Your picture of autism/ aspergers

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What is your picture Of autism/ aspergers.? How would you describe it?

A confused, usually misunderstood tourist who can never go home. That looked like and HAS to act like a local, who are seeking for answers(obsessions of learning or/and truth)...
Eh, my answer is too much of an aspie AND too short.

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I have a (very wordy) take on how I think about the spectrum as a whole here.

A fundamentally different way of thinking. It affects everything--how we process sensory information, how we process ideas, how we produce ideas, how we learn, how we interact. I don't know quite what it is, exactly, but there are certain themes to it--a focus on the tiny bits of information rather than the big picture; a flood of details and sensations; a lack of flexibility compensated for by a focus on patterns, order, and if-thens. There's a lot of executive functioning difference in there, and a different way of processing information we take in. It's a disability, but it's also a difference; autism lets the human race access ways of thinking that we couldn't reach without it. If neurotypical thinking is a watercolor image, then autistic thinking is a dot-matrix printout.

Still, autism may not be one single phenomenon. Maybe there are multiple things that look similar and are all called autism, but have different mechanisms. Maybe the autistics who think in metaphors, pictures, motion, and sensation are different from the ones who think in numbers, ideas, and logical relationships. Or maybe not; maybe there's some other difference and those are actually just variations in style.

The next step in human evolution

Like an ocean and it's currents. Solidly NT people are on the beach, never go in the water, just see parts of the people in the water that are sticking out; they can't understand what they are seeing and they can't see the whole person. Some people walk in the surf, some can crawl in the waves, and the water never really dries off of those who are touch by it. Just like the people on the land, those in the water don't always struggle. They are kind of like merpeople; stormy water can get the better of them though just as a hurricane or tornado on land gets at the land people and they might experience a feeling of suffocation and agony but so do those on the land. Just as the land people walk around and go about their business and change day to day and have their moods and stuff and changing abilities every day, so do the people in the water. Traits vary between people in the water and even in individual people as they do with the land people; the depth of the water, the currents, the mineral content, the changing temperature all signify the different expressions of traits in these people. Same as those on land. The merpeople can be swept deeper into the ocean and back; the land people can be swept further away from and closer to the edge of the water without ever getting wet by it. Neither group can really tell when the other group is in distress or not. They each see the other through their own lens: the dry people try to dry off or interpret the wet people's actions the way a dry person would think and the wet people try to wet the dry people and interpret the dry people's actions the way a wet person would think. Then there are those who live in the surf, being both wet and dry so that the dry people try even harder to dry them off or just ignore them or refuse to touch them or run away. The surf people can be almost dry and fake it for a while or they can be heavily soaked. The dry people wonder why they just can't stay dry, why they can't stay out of the water. The surf people aren't sure if they prefer to be wet or dry and wonder if it's nicer farther out to sea. They watch the dry people from the shoreline, never being one of them, wondering, "What is wrong with me?" The water hurts. It makes the skin pucker and prickle. It gets in the ears and makes the sounds louder. It gets in the eyes and makes things look in parts. Being wet doesn't mix with the dry world. The sun burns. It's hot above the water and cool below. Underneath is cool, and quiet, and heavy, like a cocoon and dark. But also suffocating. The dry people don't stim as much because they aren't treading water. They are battling other things, but not so much for their senses and for their lives.

I wrote about this in my journal last year. This isn't a quote of that journal entry but is the gist of what I wrote. A few weeks later, someone else posted a similar concept of the spectrum being like an ocean. I have no idea who it was or what the thread was about.

Edit: I should add that the water isn't very visible because it isn't fully understood by the dry people. So they see only parts of a person they can see above the water causing them to view the person who is in the water as not being whole, as being a puzzle. They can't understand the wetness in the surf people because they can see more of the surf people and so expect them to be dryer and don't recognize the extent of their wetness.