What is it like if your first words came at age 5?

Autistic people typically have a very difficult time making their way in our society. Communication is one major difficulty, but in a way, it's just a symptom of greater difficulties with social interaction in general, most of the time. The things I have read suggest that the neural connections in the brains of autistic people are different from those of others, that perhaps these people are more easily frightened, less able to make generalizations and discover the underlying rules, both in language and in social discourse generally, than others. There's a wonderful book, "Animals in Transition" by an autistic woman, Temple Grandin, that explains this and a lot more.