Am I the only autie here?

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Maybe it's just me, but other than the IQ and the development of speech I can't think of anything that is seperating Aspies and Auties. BUT I haven't seen another Aspie in action yet, just Auties on videos they did themselves or which were made of them (in the case of children) which I all found to be understandable, not strange but instead familiar to varying degrees.

Sooo... maybe I'll realise Aspies are very different from Auties when I meet some Aspies some day. Until then, I'll stick to "being autistic" and "autistics" and claim I have an opinion about something I have no idea about.

I'm told I'm AS but there are some things that fit in more with ASD. I think it is a question of clinical judgement rather than an exact thing. I used to think all my problems were the same, and then I thought they were all different now I'm just confused.

The speech delay is the most distinctive and it's the defining point between Asperger's and "high functioning" autistic. Although my son is considered to have "age appropriate" speech, he is still quite a bit behind and will always struggle with speech and receptive language. A lot of people don't realize that he is very often speaking in script and echolalia. He has developed "appropriate" pitch and tone to his voice so people don't realize he is not spontaneously chattering.
It gets him in trouble when people either mistake him for saying something highly inappropriate (repeated script that he inserts in the wrong context) or when they don't understand the actual words. (a bus driver insisted he was shouting about "violence and death" when he was talking about "Violet and Dash" from The Incredibles)

I am not a specialist, though I have spent all my adult life in studying, under all possible profiles the problems of mind, emotions, and psychological suffering. I have reached the conclusion that there is a great deal of overlapping between syndromes and that, perhaps, it's not that important to know the precise location of each case in the many definitions. It is important to know everything possible, in order to find the strategies to cope with problems, but I think this should be made not so much having in mind the abstract classifications but rather the concrete cases.

Syndromes may be made more serious by the history of the persons. I believe that neurons are more important that traumas (bad parenting, for example). But the merging of the two kind of causes should always be taken in account and each individual history is probably so complex that it should be studied and interpreted in relation to all the causes involved. Fast driving may result in an accident, but there may be also bad sight, faulty brakes, limited visibility and so on.

A defective mirror neuron is very likely to make empathy more difficult. But what if the person has also been subject to bullying, violence, difficult environments? The propensity to be gentle and kind has certainly a genetic root, but often the equilibrium between being good, norm abiding, supportive of others and being the opposite, may be precarious and can be shifted one way or the other by the weight of an hair.

I have PDD-nos.. but I usually say aspergers I know there are other autistics non-AS here

I am dxed Aspergers, but when refering to myself in reference to ASD, I usually just say I'm autistic.

My son is technically HFA.