Ryan met me in the parking lot of the Family Video on a Saturday afternoon. We went inside carrying chairs and popcorn, set them up in front of one of those corner televisions in the back, and watched the movie that was playing as though it was our living room. After a half hour, once enough people had cycled through the store to give me something to write about, we packed up and left.

I was a high school senior, and my AP Psychology assignment for the chapter on mental illness was to go to a public place and do something deviant while paying attention to the reactions of the people around me. It was open-ended: we could choose to do whatever deviant act we wanted, and there were no guidelines other than the standard “stay within the confines of the law”. The assignment itself was a one-page paper about the experience.

It taught me something very important about what it’s like to be different. You may have the idea that people who are different get a lot of stares from others, but it’s not true. There wasn’t a single person who looked at Ryan and I for the duration of our deviance. They all walked around us, stiffly and awkwardly pretending everything was normal, as though it was normal to avoid eye contact at all costs.

No, a person who is different usually lives a life of isolation. We notice him in a public place, and these thoughts pass through our minds almost simultaneously: Something’s wrong with him. Act like he’s normal. Don’t stare—he probably gets that a lot. He’s just as much of a person as you are. Don’t let him know that you know he’s different. Just look straight ahead and keep walking. And in trying so hard to prevent him from feeling conspicuous, we make him invisible. I experienced this for a half hour. I can’t imagine a lifetime of it.

Is normal anything more than a democratic idea? I’m only normal because there are more people like me than there are like him. But I have a dozen disabilities of my own.