Reading Hidden Laughter, I find myself empathizing with a vengeance. Except that it's not the writer I'm feeling for, it's her little boy, who's been diagnosed as having high-functioning autism.

I remember being there. Not exactly there, because I never, as far as anyone could tell, had trouble with imaginative play. I spoke late but read early and well. But other people were worlds incomprehensible to me, huge and unpredictable and there I was without any idea of what was appropriate and lacking an emotional vocabulary.

I know I've written about having Central Auditory Processing Disorder before. But as I was reading about Tamar's worries for her child, the hopes that he'll grow up into a normal adult, I started wondering. Would I be neurotypical, if I could be?

It's a tempting thought. I'm fascinated by social intercourse. I began studying it out of desperation as a kid, knowing that there was something I was missing that I was expected to know, and if I wanted to be left alone, I'd better figure it out well enough to pass. Later, as a teenager, I began studying it because it interested me, playing anthropologist, watching with cautious eyes, learning how to blend in, learning how to look "normal".

Would it be fun, to be able to interact with other people without planning things out in advance? As I've gotten older and my nervous system has finally matured, the amount I need to plan out and rehearse has gone from entire social encounters to thinking about five minutes ahead. I can manage to get in a word edgewise, on occasion, and I've found that other people aren't generally out to hurt me and so I can trust them to direct the conversation or activities.

Would I like to be able to follow the flow of a conversation and be able to add a comment at an appropriate time, rather than being forever three minutes too late? Sure. It would be nice if it didn't take forever for my brain to process speech. Would it be nice to relate to the people I love like neurotypical people seem to? Maybe.

The thing is, though I do love people in my own way, I may well never end up with a permanent partner. I know I'm not going to have the life partner and the picket fence and the 2.5 children (adopted from someplace war-torn and needy) and the minivan and the retirement and the midlife crisis and the little red Corvette and the burial in the nicely manicured cemetary. I used to think I wanted that and would never find it. Now I know that I'm not cut from that cloth, and the expected progression would have killed all that was good in me.

In ways, it's hard for me socially. It takes me years to really let people in, and I'm blessed by persistent friends. But I also rarely worry about losing people. People have appeared and disappeared from my life with astonishing regularity for my entire life, and it's hard to get excited about the process now. But once I'm convinced that people are around for good (usually takes five or six years) then I start to become truly attached to them. From what I can tell, for most people, the process doesn't take nearly that long.

But, you know, being the way I am has its gifts. How else would I know the song of a building, the little creaks and the fans and the hum of the electrical life within its walls? How many things wouldn't I have known if I'd been worried about other people, let people distract me from the real business of my life, knowing all the hows and whys and wherefores of the world? How many things wouldn't have done if I'd been worried about how other people were seeing me? What wouldn't I have done if I'd known how odd I looked?

I don't know any neurotypical people who are moving celebrations of solitude, who can walk in four different places at once, who can reach the ecstatic meditation that resides in silence, who drink in quiet greedily.

Living with my brain is scary and sometimes tiresome, but it's also a lot of fun. I probably could have been helped, had my parents had any idea what was wrong with me. I could have been poked and prodded into caring about interaction with other people, and learned how to route around the damaged part of my brain sooner than I did.

The problem with that, of course, is that it wouldn't have been my idea and there would have been no rewards in it for me. Even now, the pleasure of other people is thin and worn beside the pleasures of being inside my own head. It's an unstable thread to dangle an entire life from. There are other, better reasons to live in the world, even now.

I understand the urge to want children to be normal, to want them to relate to other people. There is a temptation to view those of us who experience relationships differently as deprived of something rich and wonderful. And perhaps we are. But I cannot imagine experiencing people as anything other than I do, and there are so many fascinating things that have nothing to do with other people. I'm confused by the pity I occasionally receive, because I think the way I am is infinitely preferable to being a social creature and having to depend on the whims of other people for emotional sustenance.

I think it's wonderful that kids today can be helped. But I am glad that nobody ever tried to help me, glad beyond saying. I am glad the technology came along in time for me to explore the world of other people silently. I was given the gift of dealing with the world on my own terms and my own schedule, and I am a far richer person for my long silence.

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