I had a boy nobody knew about: a feeble autistic child. I was barely an adult myself when I put him away. I had no options. And I told no one what I did.

If you're autistic, talking to humans is a bit of a magic trick. When I was a child, I had yet to learn that trick. In fact, I didn't yet know that I was autistic. Talking to humans was a mystery to me, as was so much else in life. I was a frustrated quiet child.

I study humans as a matter of survival. I need to understand how humans work, because I live in a world full of them. I notice things about them that they don’t recognize themselves. For example, humans define boundaries. It's how they make sense of the world, how they organize it, how they pigeonhole all of its myriad bits.