Life is different when you are awkward. I admired normal people, and desperately wanted to be like them. Yet the more I tried to fit in with normal people, the more they pushed me away. I followed all the available advice. They pushed harder.
Increasing apprehension when dealing with others, and the desperate search for acceptance, eventually evolved into compulsions. The compulsions would consume my life. The compulsions would drag me to the very edge of sanity as I fought, at any cost, to obtain the normalcy that came so effortlessly to others.
Forty years into my struggle, I found a glimmer of hope-hope that I had finally become normal like you. This is a memoir of that struggle, and of finding hope even when all seems lost.
