ABSTRACT
I can admit now that I was afraid of Adam. He wandered up, smiled and asked me my name. And I froze, momentarily, because this conversational, social 15-year-old in the school reception room was not acting how I had been taught autistic people would act. I had prepared myself for something different. I was nervous because that difference scared me. Meeting Adam shamed me, for he made it clear that I had bought into a myth and then recycled it, propagated it and adjusted my own actions to fit within it.
