Who am I? What am I trying to do here?

I’m trying to get things out of my head, without the fear of judgement. I am certain things. Other things I have still to discover. I want to be able to explore without being said that I should behave like this or like that, or being told that my outlook is wrong. If it is, then by all means, trust in me to get it in the end.

I need this new place because I’ve been told that I should stop looking at life through the Aspie lens, even my closest friends have said so. Having Asperger’s Syndrom is autism, it’s a fucking mental condition. I cannot stop looking things through it more than someone with a depression can “just get over it”. By telling me so, you’re just denying my struggles, guys.

Oh, because, yes : I am autistic (surely, the moniker gave me away, innit?) I’ve been officially diagnosed at the tender age of 43, and by professionals who told me that it wasn’t an edge case and was actually quite well pronounced. Like: they actually congratulated me for having a well balanced life despite the handicap.

I did not overcome that handicap, but I managed to get it mostly under wraps thanks to not being exactly dumb: since the age of 15, I’ve taken my share of IQ tests, with varying results, but one constant: 130+. It puts me in what is called the 2nd percentile. It means that in a pool of 100 people, only one of them has an IQ higher than mine (and he has, I’m sort of the village idiot at geniuses’). I take a certain pride in that, but I do not judge someone’s value on it, I refuse to think I’m better because of my IQ. Still, if I want to explore who I am, I have to be comfortable writing about that fact: I am highly intelligent^[1].

As a human being, and even more as an autistic person, I know the value of seeking patterns to understand the world around us. As a creative person, it saddens me, but I’ve got to admit that putting people in boxes is sometimes of great help to try to make sense of social interactions. Yes, most human interactions follow patterns, and those can be written down and studied.

In that regard, being fully aware of its shortcomings, the MBTI^[2] is a valuable tool: it lays down some basics of a personality and helps apprehend how social life, or life at large really, can be dealt with for certain persons.

After taking several tests (a must-do, given the low reliability of taking just a single one) , lots of readings, and conversations with someone who read about it too and know me well, it appears hard to deny that I’m an INTJ.

In this place I won’t apologise for being autistic. I won’t apologise for being intelligent. I won’t apologise for tagging myself with a certain personality type. I need to accept the formers to go further in my self understanding. I will use the later as a tool for that quest.