I am glad that you were able to get through all that prejudice to get your tube. I am frustrated that all that effort was necessary in the first place.

I can relate to some of what you say about the nonverbal communication as well, but I feel like I could get stuck in endless anecdotes. Mostly I can say that “In My Language” was probably the catalyst for me in understanding that I am autistic, and to some extent it’s because the video itself made sense to me. I appreciate what you say because it is so important and so often neglected or even actively excluded by others.

It’s frustrating to so frequently see other autistic people assign value or agency to other autistic people on the basis of how they communicate, or whether they communicate in “accepted” ways.

Also, as far as nonverbal communication goes, I am terrible at the various tests that test this, but I find I am fairly good at picking up emotions, guessing when someone is hiding something or lying to me, and sometimes determining their actual motives. In some situations in the past I have guessed information about social interactions that the people involved swore vigorously that I could not have known without someone explicitly telling me. I’ve sort of been going over this with my therapist, and I’ve tried to find some way to explain it because it is not the way NTs do things, but there are many situations where it doesn’t help me much, either.

There is definitely a commonality of root/cause, yes. I was more referring to the result of what shows on the surface and tends to get studied.

We tend to be different frequently in a lot of the same things, which highlights a similar or same underlying cause, but the *ways* in which we are different vary a lot. As I said, most of the criteria seems to keep coming back to, instead of ‘displays x’ like many conditions, ‘displays any variation of x that NTs don’t’.

Clearly there are commonalities somewhere along the line, or it wouldn’t all be considered the same condition. My point was just that it adds to the difficulty of studying autism because most people seem to think of it as a condition in the way many others are, with one defined set of symptoms and few variations. A lot of people seem to miss the fact that it’s more like a mix-and-match grab-bag of possibilities – at least on the outside, where they’re trying to observe it.