For years and years I bought into the idea – the dream – that I should be treated “just like everyone else.” If I had known what a mantra was, that would have been mine.

But when I started parroting that dream, I was only a child.

What that phrase is trying to say, is, “I’d like people to see me as I am: flawed certainly, as a character flaw is part of the human condition. But whole, and sometimes, a bit of a pain. And allowed to be a nuisance, not because I am ‘unusual’ and...