People like me with ASD are rare

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It's a bit like life is a gene war, going on eternally, the subtext is dominion, and anyone whose playing a different game or, perhaps more frightening still, living honestly but showing signals that they see all of this in a self-aware manner, they don't handle it well. It's like spooking the horses in a barn.


It really makes me wonder - are NT's actually intimidated by us and are most of our problems stemming from that?

I know I'm saying some bold things in this post, give it time to process, but we have different strengths and weakness and - TBH - they tend not to freak out about people who are clueless, living in their own bubbles, etc., they freak out instead about people who aren't doing that or who aren't playing the bully game. All of that really gives me pause for thought.

The thing that's getting to me, TBH, the more I look at autistic traits and look at my own life and the degree to which I've done the same, the basket of what's 'ASD' seems to melt under inspection.

Apparently I really stick out as different even though I spent years under the following assumption - that if there were major misunderstandings that people were having about who I was, my intentions, my character, etc. that what I needed was to be able to translate my actual language into NT - which meant simply phrasing it, timing it, and putting it into a cadence that matched NT style of expression.

What that's done is put me in a place where the times that I spoke at autism events the parents often told the guy and his wife who headed it that a lot of us on the panel hid it well and me especially, they could hardly see it at all.

Put me in the work place under stress, pissing contests, and zero-sum games and it's a completely different story - ie. everyone knows the knives belong in my back. I also notice that the people who are extra-fake and zero-sum see me as a threat very quickly and yet anyone else I don't trigger.

So, the more I look at it, I really think what they despise is integrity, and one of the things that often goes with how we sort out reality is being something like logical Platonists. I remember in one of Manly P Hall's lectures when he tried to define honesty vs. integrity he used the example that a person whose honest, when needing to give change back for a dollar, gave the right change back because it was the 'right thing to do' whereas the person who had integrity gave the right change back because the math. I'm almost forced to conclude that this sort of integrity, ie. Platonic or mathematical integrity, when people see it, it both puts a target on you and also seems to describe quite well what's seen as so bizarre about the autistic mindset (it actually makes me wonder if MP Hall might have been partially on the spectrum to even say a thing like that).

This is where I can't escape the notion that even erasing your outside ASD markers still isn't enough not to be weird. Even having good social skills, being empathetic in exchanges, etc. isn't enough unless you maybe consider that 'good social skills' amounts to having almost all of your social traits copied from the person next to you and that building your social skills from first principles is creepy. If you're not lying, backstabbing, gossiping, socially gaming, etc., you're still sticking out like a sore thumb.

My best understanding of that then - at least the kinds of NT's I'm thinking of, they live very close to their genes and genetic imperatives, and have little or no trust (or even fear) of anyone who doesn't. The rumors then start going around about what kinds of closet aberrances you might have - ie. the whole you might be a serial killer, a cannibal, a baby-rapist, whatever bizarre thing they can imagine. The best bucket I've found for this sort of thing is Rene Girard's memetic desire, unease, and people's tendencies to find scapegoats when they're feeling uneasy about things that they can't put their finger on.

It's a bit like life is a gene war, going on eternally, the subtext is dominion, and anyone whose playing a different game or, perhaps more frightening still, living honestly but showing signals that they see all of this in a self-aware manner, they don't handle it well. It's like spooking the horses in a barn.


It really makes me wonder - are NT's actually intimidated by us and are most of our problems stemming from that?

I know I'm saying some bold things in this post, give it time to process, but we have different strengths and weakness and - TBH - they tend not to freak out about people who are clueless, living in their own bubbles, etc., they freak out instead about people who aren't doing that or who aren't playing the bully game. All of that really gives me pause for thought.

My specific characteristics of ASD are difficult to pinpoint. The dilemma of not quite being able enough, yet not quite disabled enough. To specifically pinpoint ASD can too often become like seemingly futile exercises in semantics.

This is posing challenges in defining what specfic support resources with our state's agency are appropriate. Our state's agency (Regional Center System) is geared to serving clients with developmental disabilities more limiting than (HFA) High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder.

A few years ago, our state's agency that serves clients with developmental disabilities changed their elegibilty requirements to include clientele with least restrictions to independence...such as HFA.

One of the challenges are that the minimum hours per month (five hours per month to be specific) are too much time for 'independent living support services' for clientele with High-Functioning Autism. A couple of hours per month can suffice. Why haven't regulations e.g. best practices been drafted to better reflect the newer clientele over the past few years - such as regulations regarding minimum hours per month of services??

A change in regulations to best free-up time for service personnel to assist clientele who need much more than...five hours service time per month!

That makes sense.