(“unusual” means an average of 2-3 per week, for years as it turns out, fortunately I hadn’t grown into my neuromuscular system or someone else might have gotten hurt)

The shrink took a month to come up with the conclusion that I was “too intelligent” and “had no filters”. If being an Aspie were a diagnosis then, in his awareness, then I would have gotten saddled with a label and self image that would have done untold damage to me.

I haven’t gone for a diagnosis, but rather a lot of people think that I am “on the spectrum”, while many other people think that I am “just Darryl”, and roll their eyes.

The latter group, even if not my fans are generally preferable to the former (excepting people who are actually somewhere in what I call “Spectrum Country” but haven’t let the diagnosis become their entire identity).

This neuroendocrinal system that I seem to ride around in/on/around doesn’t seem to me to be all that messed up.

My hearing and touch have their inner “gain” controls turned up a bit higher than most people’s seem to be, but as long as that doesn’t become blindingly painful there is a level just short of being feedback that lets me “see” or model sound and fluid dynamics in a way that I used to think everyone could.

The fights eventually stopped having me (because I started to win, and very rationally figured out that the only way to not have people coming back for “rematches” was something that made taking some abuse as a pacifist who previously was a jerk, acceptable).

When I found out that there was actually an entire channel of non-verbal cues that most people were basing their realities on, it set the stage for me to eventually realize that many of the fights happened because I couldn’t tell when others were angry, or threatening, etc, and that I couldn’t (and still can’t) tell playfighting from a mortal attack.

It makes no sense to me to have to suppress reflexes that are there to let me survive bad luck or bad people,

As near as I can tell there is an annoyingly one sided view from the land of neurotypicals (I prefer to call them “Main Sequencers” because neurotypical or N.T. often seems like a pejorative) over into Spectrum Country.

We have “problems with empathy”?

That is a view on a trait which is neutral, it could equally be:

“We are immune or have a great resistance to lateral emotional contagion”

If you see an Autistic or Aspergian smashing stuff in a riot, it is because we choose to do so, either because we want to or are trying to “fit in”. That sort of thing is triggered laterally, I think mostly as an evolved response to big jungle cats: “Don’t try to talk to it, it is trying to eat your nephew, kill it dead!”, or something like that.

We see a lot of stuff that others don’t, and give a perspective that occasionally the more median folks value.

The fact that we have that vantage because we typically are somewhere back from the figurative social “fire” is a mixed blessing. It is good to not have to deal with the insanity that most people exhibit as couples, while now that I have learned to observe human behavior and accept it as it is, the thought of a few women over the years who were giving off what other people told me were “clear signals” on a strange level of theatrical socialization that I can’t see…

Well, it sometimes makes my chest hurt, being clueless doesn’t make me any less human. If anything the fact that without a diagnosis I decided in my teens to try to better understand other people because I was scared of being a sociopath, and made a full time habit of working on what I called “cognitive empathy” * meant that I innocently set myself up with one hell of a learning curve that most people don’t even think about.

It is very possible to not “belong in” the crowd, but to choose to “belong to” them, I call it Universal Identification because it can be done fully only with everyone or not at all, and it is both fun and horrifying at the same time.

Normal people are insane, flat out.

And the scariest part is that I might not actually be a Spectrum type, I might simply have a slightly higher than average measurable IQ, and be naturally a bit naive.

And synaesthetic.

And sometimes prone to obsessing on something for months or years.

I guess where I’m going with this is where I began:

Thank creation I didn’t get diagnosed as “Spectrum” as a child.

I know some folks have a harder time of it, others don’t think about it, and the kids that I think of as “Deep Spectrum” I sorta feel I have an idea what it’s like to be where they are, from the few times that I’ve overloaded and gone catatonic.

Because I am pretty content, even though my life isn’t up to the standards that some people care about (and that I don’t). My thoughts are my own, so are the bulk of my emotions. I generally try to be nice to people, and have learned a lot about how not to try being nice when doing so isn’t actually very nice.

I’ve been told that I’ve done a few things that have made things better for some situations.

I’m also pretty sure that I have a grasp on “WHY?” for the question of the purpose of all of the sub-variants of people, and how we are all supposed to be able to fit in if people would just relax a bit.

That said, psychopathologists can go %&*&^ a goat and lick the *(% off of *(&^8ing (*&*(&s.

My niece from one half sister is diagnosed Aspie, my nephew from another apparently tests off the top of the charts for his province and age, but took a long time to figure out shoelaces, and whatever it is about us runs true and comes from my dad’s side.

His mom received electroshock therapy when they were trying to “cure” her of the things that I like most about myself,

Seriously, &^^%them up the &*^&* and throw them out of a moving van in winter.

* note (Data from Star Trek The Next Generation and Mork from Ork are the twinned patron saints of Aspies)