Christmas Thanks for asking. Yes -
I'm came to Cambridge as a researcher and there's a lot of discussion amongst the research community about the very mildest end of ASD and how that can be common amongst researchers.
As a friend of mine said "A lot of people are here because instead of going out and socialising in their teens, they stayed at home and put in the hours on their specialist subject."
The implication being that a lot of us didn't have the social skills to go out and form friendships in the usual way (dating, I think he meant), and sinking ourselves into whatever our subject was, was the escape that worked.
Anyway, he was certainly right about me in that. I was definitely a bit behind socially as a child - no more than that really - but ds is the same. I sank myself into botany and the sciences, and ds is all about robots.
I do wonder if my slightly-behind social skills are still a factor though as I have struggled so badly to get help from GPs over the years for ds and myself. I think if I was better at the talking, we might not have sunk so entirely.
I have a lovely GP now who I think gets what's going on, but communication is still tricky. Much of what he knows about me, I only managed to tell him because I wrote it all down, rather than because I was able to actually say it. The little text field that we fill in when we make appointments online is a bit of a Godsend I think.
Because I'm a scientist I often default to self-diagnosis through the research literature, but having a good GP now who can look at me from the outside and see what's going on is much better.