About a two or three years ago I was starting to become rather convinced that I was on the high functioning end of autism. I have highly specialized interest. I find social situations and social rituals confusing. I very occasionally have some sensitivity to auditory and visual stimuli. I have trouble making friends and connecting to people. I struggle with small talk. I am rather attached to my habits and routines and I do feel stressed and drained when they are disrupted too much for too long.
I took a few online quizzes and I scored right on the border in just about everyone one. At the time I was feeling particularly socially withdrawn. I lacked confidence and I had no meaningful social interactions with anyone outside of my wife and my most immediate family - and even with them I felt distant and uncomfortable.
With that said, there were many symptoms I couldn't identify with. I don't have trouble with eye contact. I don't have trouble with abstract thinking. I can visualize people's faces and read fiction novels just fine - those things have never been a problem for me. I also can't really identify with childhood symptoms of autism hardly at all. I don't remember being totally disinterested in other kids, being fidgety , breaking down in stress fits and tantrums, or being obsessed with tiny details or having highly specialized and eccentric interests. As far as I can remember, I was a fairly normal kid between 0 and 12. I have always been a bit shy and reserved, but not obviously autistic. My problems really started at puberty.
After seeing this thread and reading the comments, I took a couple of online quizzes again . This time I scored much closer to the normal range. A lot of those questions are subjective.
"Do you have trouble with small talk or social situations?"
Well yeah, but do I have more trouble with it than anybody else?
"It is difficult for me to understand how people are feeling when they talk?"
Sometimes I think I have no clue, and sometimes I think people are just guarded and only projecting the emotions they want you to see.
More recently, I have been doing a lot better. I work as a software developer. I really excel in my line of work right now, which has helped a lot with my confidence. My work and home situation has been stable for several years, which also helps a lot. I have started to develop a closer relationship with some of my coworkers, and as a result I have begun to learn that they are a lot more like me than I initially thought.
I think some people, maybe half, are perfectly comfortable around other people. They just flow. Conversation and friendships take very little effort. I wish I was one of those people... it sounds nice.
For me, just about every conversation I have feels like I am working from an script or elaborate flow chart. I have strategies for different contexts with different kinds of people. As my social skills have improved, I feel like I have really just gotten better at interpreting the background context and expectations, and I am only really learning to apply my social strategies better. It doesn't feel very intuitive at all. It is actually extremely mentally taxing and I don't particularly like to do it. Strangely enough though, because I am a human and crave social contact, I need to feel at least some what connected to other people or I get anxious and depressed. As I have developed a report with the people I work with, it has gotten a lot easier. It doesn't always feel like an elaborate math puzzle in my head that I have to compute in the background while also attempting not to seem like an alien.
The good news is that I think at least half the population is like that to some degree. I have become more confident and settled in my myself, which has made it a bit easier to read other people - just because I am not quite as focused on myself all the time. A lot of people struggle with small talk, eye contact, social cues, discerning the difference between politeness and genuine interest and engagement, ect. There is a myriad of unwritten rules and guild lines that we are all expect to follow, without anybody ever explaining or articulating any of it. They are just weird, mostly arbitrary rules, with very little justification. Of course it is confusing. I don't know why it is like that - I think if introverts ruled the world it would be different. But it is, we all have to figure it out, and it is ok to not be particularly good at it.
So am I autistic? I think according to any meaningful diagnoses I am not. But I do sympathize and empathize a lot with people who clearly are. I think at times when I was more depressed and socially withdrawn that I could have fit a diagnoses. Autism spectrum, especially on the high functioning end, is as much more description of a type of person or individual as it is a diagnoses. It really only needs to be addressed when they symptoms pose a real problem. I think many people who are autistic live their whole life without ever needing an intervention, and I think many people, like myself, who probably aren't autistic, might need help under the right circumstances.