These are a few things I know about myself:

1. I have low affect, which means I don’t feel highs of emotions. It also means that my emotional reactions to things are not always what “ordinary” people are expected feel.

2. I have difficulty making and maintaining eye contact.

3. I often feel uncomfortable being touched. That is something a friend and a relative, who are huggy people, are trying to cure me of. Still, the longer an embrace lasts, the more likely I am to break it off.

4. I often have obsessive thoughts. As I get older, though, I am becoming better at recognizing when they start and short-circuiting them before they become too debilitating.

5. I have difficulty reading other people’s emotions.

When I was younger, I went through a period when I tried to understand why I was the way I was; I suspected I had some form of autism. When I did some research into the subject, however, I found that I was missing a couple of key symptoms of autism. I have mellowed over the years and no longer feel the need to name how I act; it’s enough for me to know that my interior life is, as best I can make out, much different from that of most other people.

This fed into my feelings of otherness growing up. On the one hand, a lot of people get a weird vibe from me, which leads them to keep their distance. On the other hand, because I can’t read other people, I don’t know when people are offering to be friends (in fact, I have been used by more than one person because I was unable to see that their offers of friendship had ulterior motives); my ability to form relationships has been stunted, at best.

It’s not all bad (although, even if it was, I would have to make the best of it since this is the only life I’m getting). Years ago, I read an article that claimed that a lot of autistic people become great actors. Why? Because people who are different often watch others very closely to try to learn how “normal” people behave, and become very good at mimicking those behaviours. Perhaps this is also true of writers. If nothing else, my single-mindedness, if not outright obsession, has allowed me to spend decades pursuing a career with little reward.