Another non-social pretending to social.

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Hi! I'm 29 years old, was diagnosed with AS last year, and I'm still trying to make sense of it all. When I first got diagnosed it was kind of a mixed bag. I felt good that there was finally explanations for the additional oddities, that Tourrette Syndrome and ADD didn't explain, but I also felt like a recent amputee.
I have been struggling with school since I was quite young, and still struggle with any form of a carreer. I have worked so hard to get over my problems, and over the years have somehow figured out how to make some really difficult changes at some cost, only to find some other problem seems to come up, preventing me from creating some sense of consistency in my work life, or social life.
I seem to be able to do social stuff, but only for stretches measured in months, to which I become overwhelmed, and my management abilities seem to diminish. I developed a love for people, and a social environment in my teens, even though it is a bit contrary to my nature. For example, I really don't have much natural empathy, and really don't care if people consider me the sort of person they can choose as a friend, but I have taught myself to choose to care for others, and sincerely feel a need to express those feelings to them. I often don't find a way of "keeping up" with more then a few people I currently interact with, and feel guilty that I don't seem to have a natural ability to keep them from feeling I have abondoned them, which I feel I haven't. I kinda feel lost in the NT world, and don't consider keeping to myself to be fulfilling, even though I have learned to keep to myself for many months if I need to.
I think it would be useful to listen to others' experiences, and look forward to hearing anybody else's experiences.
One more thing, I am not a social person, for instance, I just don't do small talk. Does it feel as wierd to any of you, using a social forum to discuss topics about disorders that are notoriously non-social?

It does seem strange doesn't it? A bunch of anti-social folks getting together online and being social! It doesn't because most of us want to talk about our thoughts to people and the "social" folks (NTs usually) aren't interested or don't understand us. Here we don't have to talk directly to anyone, but we can broadcast our thoughts to everyone. No one has to read them and those that do, we welcome responses from. It's a social mechanism that works for us. We can refer to old posts/thoughts and read other people's posts. It works since it's so different from the traditional sense of being social. I'd love it if all my causal conversations with people in real life were as easy to understand as they are here.

Hello! Much of what you talked about sounds really familiar...I just found this place a couple of days ago (which is how I realised I have AS) and am blown away to discover that there are lots of people with the same

Yeah, it does feel pretty weird actually. It's mind-blowing to read like-minded people's thoughts, but I still find it semi-stressful writing posts. I spend way too much time rereading each one, rephrasing things, worrying about how sentences might be misinterpreted, moving commas around and trying to choose between semi-colons and dashes.