I have Aspergers, I have hilariously low neuroticism on every test I have ever taken, every person I have ever dated besides fellow aspies finds it incredibly strange, I don't worry about things, I don't have anxiety about things, I don't care about social judgement at all, I don't care about correcting people's perception of me, I don't believe there is even a 'real me' to speak of, I am too Buddhist to have such silly notions. I am lucky I was born with Aspergers because it bestowed within me a certain kind of fetterless way of being in my own mind, pretty much everyone with Aspergers has this, this is how Aspergers was identified and understood until the past say 20 years, now we have the Autism Spectrum, and most "Autistic People" who call themselves that are anxious about judgement, worry about how people perceive them, and are constantly emotionally preoccupied...
I don't have any of this, and if I try to talk about my experiences with autism (aspergers) these people just talk over me and say I'm crazy and that isn't what autism really is, I understand what they're saying, but I could equally say the same thing, and often times in annoyance and bad faith trollishness, I do, knowing that even though it will only inflame them, perhaps they will see the hypocrisy to insist on invalidating my autism while lashing out bombastically at me invalidating theirs
Yet Aspergers alone and by itself is quite unique, I'm not sure if these Autists even would be diagnosed with 'Aspergers' but Neurological testing to discover neurotypes and genotypes has revealed that the 'Aspergers Cluster' is real, Asperger's is real, even if it has been, in the non-scientific field of psychology, merged with 'Autism Spectrum Disorder', it still is a unique neurotype that can be identified via imaging in the brain, genetic sequencing & analysis, & finally behaviorally. So, that is to say, Asperger's is real, and saying "Autism is a spectrum" actively makes people with Asperger's go unheard
20 years ago if you thought about aspergers you imagined someone with aspergers, now if you imagine someone with aspergers you imagine someone with autism and you're not sure how aspergers is even different, you look at the mass of autistic people, you see the spectrum, and thus you see the novel and unique traits of 'Aspergers' as personality defects instead of the literal disordered neurotype that they have
I have never been a very emotional person, I have never much cared about what people think about me (except to pragmatic ends), I do not care about judgement (again, except to pragmatic ends), I don't believe there's a real me, I don't feel 'humiliation', I don't care about 'properly expressing myself' to random people, but so many autists do, because they DO NOT HAVE ASPERGERS! They just have Autism or they have Aspergers+OCD AuOCD. Which is like, it is totally fine, but people like me are done a horrible disservice by this epistemically sorry state of things
In short, the current umbrella term "autism" collapses many distinct phenotypes, people like myself with low-neuroticism, socially indifferent, classically 'Aspergers' like autism are drowned out by this new wave of autistic people whose entire presentation is shaped by social anxiety, OCD, trauma, and masking. These profiles are 100% valid and real, but they should not (yet they have been) overwrite the Asperger's phenotype where social judgement simply does not matter much internally
Autism as a spectrum is clinically convenient but phenomenologically crude & unhelpful
If you related to this at all, I wrote this for you so you can identify the disconnect you may be feeling with 'Autism' and 'Autistic people', I feel we've gotten to a point where the term is so meaningless it means basically nothing and is a cultural tribal signifier more than anything
One person’s "autism" means: "I am constantly trying to manage how I am perceived, and it causes me agony"
Another "autism" means: "I have a structural inability or unwillingness to grant that whole game much metaphysical importance"
Those are almost completely inverted relationships to social reality, both are 'Autistic', do you see the problem?
One subset of autistic people have taken their own comorbid, historically situated, internet-shaped, therapy-language-inflected experience and silently made it the default moral definition of autism... "Autism is a spectrum" should mean that distinct phenotypes are preserved and described more carefully, not that the most socially vocal phenotype gets to dissolve all the others into itself
Aspergers is not merely autism with high verbal or spatial ability, rather it is a distinctive relation to -SOCIAL REALITY-: low concern for social judgment, weak attachment to ordinary self-presentation, and a kind of natural estrangement from the emotional economy of the herd, it is being strange without being haunted by strangeness, it is being socially illegible without making legibility into a religion, it is not knowing or not caring how to perform the expected emotional choreography, it is bluntness, literalness, intensity, solitude, fixation, eccentricity, and an immunity to shame
It is the child who talks like a little professor, the teenager who misses the point of status games and has no interest in playing them, the adult who can be misread without caring or feeling existentially annihilated by it.
It is not a wounded hidden self begging to be recognized, it is the absence of that whole drama from the root: no sacred inner "real me" to unveil, no endless panic over being perceived incorrectly, no compulsive need to translate oneself into normal terms. It is having private worlds far more compelling than social belonging, principles more real than popularity or friends, interests far more deep than small talk, a mind that would rather be true than agreeable.
It is not social anxiety, it is not OCD, it is not trauma, it can coexist but when it does the result is something very different, but Aspergers itself, the classical sense being spoken of here, is the odd, angular, self-contained, low neuroticism form of autism, a person standing outside the human status trance, is fundamentally misunderstood when autism is reduced to masking, anxiety, and the longing to be socially seen or acknowledged