You are well on your way to achieving true wisdom. I had little idea I was different when I was younger, and am glad that people here have the opportunity to help each other. The system, and even the mental health profession, doesn't seem to understand our issues too well, so it's up to us to find our way in the world.
Being normal is easier, though. Especially if you're cut out for it. In the ASer's case, we're not genetically cut out for it, but along through life, we all make decisions, regardless of our neurology, whether we want to be different or not. The reason being normal is easier, well, sometimes it's not easier. Sometimes it's harder to be normal, as in the amount of work or effort involved. But, the thing is, you're not to blame if you screw up. If you're doing what everyone else does, when man judges you, or God judges you, you can simply just say "Well I did what everyone else was doing." It shifts the responsibility away from you as the individual, to society as a whole. If you do something by yourself, and people hate it, you yourself generally take the fall, but when an entire society does something abhorrent, it in essence becomes nobody's fault. Thus, this is why people strive to be normal, it shifts the "blame" or responsibility, away from themselves. It works both ways, though, by being normal, as you said, you can never accomplish really, much of anything. But, you never risk failure, either. So most people, when evaluating life, see being "normal" as a good life goal, as it's the path of least resistance, nobody will love you very much, or hate you very much.
I don't know if I ever showed this to you, but it's CS Lewis's "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" essay.
http://screwtapeblogs.wordpress.com/200 ... s-a-toast/Quote:
In each individual choice of what the Enemy would call the “wrong” turning, such creatures are at first hardly, if at all, in a state of full spiritual responsibility. They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them. And of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur; what would be a bribe in someone else’s profession is a tip or a present in theirs. The job of their Tempters was first, or course, to harden these choices of the Hellward roads into a habit by steady repetition. But then (and this was all-important) to turn the habit into a principle — a principle the creature is prepared to defend. After that, all will go well. Conformity to the social environment, at first merely instinctive or even mechanical — how should a jelly not conform? — now becomes an unacknowledged creed or ideal of Togetherness or Being Like Folks. Mere ignorance of the law they break now turns into a vague theory about it — remember, they know no history — a theory expressed by calling it conventional or Puritan or bourgeois “morality.” Thus gradually there comes to exist at the center of the creature a hard, tight, settled core of resolution to go on being what it is, and even to resist moods that might tend to alter it. It is a very small core; not at all reflective (they are too ignorant) nor defiant (their emotional and imaginative poverty excludes that); almost, in its own way, prim and demure; like a pebble, or a very young cancer. But it will serve our turn. Here at last is a real and deliberate, though not fully articulate, rejection of what the Enemy calls Grace.
24 May 2012, 10:51 am
Being normal is overrated!
