Last spring, my family and I moved from our 22-acre farm in western Massachusetts to the center of Brattleboro. It was the beginning of a new life together.

Six months later, at the age of 50, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. Far from being a moment of heartbreak, my diagnosis was a cause for celebration. For the first time, my life made sense.

I had always felt very different from other people. I had always had a sense of apartness, of otherness, for which I could find no explanation.

The subject of autism had always fascinated me, but the idea that I might be autistic seemed absurd. I'd gone to college, made friends, and worked full-time. I was married and raising a family. How could I be autistic? After all, autistic people were locked into their own, strange worlds, unable to communicate or function in society.

Or so I thought.

I teach creative writing courses in a continuing education department of a college. Most would consider these to be “special interest” courses, which people take for enjoyment. And that’s great – one of the reasons I teach these courses is because I enjoy it.

But there is another really big reason I do it. It’s because I believe that lifelong learning is a fundamental right of every human being, and that lifelong learning makes better citizens, communities and countries.

A man will never have enough guts to raise a hand against me. I would just slap him back into place. If a woman really wants to, she can put a man in his place!

What is exactly is a representative democracy? How can we measure the ability of an electoral system to accurately represent the will of the people, and to act in accordance with the wishes of the population? These are complex issues, no doubt, and luckily there are people out there giving it a lot of thought and coming up with a way of ensuring that we are living in a just and truly democratic society.