Has anyone else experienced this?

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I'm in my 30s, and very recently, I've started to have increased social awareness, like imagining social scenarios in my head and actually being able to work out what people would do in those situations and potential consequences for not doing those things. I always find behaviors/attitudes/thoughts that I associate with NTs distressing, because I feel like if I lost my autism diagnosis, I'd have to learn a whole bunch of other rules and practice the common prejudices the non-autistics sometimes practice in order to make and keep friends, because people can read sincerity and lack thereof, and I feel like they'd be able to tell if I deliberately ignored social rules instead of just not knowing them.

I don't want to be like that, especially after growing up socially "blind." I wish I knew what was causing this. On the one hand, perhaps I could use this to help other autistic people, but sometimes I just feel like I'm losing touch with the asocial mindset. I haven't tried my hand at actually making friends like this, and I'm actually a little offended at the idea that I might be getting "better," because I would then be left to my own devices without any support.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Yep....I experienced this very same thing.

In my 20's, I was pretty socially oblivious.

I became much more "socially aware" as I hit my 30s.

I'm a lot "better" now in my 60s than I was in my 30s.

I am autistic.

I didn’t speak until I was 5 1/2 years old.

Of course you're qualified.

No.
I tried to think of this scenario before.

If it were my own case -- even officially removing my diagnosis, no longer qualified as autistic, doesn't change a damn fact that I still don't know the damn rules, that I don't have that social instincts every other allistics have, that regardless of my experiences and performance it's still unnatural, it doesn't change how I navigate the world.

Even if I no longer am regarded as autistic, even if I was 'cured' of it, including my asociality, including my uneven cognitive aptitudes...

It doesn't change the psychosocial issues, it doesn't change the inaccessibility by executive dysfunction needed for socializing and functioning, it doesn't change the distortions created by emotional dysregulation and stress intolerance...

It doesn't make me relatable to others, and me relatable to them.


Because in my case, it's no longer all about autism anymore.

But I can still be autistic and I have no executive function and psychosocial issues. I've experienced that regardless of the validity of the label.
It was the happiest days of my adult life, wishing it's consistent because it's the real me and there a world of difference inside and outside.

So my real issue could simply lie elsewhere, maybe beyond autism.

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I think many autistic people simply grow up more slowly when it comes to social/emotional things. So it's not that they never develop this or that skill--it just takes longer. Doesn't change who you are any more than any other part of aging.