I sat in my office chair and committed myself to one of the dangerous things I could do at the time. Sit down and ponder. Thinking is dangerous to me. I tend to say it when joking around, but as I have mentioned in the books I’ve published and in some of my keynote speeches, the mind can play devious and mischievous tricks on people with autism. No denials in that statement on my side, I have said before there have been multiple sides of Tyler McNamer and we ended up fighting with each other because of our differences.

One topic he mentioned while I was sitting there was the idea of “The Perfect Year.” I cooperated with myself and let him speak on what he meant by that. He brought up separate days we happened to be in areas where we saw a couple of familiar faces that we used to see at school. The opportunity could not have been any more open. They were right in front of me and I encouraged myself to go up to them and say hi.

But I couldn’t.

Why did I do...