Finding my chance to be me: My journey with high-functioning autism

Abstract

I have spent almost my entire life feeling different. It seemed as though there was a set of social rules that everyone else appeared to live by, and those rules just didn’t work for me. Social interactions have always been difficult for me. When trying to express my thoughts and feelings to others it has always seemed to get lost in translation somewhere between my mouth and their ears. Over time, I learned to assimilate and to act the way others expected me to. Shakespeare once wrote, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” This is how I saw myself, as an actor that never got to exit the stage, but had to keep performing.