I, for one, am not trying to make a blanket generalization. Or establish a superiority/ inferiority thing.
And I don't think you're pointing a finger at me, or making it personal.
I basically agree, that it isn't really productive or beneficial to establish a mood of "better than because..." and it seems like anything that follows that could easily become something not so different than establishing a superiority complex based on things like color, gender, religion, etc.
It is interesting, though, that there seem to be a lot of incredibly intelligent aspies. And that it's really not an ego thing, it's just the truth sometimes. For me, it's one of the defining characteristics, it's one of the things that I deal with, without which most of my other "symptoms" could be coming from anywhere. Sociopath, ADHD, depression, anxiety... All of those things lack something, they all miss something. Some of them are really far off the mark (I AM NOT a sociopath). Even if you combine all of them, they still don't make sense, and they don't account for a high iq.
Asperger's does, or seems to rather often. I'm certainly not an authority, I'm not even very experienced at thinking of myself this way. And we're all different, we're all dealing with different things...
My iq is weird. If it's tested without including numbers math it can start to look ridiculously high, if you include math it drops down well below average. So it's almost irrelevant, other than as an example that I really can't do math.
But smart, as far as grades go, is something positive for me. I have to remind myself of it sometimes just to feel a bit better about myself, but I can't even take any pride from it because I didn't have to work at it at all. As long as I do the work (and it's not math), my grades are the highest in the class. Consistently. I don't even have to try. It's not challenging, and it never has been, and that has caused problems, including getting me put on an extreme amount of Ritalin because I was so far ahead of the class that I really didn't know what was going on in the class anymore.
It almost feels like, every time I take a class, it's the same class again. Over and over. There isn't any new information. I just keep having to study the Greeks and the Romans over and over again. And I keep failing the same math class over and over again.
That's excessively negative, and too broad of a generalization to be true, but it's a lot like that. And it's been really, really frustrating.
But, being smart has been a fact of life. Often being the smartest person in the room. That's just the way it is, usually. It's one of the few really positive aspects of my life. It's why I was able to soak up ten years of music theory in about six months, but it's also why I can't talk to anyone about music theory.
One of my favorite things to do is read, but I can't afford to buy books because I can read over a thousand pages in a day, on a good day.
So it's another part of it that really isn't fun. It can be torture. And that's a part of the reality for me. It's a part of why I identified with Asperger's. It's a thing that none of the other (rather ugly and painful) labels I've been given actually account for. And I know that it's different for everybody, but it's a part of how it is for me. A part of being an aspie is being the smartest guy in the room, and being unable to communicate. Unable to function on some really basic levels, and unable to explain why that is, or convince anyone that I'm having a problem. Sometimes it's like my tongue is nailed to the roof of my mouth, or I stutter because I have eighteen different thoughts I'm trying to get out at the same time.
Sorry for that big long rant. I hope that makes some kind of sense.
I haven't even had coffee yet this morning.