Finding out that one’s quirkiness may be due to a disorder instead of a unique personality is a bit disorienting. Yet all Aspies are different as are all normies, if there is such a thing. So I don’t know how the following fits with us or me only or with them too.
Self perception: First I’ll say that before western culture was so deconstructed, one could assume a cultural identity that everyone could relate to – I’ve even heard black people say they related to it, and they are now called sell-outs. I am not saying that it was necessarily healthy or real, but that the perception of everyone buying into it created a baseline, an attainable bar to measure onesself by. This was fad culture, but also longstanding romantic, chivalric culture where people knew their place and how many points they got. Therefore one could be comfortable with a certain level of success, namely getting married, having children and earning a living.
With everything up for grabs now, one is no longer sure that even having three square meals a day is the right way to go. Should we be growing the population? Just how much does one person hurt the environment? Have we put too much emphasis on able-ism and bootstrap pulling oneself up by-ism? Have the scientists been overconfident spinners of disinformation all along? How long was America the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Ignorance was bliss, and I wonder if like Jordan Peterson says, society is better believing in God whether He exists or not, that self-awareness, like atheism, will throw us into chaos or disillusioned inaction.
Back to introspection, if I am not who I think I am, how am I known? By what others think of me? If normies are iterances of a deligitimized culture, and aspies adopt expressions from whom they’re with, then everyone is wearing borrowed clothes. Who knows how one would have dressed otherwise? Wearing borrowed clothes can still say something about a person. It’s the somethings that we try to piece together. One can know something about a mountain by a photograph. One can try to put together a 3D model from lots of photographs. Information can be obtained about its structure from outcroppings, and of course more from a visit to know scale and context. But even geologists don’t have a precise story about all the workings inside or its history. Right now old models of gradualism, which replaced new creationism with a single catastrophy, are being put in the controversial category by evidences of sudden multi-catastrophism with almost(?) total rebuildings. Stories are wildly disparate among sincere, knowledgable recounters.
Yet we know something and somehow mostly cope, survive or even thrive. Is it enough to know it’s weird, or is that just an Asperger thing?