How do you experience emotion?

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I just discovered that by all objective measures I have Asperger's.
I am Obsessive. Literal. Inclined towards a linear thinking. Things are all connected.

Until recently I thought I was like everyone else; except, somehow crazy and without access to understanding why I would spontaneously destroy a social situation with statements that I watched spiraling helplessly out of control. I could see the train going off the cliff. So I reached for it to hold it back and tripped and pushed this train wreck into existence. Of course, the consequences were predictable and I could blame no one but myself.

I always thought that I experience emotion just like everyone else. I have joys and fears, I love and hate. I am well acquainted with pain and anger. I have always thought that I could read peoples emotions. I have always believed that I understood nuance of voice. Now I must challenge my self-estimation.

I am examining how I perceive that I feel emotion and naturally it seems all right to me. It is all that I have ever known. I have selective blockage on questions like how do you feel because to know that I have to look inside and the language to communicate what I see is difficult because it is never precise and I am a fairly literal alliterating literary guy. When I say, "I love you", I am always uncomfortable. I like people and have difficulty because I can never get into the other persons head and while I think I know whats going on, I am often surprised. Finally, I have accepted myself and give people a chance to accept me. A few have. They like my quirky honesty, my punny nonsense of humor, and they struggle with communicating with me because they seem to think that sometimes I don't get it and I am rambling on and on about some specific mathematical ideas that I should realize they can't understand but somehow in the moment I ignore that and continue because I am so excited. Sometimes we are at direct opposition and I walk off to my cave. I don't understand why they don't get it. It is only logical. They don't understand why I don't get it. They think I am missing something obvious. I can't always see what I am missing. Though sometimes I get it at a later time as I replay the circumstance in my memory.

I would like to get a spectrum of input on the question of how any other people experience emotion or have difficulties with the language of emotion. Do you see any colors or is it just the primary colors that we see and our emotions are simple like red and blue, but not complex like chartruse and azure and blended landscapes. Is it just volume control problems, or are these difficulties built more by the inability to dereference emotional words; because the observation needed to create the initial reference is not as precise due to a gap in the input data and therefore my mirror neurons don't fire properly in response to certain input. I think I see the landscape, but I am no longer sure, because the external observable evidence says that I'm missing something.

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I have a suspicion that alexithymia is more common in AS people than clinicians realise, perhaps because the inherent 'emotional dyslexia' of AS masks it as a subcondition.

I have it, and it usually leads to a certain delay while I figure out what my emotional response to an unexpected situation is, causing anxiety in the meantime.

This anxiety gets somewhat in the way of trying to figure out other people's emotional states at the same time.

It's like that old parlour trick of rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time.

I gave myself away pretty quickly. Everybody knows the order of my top three bands now.

Your post confuses me a bit actually, in that I perceive it as you talking about 2 different things. One point is that there's a failure of communication and understanding when you're talking to someone. The other thing is you wondering if your emotions are akin to others' emotions. While the 2 things can certainly be connected, in that if you have an inability to understand someone else's emotions, it can cause all sorts of issues when relating to someone. However, the way you described your issues when talking to someone seems to me more of a disparity in communicating an idea, or you ignoring how someone else is reacting (since you say you realize when the other person is likely lost or disinterested), than failing to understand emotions or emotional processing.

I don't experience emotions as anything but emotions. I have no colors or landscapes or anything else associated with them, at least not that I know of.

That said, I just heard and then read about alexithymia for the first time, on wikipedia, and although not all of the features about it describe me, a large amount of it does. I have issues with knowing what I want, issues with knowing what will make me feel better, issues about why I feel sh***y a lot of the time, (I suffered from depression for over a decade), a large part of my depression has been/is anhedonia, I hardly daydream/imagine things but when I do I enjoy it a lot, my dreams for the past, oh, decade or so, when I remember them, are themselves sadly anhedonic-including what some people call nightmares but more recently I am disappointed that my dreams are themselves mundane in that I'll do regular, everyday things in them.
I don't know if I have difficulties separating physiological arousal from emotions. I don't fully know either if I have problems identifying my own emotions...I know that for some recent events in my life I have had a very hard time pinpointing my emotions, but I feel that that's more because I don't have experience feeling those emotions, and any external guide for them doesn't fit me. I guess I know what I'm not feeling, but not what I am feeling, in regards to that specific situation.
How would one know if one is actually in-tune with their emotions?

As for alexithymia being more common among those with an ASD than clinicians realize, the Wikipedia article cites that it's incredibly common. Perhaps clinicians just aren't bothering to separate alexithymia from the rest of ASD. Once more than 50% of ASD experience it, it would be more effective to treat the people with an ASD who DON'T have alexithymia as non-standard.

I guess I have the opposite of alexithymia, in that the onset of my emotions in reaction to a stimulus, is instant, sometimes the feelings come on with an alarming alacrity.

I worked with a therapist to get over my alexithymia, so I know how to identify one of the four basic emotions: happy, sad, angry, afraid, and then to connect them to a cognitive cause (since no emotion comes from a vacuum). Now the difficulty for me is when and how to express my feelings.

I always felt put on the spot when therapists would ask how something made me feel:

"How did you feel when no one would let you sit with them on the schoolbus?"

"I felt like jumping out of the bus window and running screaming back home."

"That isn't a feeling."

It should be obvious that I was "sad" and "afraid". Those words are too vague and didn't convey the enormity of the indecision and panic that was overcoming me. No one would let me sit down, there weren't any empty seats left, and the bus driver was yelling at me for not sitting down.