Are you a textbook example of Autism?

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Through the years I have lost many traits related to the AS, but I still mantain a few of them. For example, I'm not good expressing my emotions, I prefer to do things like reading, playing videogames, etc than hanging out with people and going to parties. But I don't have many problems with eye contact, I have a good sense of humor and many others things that aren't in the AS diagnosis.

I'm very selective with my friends, they usually must share many of my interests and personality features, but sometimes I want to be a little more "friendly" with the people near of me, and for my "rigidity" I usually fail.

The AS is a very complex disorder and each person with it will be unique, him or her will not have all the symptons described in the general diagnosis.

I don't know, it sounds circular to me -- "He's more autistic because he's self-ist and he knows autism is self-ism because he's more autistic."

Not that autism can't cause that. But I don't think it's inherently more autistic than other configurations. Donna Williams talks of autistic people frequently being aware of "no self, no other," or "all self, no other," or "all other, no self", but having trouble combining "self AND other". That sounds more right to me, rather than seeing one or the other as inherently "more autistic".

Personally I've been all of those (and still cycle between them).

As far as the actual topic, I tried to write something but got confused. There's too many textbooks. I tried to read a couple classic-but-clueless one's and got too bogged down in the details, especially since there's no single "textbook autistic person". Some of my traits are not "textbook" now, but were 40 years ago. And as usual I have trouble thinking and functioning within ideas so distant from reality, so I just stopped. I certainly saw a lot of myself in a book by Lorna Wing, IIRC.