When my mother was dying 5 years ago, my NT sister was still trying to get her to do regular mother stuff. I'd had some theories from studying dysfunctional families, etc, but did more reading, and finally discovered AS, which we both had/have. Too late for her, but her life plan had been to deny her oddities anyway. Her last words to me were "Don't call me, I'll call you." She was probably worried that I was about to start talking about God.
Finally having an understanding of my basic differences made me bolder about being myself, expecting to be understood. Instead, I was soon facing a disaster, with my landlady tormenting me with my phobia and everyone I asked for help just taking advantage of me. I had to move to where houses are cheap just so I could sleep enough to begin to recover. Not one of my old friends has taken the trouble to understand why I left. I've told them to stop trying to carry on a relationship until they stop ignoring my huge changes.
I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday, after advising another guy to stop trying to talk logic to a perpetual-motion cult group. I've hit snags several times when I've been feeling particularly crazy, expecting people to understand me because the logic of my situation was obvious. I realized that life evolved so that everything works fine with no logical consciousness at all. It is just an overlay on a complex, language-using brain, and even though I use logic to navigate through life, for many people it is just a rhetorical style, with no underlying structure.
I have operated on instinct some times, but logic is what brought me some acclaim for designing a spectacular prototype velomobile. I had expected to find a business partner from the publicity, but got decades of run-around instead. I've always resisted using a lot of creative energy on personal relationships, but maybe I can learn to compartmentalize my logical work, to recover the attention I used to give it, and run the social stuff mostly on the cortex. Since studying sociobiology, I've observed a lot of baboon-like behaviour dressed up with rationalizations and a smokescreen of gossip. Maybe as long as I just try to act like a pleasant monkey, I can stop worrying about analyzing the details, and shrug off the surprises easier.