What do we all have in common?

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And even those traits you no longer present are still there "underneath it all" -- or at least the triggering cause of those traits is still a part of who you are if I'm making sense. As you say, you've just learned skills of accommodation that allow you to "read" as NT. But it doesn't make you NT (as you obviously know.)

It's really no different than, for example, Jodi Foster's performance in the movie "Nell." In that movie, Ms. Foster "read" as a particular sort of person (raised in a very isolated environment and learned to speak from a mother with stroke-induced speech impairment) but just because the movie "Nell" was very convincing doesn't mean Jodi Foster was no longer a modern, assimilated, urban woman -- underneath the "Nell-ness" was still Jodi Foster just as underneath an Aspie's ability to "pass as NT" is still an autistic person.

This is part of the difficulty with adult diagnoses, as well. Over the decades, we continue to develop (albeit on our own, non-NT timetable) and we continue to devise personal accommodations and work-arounds until we often do not look as autistic as we did when we were children. But it doesn't mean that the non-mainstream neurology is no longer present "underneath it all."

It's kind of ironic: I sometimes hear people describe those with autism as being "trapped inside the autism" and family members and professionals are trying to "release them" but they dont' seem to realize that what they are doing is actually wrapping new layers of behavior and accommodation around the genuine autistic. They see the new creation and say they have been liberated (and, in fairness, perhaps in many ways the individual has been liberated from many things) but what they're actually looking at is an autistic person inside an NT-approximating shell.

Sparrow