Raised to be an "Aspie".

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Of course, when I first learned about Asperger's Syndrome, I was ecstatic that there seemed to be this huge underlying cause behind 25 years of problems in life. Oh, it opened up a whole world of possibilities and reconsiderations for me. Maybe I wasn't crazy, stupid, lazy, and so on.
Maybe it wasn't my fault....

Now I'm starting to see that my problems were the result of my upbringing, and that I had been using Asperger's Syndrome as an excuse to keep me from feeling personally responsible for the state of affairs in my life. If anything, thinking I have AS was an obstacle to my own motivation to make improvements, because I felt helpless to do anything about my problems. Instead, I started wearing headphones and sunglasses all the time, avoiding any social situation if I could help it, and gave painful attention to my own sensory experiences. Rather than trying to solve my problems, I wrapped myself in "coping mechanisms", and expected accomodations from the world because I was "different." That was wrong. My attempts at trying to deal with Asperger's Syndrome actually sent me further into a reclusive inner cave, and put an imaginary barrier between me and the rest of the world.

I believe that the core of AS is an neurological difference and that many of the dysfunctions of Asperger's are not core, not things we are stuck with. And those we are, they are along the lines of different talents. Some things we aren't good at. Others we are.

That's exactly what I'm trying to communicate (forgive me, I'm quite awkward with words, especially in English). There's in fact no such thing as "unchangeable neurological dysfunction". While doing my first degree in Behavioural Science, I took quite a few papers in neurology, neurophysiology, psychophysiology and such - and I was surprised how much things in our brains can actually be controlled and changed by consciousness. For example, I read clinical data on a person, who managed to reconstruct his intellectual capabilities after having almost half of his cortex destroyed, some people managing to "beat" schizophrenia and maniacal-depressive psychosis, evidence of some Buddhist monks who were able to change structure and biochemistry of their brains through rigorous training and meditation... So why can't one get AS the similar way?

AS is but a group of symptoms, united by some common cause (which by itself is unknown). If there is some "thing" in our brains, that make us "different" from other people, what's the difference how exactly did any particular aspie get it? And there are obviously different ways. For me, for example, it's most probably something genetic - my dad is a classic aspie, though never diagnosed, and so was his father. It runs on the male line of my family. On the other hand, my mom and my sister and all my other female relatives are quite NT. There're many aspies around, for whom it's not the case. There are people who become AS because of congenital factors, as in those recent papers that show correlation between taking flu shots while pregnant and autism in children. There are at least some cases when even adult people develop aspie traits after suffering some heavy injury or psychological trauma. If you "mimicked" AS for so long, that it became "hard-wired" in your brain - I fail to see why it is somehow "not legitimate".