"I refused to wear makeup and tied scarves around my head like a Russian peasant," she wrote of her 15-year-old self. "I did the opposite of what all the other girls were doing, and I turned myself into a real man repeller. I dared people to like me and my nonconformity."

Madonna says because she was weird, she had no friends, but having no social life helped her work towards her future. "If I can't be daring in my work or the way I live my life," she writes, "then I don't really see the point of being on this planet.

In the essay, she takes us through her early days in New York, where she was not welcomed with open arms. Instead Madonna says in her first year in the Big Apple she was "held up at gunpoint�raped on the roof of a building�dragged up to with a knife in my back, and had my apartment broken into three times."

But even after all those terrible events, she still says she knew there was some special about New York City.

"The tall buildings and the massive scale of New York took my breath away," she writes. "The sizzling-hot sidewalks and the noise of the traffic and the electricity of the people rushing by me on the streets was a shock to my neurotransmitters. I felt like I had plugged into another universe. I felt like a warrior plunging my way through the crowds to survive. Blood pumping through my veins, I was poised for survival. I felt alive."