Prologue

I came out of the coma slowly.  It had been a sort of voluntary autism.  I had listened to people only at the edge of my attention, appreciated other beings only at the periphery.  I must have been infuriating. Like a stand up comedian listening to whispered instructions coming to him through the curtain, I knew people were trying to get through to me, and I really was trying to listen.  But inside my head was a light show so compelling, it blotted out everything else.  I was quite mad.  But I had always been this way.

What changed was the realisation that it could damage me, that the consequences of living that way could touch me in my world.  For I was neither one thing nor the other.  Perhaps it would have suited me better to have stepped completely inside myself, and become clinically insane.  Maybe I will do that one day, if things get too rough.  But there was still a large part of me which craved attention, and shied away from it for fear of rejection.  I realised I would have to speak to people, really speak to them.  Allow my sphere to intersect with their spheres in a more sincere way.  A frightening prospect, baring the clumsy and the ugly to public ridicule.

How had I gotten there?