Feeling inferior

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I have been thinking a lot about something that came up in counselling a few weeks ago; that I am ashamed of who I am and feel inferior. There are probably 3 main contributing issues.

1. Having Autism (I'm not saying being autistic makes a person inferior, I just feel inferior to others and worry that I can't do things because of my autism. I also think that others think I am inferior because of my autism or believe I can't do things, and I have had some experiences which show this to be a little bit true).

2. Being fat. I am definitely ashamed of being fat, as are some people in my family (well they're ashamed that I'm fat). And fat shaming is big at the moment. However, it does kind of seem that something within myself is intent on sabotaging my efforts to lose weight. Either that or I'm just not trying hard enough.

3. Relying on alter-egos. Having done this in the past (and still to some extent, in some circumstances) I feel this makes me a bad person and a liar.

Obviously, not many people will struggle with exactly the same issues that I do. But does anyone feel inferior because of their autism, or feel that they are perceived as inferior by neurotypical people? Or even find that people expect less of them?

What do you mean by "alter-egos"?

I hope you don't think there's something wrong with, for example, using a pseudonym on a message board. That's just common-sense protection of your privacy.

Oh no, that's sensible, I don't have a problem with that. I mean ìnteracting online and sometimes in person as though I am someone else, like an imaginary character.

Does enacting these imaginary characters help you develop social skills? If so, it may serve a useful purpose.

I doubt it. I think I originally started as an outlet for difficult emotions that I couldn't express conventionally (due mostly to feeling like an outsider as I had undiagnosed Aspergers and became very anxious and depressed); this was as a young teenager.
Later at university I withdrew from 'real life' and interacted only through an alter ego on the internet.
Later still, though I had at this point been diagnosed with AS, one alter ego had become a comfort blanket and I still use it to talk to one person online.
At one point I had a real life boyfriend, and stopped engaging online as an alter ego. However, when I couldn't cope with a situation in my relationship I slipped very easily into a new alter ego.
It's difficult to go into much more detail and I'm not sure how much sense this makes... I feel a lot of shame around it because of how I have lied to people through these alter egos.

I don't feel inferior to NTs but, I can see them thinking that I am.

1)Social skills. My social skills aren't as great as NTs so I might say something inappropriate or something that sounds weird.

2)Processing Information. It takes me a while to process information especially in social situations so some might think I'm "stupid" cause it takes me a bit to answer them.

3)Low self-confidence. I have trouble being confident in myself so that could also cause me to start feeling inferior even though normally I don't.

4)Anxiety. Because I fear the unknown I might not do a task someone ask of me or not go to places. Some might then think that I'm not capable of those things and think they can do these things and I cannot.

My feelings of inferiority and superiority to NTs are complicated. I still don't quite know what a NT is, I couldn't easily say whether any particular person was or wasn't NT. Neurotypical is a relatively new concept to me. The nearest concept I have to NT that I feel I understand is "mainstream." That's probably based on my life experiences, for most of which I wasn't diagnosed. As a teenager I aligned myself with groups of other teenagers who were proud of being rather different from the conventional norms, and I found I fitted in quite well with them. I continued like that well into my 20s, and that gave me a fairly durable sense of pride which I still feel. So when I was surrounded by conventional types, or NTs or whatever they are, whenever it became clear that I felt differently to them or was in conflict with them, I tended to feel that they were unenlightened, wrong, or (when I was in a good mood) just different. I often questioned aspects of my behaviour but I never accepted the idea that I might be inferior as a person or as a neurotype, and I saw that I had special talents such as my obvious ability to think more diligently than most people and to fathom complicated technicalities (given enough time), and get a better result, which reinforced the idea that if anybody was inferior it was them. I was also quite strongly on the left in my political persuasions, and tended to comfort myself with the idea that I was one of the few who had some inkling of the objective socio-political truth.

That said, the diagnosis shook that up to some extent, as I saw that I had a condition which often has a stigma attached to it - I no longer saw it so much as a matter of personality or attitude but brain wiring, something I couldn't help, and I started to take on board the idea that there may be things most people could do that I couldn't, or at least I couldn't do them so quickly and intuitively. I've lost some of my protective arrogance over the years. And although I never intellectually succumbed to the idea that I might be inferior, there was always some feeling of self-doubt, so while the question "am I good enough?" makes no sense to me intellectually (who the hell is my judge supposed to be anyway?), on an emotional level the question does somehow resonate. But the feeling of being inferior to NTs doesn't really much enter into it on any level, I see it more as a somewhat brittle sense of self-confidence that causes me to sometimes feel doubt about my abilities, and it can affect me just as much when I'm trying to solve a technical problem that doesn't involve people as it does when I'm pondering about my relationships with people.