Wired This Way

The first wires in his life were live ones: box-fan cords with the insulation stripped off, plugged into the wall, and used on him and his sisters.

He survived the way he survived everything after that. He mapped every room, tracked every exit, read every face. He thought everyone did.

Pete Salcedo was born in a Mexican border town and raised by a system that kept moving him: foster homes, shelters, juvenile facilities. At seventeen, a night in the back seat of the wrong car ended with a ten-year prison sentence. Inside, he taught himself to write code on paper. Outside, with a felony that closed door after door, he built a career in software, fought his way onto a fire department, earned his EMT license the hard way, and joined a federal search-and-rescue task force. He went to court to protect his young daughter, and he won.

He never understood why he could stay steady inside a burning house but couldn't get through small talk in a break room. Then, at forty-three, a psychologist gave him the word he'd been missing his whole life: autism.

Wired This Way is his true story, told the way he lived it: direct, precise, and unsentimental. It's about the systems that fail kids, the rules a mind builds to survive them, and what changes when you finally understand how you're wired.