I used to think I had no social issues.
Then I realized it was a combination of factors:
1. Other aspects of being autistic were far more obvious to me -- processing sensory information, understanding language, connecting to my body, communicating things that matched my thoughts. Compared to those, social issues seemed tiny.
2. Other aspects of autism were more [I]central[/]. Sounds almost the same. But what I mean is that the way I think and process information is the stuff at the center that gets me called autistic. Social issues were not a direct result of that, but rather a result of interacting with people whose brains processed everything way differently. So they happened more when my edges brushed up against someone else's edges, rather than being the core of who I was.
3. I was completely socially oblivious in certain areas. When you're that oblivious you don't notice how bad you are at something. Plus I didn't even know how I looked to other people, or how some of my actions affected people.
4. I was also oblivious enough to mistake bullies for friends. (To the point if I met online an autistic person who understood me in some respect I would become frantic with fear along the lines of, "This isn't really a person who understands me, it's my "friends" tricking me again!" Which says a lot about my awareness in other social areas, including the ones necessary for self-evaluation.
5. Once I did get better friends, they were people who understood me. Therefore I had less social issues even if I was looking carefully.
Now I know I don't have the world's greatest social skills, but it still seems like such a tiny part of being autistic for me compared to the other stuff. The reason it's considered the most important part of autism is because of the priorities most people have, not necessarily because of autistic people's priorities.
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"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams