You took an enormous burden and leveraged it to a tremendous strength- the weakness of desiring to avoid a miserable existence (and it's a weakness, as nearly all ordinary humans do or will suffer from it) led you to a facility vivid fantasy (same for me, but it is just the way I am, and didn't take much in the way of trauma to stimulate). There are many others like us, (but I ALWAYS loved school, as long as it didn't interfere with my reading- and it almost never did), but there's a problem with the overwhelming majority who want the fantasy but don't want to progressively learn to advance in their sophistication in the formulation and elaboration of fantasizing their reality.
For so many, rather than pursue that with such determination through books (and you can do this through other media, but each has different constraints) there are far simpler and easier outlets that don't have the side effects of stimulating such a broad-ranging education as you obtained. That unwillingness to progress (I'm not even talking about excellence, simply pushing against current limitations, just improving in SOME way) doesn't lead to good art, craft, or any other good personal quality.
And we run into so many who think their simple existence gives them access to mastery of all human capabilities, as though education (not just schooling) doesn't require effort on their part.
If you're "one in a million", that means there's still nearly 8,000 just as good or better than you....
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T.H. White wrote in The Once and Future King... "The essence of education is knowledge and the essence of knowledge is application."
That suggests an entire universe as a thread generated by that quote.