It all made sense when we found out we were autistic

Aspergers was not a thing when I was growing up in the 70s so I was never formally diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure I'm on the spectrum, and the result was a pretty painful childhood. I managed to drag myself out of it and give myself an education in social skills, and nowadays you'd never guess that I'm Aspie (my wife still doesn't believe me, but I think she's an undiagnosed Aspie herself). Even to this day there are a lot of things that "normal" people do that are utterly foreign to me, like going to clubs or watching sports on TV. My idea of a good time is reading up on quantum mechanics or the ordinal hierarchy. I think mild Aspergers is a lot more common than most people think even today because it is possible to hide it completely, and there's a lot of societal pressure to do just that.

[UPDATE] A lot of reply comments are of the form: what you have described here is not Aspergers, it's just normal growing up. Well, yeah, it's not so easy to give a complete description of my situation in an HN comment, and I'm not sure I'd be willing to do it even if I could. I'm not particularly proud of the person I used to be. But I will tell you this: in retrospect, when I was a kid, I was completely oblivious to the fact that my peers were agents in their own right, with thoughts and preferences and hopes and dreams that might be different from my own. That, I am now given to understand, is the hallmark of autism spectrum disorders. But I don't think it matters whether or not I "actually" had/have Aspergers. What matters is that because I was clueless, I behaved obnoxiously (not realizing that I was doing so) and as a result of that I had very few friends. It was intensely painful, and it took many years of concerted effort to change my situation, but I ultimately managed to do it. That is really what I want to convey: whether or not it was abnormal, it hurt, but I was able to make it better. And if I could do it, so can you, regardless of what label we choose to attach to our conditions.

I mean, IANAD but I would definitely get a professional diagnosis before acting on the assumption my child has a specific medical condition...?

Thanks. We're only acting on it insofar as we read about it and try to find practical ways to deal with it. We're not going to medicate her! And when we discuss the topic, we always start with: "We believe that..."

> My idea of a good time is reading up on quantum mechanics or the ordinal hierarchy.

Haha, same here!! Does it mean I might be an "Aspie" too???

Autism, like cancer, is not a single thing. Toward the start of the spectrum, including Asperger's, it seems to be essentially "clinically-significant weirdness, not otherwise specified" (on the later end of the spectrum, it's "major or profound mental retardation, not otherwise specified").

A more productive discussion might be why we feel the need to pathologize so much about ourselves. Why do we need a person to look us over and say "Ah, none of what you are is your fault" to feel OK?

Worse, why do some parents need to hear that about their children? I've known kids who've been paraded to several "mental health professionals" until one would finally give the parents what they ultimately wanted, a diagnosis-as-scapegoat. In the 90s that scapegoat was ADHD. Today it's Asperger's.