollment, August, I was the youngest by almost 2 years. What made things slightly better was the fact that was usually the tallest. Also, up until 8th grade, I was usually the one with the highest grades. In 8th grade I had another depression episode, and my grades went down down down... I should have been retained, but was moved on, only to fail the next year. That's when the age gap started to go away. My grades never really recovered, I simply stopped caring about school. Never finished 12th grade, had no real interest in going to College...
Years later, I figured out that the decisive point was at the 9th grade. The government in an effort to make us do good decisions, instituted a Vocational Test to be had at the 9th grade. This was done by Psychologists hired for that task. When it was my turn, I had the misfortune of being late due to the Bus that I took broke down halfway. I was late by 10 minutes. Mr. Psychologist Extraordinaire decided to make an example out of me and refused to let me in and to even schedule me to another day. We argued, I have to say, I wasn't calm and told him in no uncertain terms what I thought of him after his absolute refusal.
I reported him. No one did anything. So, I said, Fuck You All. To be honest my opinion of psychologists hasn't improved since. .|. to them all.
Yeah, I was wrong. Fucked up my life.
Wait... what were we talking about??? No, really...
FML