Were you ostracized in university?
I realize it's not as common to experience emotional or physical bullying in university - especially if it's a more respectable university, although there may be exceptions where it's a highly prestigious university where 90% of the students come from wealth and privilege, and they flaunt that over anyone who still doesn't fit the expected social cliques.
In any case, as I'm sure many of us could attest to, universities still have their social constructs (like the U.S. frats and sororities, not as common here in Canada), which confer status on their members, and are definitely not enlightened enough to include "our kind" as members lest we sully their image as bastions of social superiority.
As far as I'm concerned, one of us Aspie guys trying to join some frat or jock club is going into the lions den, not all that different from a Jew trying to infiltrate a white supremacist group.
I can say that I was definitely ostracized at my university - excluded from events under false pretenses (oh, gotta love the irony that I was just supposed to "figure it out" when my condition caused that reaction in the first place!!) - and had other collectively turn their backs to me as I approached, giving a few smirks, I definitely noticed. Also one time when these people I occasionally said hi to and chatted with were sitting at a table in the student lounge, I pulled up a chair and sat down there, and instinctively they shot glances at each other, then got up and found another table I had to just "swallow it", I sure as heck wasn't going to confront them and berate them for being rude and how dare they, as I'd likely be shouted down (or threatened, worse). I should have jokingly said "hey, I showered after I went to the gym, OK??"
It does seem that even in a supposedly more enlightened setting like that of higher learning, the "normal" students are still not more sympathetic or open-minded towards those who may be different then them in some way - rather than looking at the common ground, values and attitudes - which we still share with NTs.
Despite these struggles, I still had a good circle of 5 friends who were understanding and kind, we hung out together, went to clubs together and tried to pick up girls, which helped my social understanding (I had some luck there ) , but as for dating otherwise, I always wanted the "hot girl" the voluptuous blonde beauty to date probably b/c she seemed so off limits but I still made some tries regardless - didn't get laughed at but more a cold reaction.
I also made a few ties by helping others study complex material like calculus, which I had a really good grasp on, and they came to like me that way, despite my quirks. One guy who I helped gave me some good woman advice which albeit cliche in some ways, helped me through repeated practice and trial and error, taking notes along the way, later in life (after I left).
For the alcohol side of things, I would drink fairly hard in the hopes of loosening up inhibitions, which worked in some ways - but it caused me to behave in some ridiculous ways - even borderline illegal a couple of times - and I got shunned for that by peers, even threatened a couple of times.
In the end, although I was a good student and got A's and B's, I had a breakdown in my 3rd year from clinical depression at all the stigmatization or realizing that I wasn't quite "good enough" for others, and this was in the mid-1990s, where I didn't have a diagnosis for another 5 years.
Not really ostracized. More like I found other people like me, and we hung out together. We also shunned people from other groups (i.e., jocks, fraternity brothers, sorority sisters, et cetera).
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