B19 wrote:
we have a member here called Tough Diamond. It's one of my favourite user names, because under the surface of autism many people here are diamond selves, and to survive as a dehumanised minority group in a world so ignorant of the feelings, reality, worth and needs of AS people, takes an inner toughness that so few give themselves and/or others here credit for.
You got the gist of it there
My first username on the Web was actually RoughDiamond, which according to the dictionary link below means "a person who has talent or other good qualities but who is not polite, educated,
socially skilled, etc."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/diction ... %20diamondI didn't know about autism in those days. I just liked the idea that the "best" people may have a deceptively crusty exterior and that it can be a bad mistake to judge a person without looking more carefully than most folks seem to do, so I guess it was a protest against having been misjudged a lot. I had to change it to ToughDiamond because the original form was often already taken for email accounts etc., so the toughness was more of an accident, though I do think it's true that ASDers tend to be resilient, because we have to be.
As for the "5 ways" link, I was undiagnosed too, so I didn't have to suffer 2, 4, or 5. If I was ever subjected to 1 then I didn't notice. My mother would call me all kinds of things to my face, but was generally less vitreolic about me when somebody else was listening. As for 3, I had that, but in those days the child's perspective wasn't a thing most adults in my life knew or cared about. And to be fair, my expressed views were frequently arrogant and plain wrong, so it's probably not surprising that I got typecast as having an irritatingly skewed perspective on things. Though I don't think autism was behind that, I just took after my mother.