I was trying to explain "being aspie" to a new friend of mine, and commented:
"Perfectly normal human wormbaby" is a phrase that basically means "I'm an alien desperately trying to convince people I'm human so that they don't kill me"I was pretty much kidding when I wrote it. "Wormbaby" is a quote from Invader ZIM that I've used ever since I heard it, after all, and that's what the phrase means for ZIM. Except, the thing of it is, it really
does feel like a very apt metaphor. Replace 'kill' with a number of other unpleasant verbs for the most part, but I've never really felt like I actually identified or fit in with humanity. They're a weird and interesting species I'm studying, and I've learned to get along with them for the most part, but sometimes they are just absolutely baffling, and sometimes they react very, very badly to the fact that I'm different.
One of the worst things about being aspie is that you have to hide and suppress it so much. I can come out as aspie just fine. The word has never carry a ton of stigma for me (others may have different experiences, but in my experience it mostly just carries befuddled looks and the question "What's that?"). But you start stimming (repetitive motion - for me, drumming my fingers or a pencil against something solid), or continue talking about the latest TV show you watched after someone breaks down crying, or admit that you really don't care in the slightest that a relative died... yeah, people get amazingly unfriendly *then*. And they don't need to know the label "aspie" to get hostile, either.
One of my more baffling childhood memories was my dad lecturing me, and suddenly yelling at me for not making eye contact. To me, eye contact means "defiance, dominance", and I absolutely could not understand why he'd *want* me to be defiant while he was lecturing me! He then went on to explain that if I don't make eye contact during interviews, people won't like me enough to hire me. I've dutifully followed this rule ever since, and it really does seem to help, but it still just absolutely baffles me. For me, even now that I've learned to deal with eye contact and it's become less painful and intense, it's still something I do only rarely or in those moments of "I'm interviewing / otherwise need to impress you."
Despite all of that, it's still really hard to explain "aspie" because... well, because the whole point of it is that I don't *get* neurotypical (non-aspie) people at all. If I understood them enough to explain exactly how I'm different, I'd probably have far fewer issues ^.^