| This is the 539th story of Our Life Logs® | The first thing you need to know about me to understand my story: I am autistic. I was not officially diagnosed until two years ago, but my family and a few of my closest friends knew at least a decade earlier. My mother suspected this from my early years. That was the 1970s. Knowledge of autism then was not as extensive as it is now, and the psychologists evaluating me at that time said that I was “too smart” to be autistic. If t

In fact, I seemed perfectly normal until about age four. That’s when I began walking on my toes with a sort of limp, as if I were...

This was the day I was born, miraculously, to a drug-addicted mother who couldn’t take care of me. I was born with fetal alcohol syndrome...

And while both were “uneducated” (in the sense that my father dropped out after 8th grade, and my mother had never been to school a day...

As my family sat, distraught, a priest entered the room to give my last rites. My blue, lifeless body laid across the table. I wasn’t...

I had a normal, Catholic upbringing. My mother’s family was Irish, and my father’s family was Italian, creating a melting pot of heritage...