Opinions? Does this sound typical?

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I wrote this trying to explain to a lover about my aspie-ness. I have never given it to him. We broke up. But I still would like to know if others here can relate to it. I just found out a week ago I have it and it opened up a floodgate of memories that I had repressed or denied. It would mean a lot to me if some of you could read it and tell me...is this typical?

It is fairly long and I don't know how else to place it here so I am just copying and pasting it into the boxes:

She sat there in front of the TV on the floor. Concentrating on the characters before her as if they were talking to her, as if she could feel what they felt. Once in a while she would change positions after becoming cramped sitting so still for such a long time. She would lay on her right side, one hand holding her head up. Then she would switch to the left, using the other hand. Eventually her wrists would become pained from the pressure and she would sit up again, her eyes never leaving the screen.
Cindy was a good girl. Her mother’s “Little Angel”. Her mother never had to worry about her. She always did as she was told. Cindy never asked for anything, never cried, never complained. She was a straight “A” student and the teachers loved how she was so quick to learn and eager to answer everything that was asked of the class. She wore everything her mother picked out for her without complaint.
Her sisters and her brother however, were a different matter altogether. They were always fighting over something. Mother had to constantly break up fights and sometimes she would get caught in the middle of them. While Cindy sat quietly watching TV and trying to listen to what was being said. The fights were just a part of everybody’s life she thought. This is normal. That black coffee cord was mother’s way of using a belt because she didn’t have one. Mother was actually being kind when she would ask her brother and sisters to hold out their arms so she could slap them with it on the tender undersides, that way mother didn’t have to hurt their bottom.
Cindy had not yet felt the welts that would rise on her sibling’s arms, or the pain of the “crack” she could hear every time it would slice the air and land on the skin. If she felt anything, it was left out. She always felt left out of everything. There was nowhere she thought she fit in. That was the way her life was.
Being alone was all that Cindy ever wanted. Everyone around her confused her. They had all these likes and dislikes. They talked incessantly about this or that. She didn’t notice what it was that they talked about. It really didn’t matter to her. They didn’t like her anyway, so she didn’t bother to listen. What was all the fuss about? The only thing that mattered to her was TV and her encyclopedias. Television taught her things about how to act. She didn’t know you see. Most of the things she did were inappropriate and people would be either shocked or tell her not to do whatever it was. She was usually ashamed of herself, but didn’t know why. So she searched for a way to “blend in” and TV never scolded her or made fun of her. Her encyclopedias turned into interesting stories and the pictures took her to all parts of the world. She explored all the minute details of whatever letter she chose for the day.
Once in a while her classmates would turn their attention to Cindy, maybe out of boredom or just as something to laugh about. They would poke fun at her baggy pants, or her messed up hair. They called her names like “baggy pants” or the dreaded “dead horse”. You see, she had not yet learned how to take a bath or a shower. Her mother was far too busy working or going to night school to notice. Cindy didn’t really care. She didn’t understand that this was what she was supposed to do. She thought she was just naturally like this and that the other girls woke up every morning looking like this. She didn’t and that’s what her life was.

In the summer of her thirteenth year, she made a friend named Jan. Her first in the new city she had moved to when she was 8. Jan had been one of the girls who made fun of her in class, but for some reason this day Jan took Cindy “under her wing” and brought her home to her mother. Cindy was so nervous. While she was sitting on the couch alone she wondered. Was she going to do something wrong or inappropriate? Was this nice woman going to fling her out of the house for sitting on her nice couch? Surprisingly, none of that happened. Jan and her mother came out of the kitchen and her mother explained that it was time to get cleaned up before dinner. Would she like to join Jan upstairs?
By the time Cindy left that evening, she had learned how to take a bath. Her hair had been neatly cut and styled. She had only one question left in her mind that she wished she had asked. “How often do I do this?” She had heard jokes on TV about every Saturday night, so she thought this might be a good start. But she also pondered that this was a ritual before dinner in Jan’s house so she decided that maybe two or three times a week was good. Cindy had a new routine.
During the summer her father dropped her off every morning at the pond and picked her up every night. She never had any money to buy food at the hotdog stand so she just wouldn’t eat. She lost weight and started looking at the Sears catalog for clothes. By the time she began Junior High the next fall, no one knew who she was. All the elementary schools had combined all the students from across the city. So there were so many people who she had never seen before. And who had never seen her. It was a new life for Cindy, a new start. People began talking to her. She had no idea how to respond. The girls who, the year before had ridiculed her, were now treating her differently. A group of girls she had tried to avoid, actually exclaimed “Oh my God, that’s Cindy!” when she passed by. She realized then, things were going to be different. Now if she could only learn how to behave with others.
She began listening to conversations when no one knew she was listening. She learned that most of the time people only complained. Her dilemma was that she didn’t care about anything so what was she going to complain about? She decided she did not want to be a complainer so she would have to talk about something that might interest the listener but be pleasant as well. Kittens! That was it, she would tell them her cat had kittens. How harmless and interesting that would be. What Cindy didn’t realize was that that would be a lie. She didn’t really understand the difference between a lie and the truth. She had never really had a conversation with anyone before, at least not about anything other than school.
She had a talent for writing. She was great at telling stories on paper. Science fiction was easy to write. She never had to express emotions, “Just the facts”. Business letters, reports on science papers, stories she grasped from television she could twist and tell in her own words as if they were her own. Mr. Fulton had always given her A’s on her papers. She had a vivid fantasy life from being alone for so long. But real life things she just didn’t understand. The inflections in people’s voices were difficult to emulate. Why they went up or down in pitch when they did were a mystery to her. What was it that made them emotional on one word and “darker” on others? Why did they care about the things they talked about? What was so special? Cindy did her best to copy how the popular kids acted. She got giddy when someone spoke to her about something she thought was supposed to be funny. She tried to act sad when something someone said appeared to be sad. TV had taught her a lot about how to act.

One day, when she was 13, she met a boy from out of town who expressed how much he really liked her. This was something she had never experienced before. Boys had asked her out, but she knew it was only to make a joke of her. They were boys who went to her school. They couldn’t be trusted. He didn’t know her, he didn’t know she was the butt of jokes. He must genuinely like her. She decided that this would be worth exploring. You see, Cindy was logical. She thought in terms of what made sense. She wanted to fit in with other people, it made life much easier. Copying the things they did was a science experiment in human behavior.
Cindy started dating him. He wrote her poetry. “Let It Be Me” was the first poem. She didn’t realize he had copied it from a song by Elvis Presley. She had no interest in music, so how would she know. In fact, she had no interest in anything. She wondered about this. Why did people make such a big deal out of everyday things?
Young boys are usually only interested in “making out”, Barry was no exception. He talked about himself in the park they sat in on their “date”. He was not a great looking boy, but he was animated and emotional. He was tall and thin with long hair as was the style of the times. He fascinated her. When he kissed her, it brought her interest level “up” a notch. This was feeling. How amazing was this? Cindy was actually feeling something.
They kissed for hours. Then the next chance they got they kissed for hours again. Cindy had never felt like this before. Was this emotion? Was this what I had been missing? How wonderful was this? Cindy would do anything to hold on to this feeling. Not living in a house with all the fighting and pain.
She had taken to going into the basement now whenever there was fighting in the house. She would sit in the corner on the stone floor wondering why she had never been hit by her mother. Is this what love was too? Did her mother not love her? Was she not doing something she should be? She was never included in the beatings, so she must do something to “fit in”. Cindy started staying over Barry’s house. Her mother called it “running away from home”. She started to beat Cindy too. And Cindy ran away from home.
In May of her 15th year her world changed again. Cindy’s mother passed away from cancer. Going to her funeral was like going to school. It was something she had to do. Her aunt found a blue velvet dress with white lace at the collar and the end of the sleeves. It was the most beautiful dress Cindy had ever seen. She attended the wake. She cried like she was supposed to. She frowned like she was supposed to. But all the while, she was asking herself if this was what she was supposed to do. Why she didn’t feel like this really. After all this was her mother.

Months later, after her stepfather had kicked her out of the house, she had been wandering the streets, staying wherever someone would offer her a place. She finally felt that she missed her mother. She felt the loss, but not so much the death of her mother, but the fact that she had never felt like she had a mother. She felt sorry for herself. She realized that all her life she had never felt loved or cared for. But also that she had never loved or cared for anything. She had felt physical desire. But from her experiences on the street, she knew this was a bad thing. Boys didn’t care about their hearts or hers. Sex was something they were only nice to you to get. If you didn’t give it to them, they would take it anyway. Cindy had not learned how to say no. Or even how to judge what she wanted or didn’t want. All the things that happened to her were part of life. It just happened. This happened to everybody. No big deal.
This experience changed her. It would color her way of dealing with emotions for the rest of her life. This was what love was, the physical reaction to a lover’s kiss. As she grew up, she judged whether or not she wanted to date someone, by her physical response. If she could not feel that in the first few dates, she knew she couldn’t be with him. But if she did, then this was a possibility. One of the ways she judged would also be if he was intelligent. If he could quote from a book, if he could speak about the universe or anything that came from her encyclopedias, math, or English. Then he would be able to hold her interest. It was all so logical, so well thought out. She would get to feel love. Wasn’t this love? After all if a man professed that he loved her, she could imagine that love and feel like she did the right thing by him.
In return, since she knew subconsciously, she couldn’t feel emotions the way others did, she thought that it would be a good thing if she helped the men along the way. If a man held her interest and gave her that physical response, she would help him to become a better person. So she sought out men whom she felt were “flawed”. She had developed a moral existence. She had seen wrong and knew what was right from all the morality plays she watched on television, read about in books, and learned of in religious classes.
Cindy thought, after all, normal guys would not really care for her. They could see that she was “flawed”. This was the most logical plan she could devise to live a normal, seemingly healthy, life. She didn’t know her theory/plan was a mistake. She thought it would be the only way she could live a normal life and feel love. The repercussions would be felt for the next 40 years. It would shade the minds of her children and her own existence. Eventually, it always came down to the fact that she really didn’t know how to connect with anyone. She always felt that she was an outsider looking in. She would describe it as being the “loneliest person on the face of the planet” except that lonely wasn’t really the word for it. That implies feeling. But she didn’t feel like others do. She just knew when something wasn’t right. But nothing ever really felt right. It was just how life is. No big deal.

Pretty good. Cindy sounds like an autistic person growing up in an abusive family - that what you intended?

I can relate to the comment about writing something opening up your own emotions. I tend to write more fantastical stories myself, but I often find that I realize something about myself by writing another character with traits like mine.