What is this experience?? Am I the only one?? Was I mis-diagnosed??
I genuinely have no idea what this experience is and haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere and don't even see it in the autism criteria. For context, I have giftedness, ADHD, dyslexia, OCD, anxiety, and autism L1. I used to be clearly autistic up until ~ 2 yrs ago (infodumping, monologuing, literal communication, clear stimming, etc). So I at least clearly "had" autism (even though I know you can't "un-have" it. I don't really struggle with communication anymore and actually try really hard to make everyone feel good, welcomed, appreciated, etc sometimes to my own determent but it feels authentic and alligned with me, not like a 'mask' I put on. My main difficult now socially (I clearly fit the other parts of autism) is that I have a hard time 'putting the pieces together' socially and am SOOOO analytical almost to my determent. I am very strong socially, but then I open my mouth and the autism falls out. Like I was talking about all my rules and clear social structure of how I think about the level of friendship and my mom was like wtf?? because apparently others don't think about things that hard. It's like I'm existing on this whole other intellectual level all of the time but also failing at fundemental human understanding that neurotypicals never even think about. But sometimes I don't feel autistic at all because I don't really struggle with being monotoned, having a flat affect, having different communication, etc anymore. But I'm not really neurotypical either. What is this?? I haven't seen this represented and I'm so confused!! Am I just gifted and anxious??
I understand this sounds a lot like masking and I did put a lot of effort into learning how to be this way but now it feels mostly in line with who I am it's just that I have to think about it more. But it's not like I'm pretending to be someone else or putting my fake face on. I don't feel like I belong anywhere in what I've seen about autism but I clearly have something going on. Has anyone else experienced this?? Or maybe it's something else??