My parents, my extended family, and many other people, have often painted me as selfish, lazy, self-centered, jerk… and all those stereotypes.
I believed all this crap for a long time.
But no more.
Now, I never apologize when NTs see me as “a jerk”. And I don’t bother as explaining “sorry that’s because I’m autistic”, because (1) I don’t have to be sorry, that’s their problem not mine, if they expect me to act like NT people and are unhappy then, (2) I don’t owe them any explanation.

Also, I don’t believe much in “passing as NT”. I met lots of autistic (and neurodivergent) people with so-called “passing”.
Not fitting the autistic stereotypes (or any other neurodivergent stereotype) DOES NOT mean that you “pass as a normal person”.

People (meaning NTs) will STILL SEE AND KNOW that you’re not like them. Or rather, they’ll see it… when it suits them to see. And they will bury their heads in the sand when convenient.

I know I won’t always get dealing with people right, especially in areas of disability/neuroatypicality/what have you, but your post gave me more information to work with to try to get it right, or closer to right. Thank you for that.

“(1) The client-applicant is ineligible for services until proven eligible. (2) The Client-applicant’s Vocational Goals are outlandish, greedy, arrogant, must be trimmed down to appropriately humble scale. (3) The client-applicant’s motive in seeking services is, until proven otherwise, to rip off the system. (4) The function of the agency is to facilitate (favorite word) adaptation (second favorite) of client to job (client to world), not the reverse. (5) The client is a fraud. (6) The client is helpless.”

Now, the problem is that most people dont make a difference betwen one and the other, they expect that their co-workers and people they meet in school should be their friends, or at least that those are the groups of people from where you should pick your friends.

Excuse for my bad english, I´m a spanish-speaker.

Which is why I feel so strongly about people who divide autistic people into categories as if the lines can’t be crossed or combined in zillions of different combinations. I’ve always been a mixture of elements of the two major sets of stereotypes, as well as many things that adhere to no stereotypes at all. Which combination, or what my appearance is like, has varied a lot, as has the environments I’ve been in and expectations I’ve been placed under.

And of course, as Larry has pointed out, there has become an entire media-influenced stereotype of my life that is often neither true to my life nor to what I myself would say of it. But despite it not being my creation, I’m expected to answer for it, especially if I don’t give my entire life story out every time I write something or talk to someone.

(All of which is why I wrote this.)

Not that this is all that unusual for autistic people (more like slightly, if at all), but then most people don’t know what is more or less usual for autistic people, they just have a fairy-story written in their heads telling them what an autistic person is and what our lives go like over time, even if the fairy-story doesn’t conform to the true diversity of autistic people in any way.

But… yeah. I can’t dismiss either “obvious” or “non-obvious” (in quotes because so much of what is obvious depends on a person’s knowledge and context or tiny little details, at least as much as the appearance of the autistic person, something I’ve noted from observation of people’s reactions to me in different places) autistic people because I’ve been in both positions and I find that anyone who wants to draw a hard and fast line also wants (whether they know it or not) to, as a consequence, split me in half or chop my life up into little pieces and throw the pieces to two different sides of a line they draw in the sand.

And since I don’t enjoy that process one bit… yeah. Can’t escape it though, it seems like. And while being on one side or the other (and the stuff that entails) is bad enough when it comes to people’s expectations, being on both or going from one to the other (in other people’s eyes) seems to have a shade of odd unpleasantness all its own.

As far as I can tell, I’m almost-always-passing Aspie. Never been diagnosed (except with ADD), but was a textbook case in childhood and “grew out of” some of it (learned secondary social skills and/or methods of covering.) I have this weird clumsiness that goes away when I’m doing something focusedly hyperkinetic or something that involves all four limbs.

THANK YOU for making it clear that not all autistic/asperger’s-spectrum people look or move like you do, or have trouble with the same things. I know a lot of folks look on your level of autism as the “face” of the whole thing and think that, well, Asperger’s/ADD/HFA/talkative types don’t stim or scramble up language noticeably so they must be faking it, and so it’s really important to see you speaking up about the range of diversity that gets lumped into this one set of things.