I look back on these projects with a certain mystified satisfaction; I’m glad they were done, but it is as though they had been accomplished by somebody else, for the particular furies and fevers that impelled them have long since evaporated.
Little in life comes naturally—except for our random, inexplicable, and often uncontrollable gifts—and, even more than most children, we assemble our personalities unevenly, piece by piece, almost robotically, from models we admire. (I remember the deliberate decision to appropriate one teacher’s mischievous grin and darting eyes, which I found so charming that I thought they might work for me, too.)
From Tim Page’s essay in The New Yorker about Asperger’s syndrome. #