Very. Yet, I am not of the most common subtype. I share plenty of traits with them with the most common subtypes. I make deep connections with people quickly and am much less censored in my topics of conversation. I memorize social rules much more than I read social cues. I tend to come across a very strong, bold, and histrionic. Which is combined with my autistic logic. To use an example from my earlier life, I led as clean a life as possible but while my peers would get shit-faced, get laid, and do cocaine, when I mentioned masturbation that would elicit a moral panic.
“Social rule to remember. All the popular kids are doing hard drugs so that’s socially okay. They also all masturbate but pretend not to and if you mention it they panic. In the normative, if I am to emulate the most socially successful of my peers as Special Ed says to, I should do cocaine and pretend to never masturbate.”
I am blunt, extroverted, gregarious, sarcastic, histrionic, playful, asexual, salty, and an old-timey romantic with the most gilded tastes contrasting with my radical socialism. This is not the same as most autism which is introverted, more minimalistic, and more solipsistic. Neurotypicals get afraid and offended by me, especially if they have hypersensitive bourgeious suburban metaphorical hemophelia. From a world of reticence and sanitation, I can be shocking and horrifying and they percieve me as a disturbed and unhinged mentla case. That’s a slight hyperbole but the point still stands. Ironically, when I am in the ghetto and around poor people, I am a clean, sophisticated, mature person devoid of behavior problems.
Here we get to Foucault and the social construction of psychological conditions. I disagree with Foucault. I am autistic. That’s not the question. I am a problem in bourgeois suburbia whereas I am a well-behaved gentleman in the ghetto. In bourgeois suburbia, their personal Overton Window is so far in the direction of comfort that the slightest discomfort is horrific to them. Any social deviance is policed heavily because the suburban bourgeois cannot handle any discomfort. When examinzed under a microscope, my behaviour is seen as bad. When zoomed out, I look basically normal. What was socially constructed was not the diagnosis but the idea it was a disease to cure and a problem to fix. There were problems to fix, sure, but those exist in everyone. On the whole, my autism was and is fine.
In the world of Biggie Smalls, I look like Taylor Swift; in the world of Taylor Swift, I look like a crazy person. I am the same, it is the tolerance of my peers and the authorities which changes. How autistic someone is usually is answered based on severity of the condition. The severeity of my autism changes based, largely, on the socioeconomic class of the people around me. I am more autistic around rich, white, people and less around poor minorities.
The Autistic Resistance 