Autism and metaphors

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If anything, I've actually gone back to using very very little slang when I have to interact with strangers/in mixed company/work dealings, because I can't keep track of what slang terms are being deprecated anymore. It's happening too fast and I'm not involved enough with young people's internet spaces to keep track of it all. I've seen people lose their careers and social circles in recent times because of something they said that was taken out of context, or twisted to mean something else. I have to treat using a lot of slang in mixed company as what Temple Grandin calls a Sin of the System. (I also do not openly discuss politics, sex, or religion around anyone but 1) my autism spaces and 2) private spaces.)

It's funny how I'm acting even more autistic here, but it's what we Jews call a Fence Around the Law.

I avoid telling people for the same reason. The standard list of symptoms you see in explanations of autism doesn’t match how a lot of autistic people actually act. It gets very irritating when people keep making assumptions about you that aren’t true, especially when they underestimate your abilities or understanding. And yes, I’m reluctant to tell health providers as well. I find they’re more condescending to you than most people are when autism is mentioned.

I've gotten clocked as Aspie, but it's always by people who know Aspies or are Aspies themselves.

Telling medical providers won't actually get me anything. I can advocate for myself. I've been able to get by *this* far. I've been able to navigate medical and legal situations without knowing I'm autistic, so they're not going to start now. I'm able to go to doctor's appointments, advocate for myself in medical settings, and advocate for other people, and the latter (as someone who has to do so for aging parents who increasingly aren't, themselves, taken seriously) requires I be taken seriously.

If I had greater support needs, and they impacted my health care experience, then it would be one thing. I find health/dental procedures a bit more traumatic than some others do but I can manage it, and seeing what I've seen of people with even a mental health diagnosis besides autism on their record, and their experience with health care (such as being told a serious condition is just anxiety/"it's in your head") it's not at all worth the risk.

If it concerns a metaphor that relates to my own behavior, i generally understand the metaphor quite quickly. I also think that walking with your head in the clouds is a strongly autism-related metaphor.
In my opinion, everyone lives with their head in the clouds, i even think that the moment you realize/accept that you watch the world with your head in the clouds, that you have a better view than the people who think they have a crystal-clear view of reality. For me, a metaphor is like a pair of glasses through which I see clearly.

Metaphors make sense to me.
In metaphor, there is a logic to it.
I can vision the correlation among vocabularies in a well-structured article.

What I am confused about most is when people joke about something.

For example,
if my manager tells me "tell that customers to f**k off and leave",
I will have a hard time if he really wants me to do it or if it is just a way of expressing his frustration.

Many times, when normal people talk, what they say doesn't match what they intend to say.
But, metaphor matches their intention and the logic behind it.

I understand metaphor, simile, idioms, etc. but I think much of this is because of my special interest in literature. I realized at a point that I was overteaching my children idioms that they just "got," whereas I had to do a special study to understand the meaning of.

I didn't really understand metaphor, simile and other figurative language until I started listening to more hip-hop in my late teens/early 20s.

Based on the fact that all the autists I know IRL "get" jokes and metaphor and love puns and wordplay, I have to wonder if 1) we are basing our stereotypes about autists off of child autists, and 2) traits that say more that the person is isolated from exposure to popular culture and peers, than that they're specifically autistic

It's all about the idea that autistic adults don't matter. They take kids of certain age and the autistic ones do much worse in some cognitive areas. That's because they have a DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITY. It's doesn't mean they can't catch up in these areas later.

I relate to this because the main way I experience my autism narrative is as someone who was socially/emotionally "behind." But having caught up a lot in my 30s+, now people just see an adult. It's actually much harder to convince people I'm autistic now. In my teens and 20s, I was obviously odd, but later, I just seemed like an intelligent working adult who had some emotional/relational problems.