it used to seem that I might as well have been born on an asteroid, so awkward and unnatural was my place in the scheme of things. I remember my clumsy efforts to simulate "normality," to win acceptance by any false pretense, and my desperate betrayals of my own nature to avoid detection. Then the gradual discovery (born, I think, out of some irreducible core) that others were twisting and cracking under the same strains, and that behind the apparent conformity of daily life was a world of "all things counter, original, spare, strange."
