I think it's like one of those cases where someone has been doing something for so long and are so good at it that they find it hard to explain to someone who can't do it.

For normal/neuro-typical people, socializing and all that goes with it is second nature, for us with ASD it's a confusing thing and we essentially remain social novices our whole lives.

It gets hard because that normal person feels he/she has to really break everything down to the real bare basics and I think normal people are just too far advanced to do that. Furthermore, I don't think social talent (not merely skill) is actually something you can teach or really explain (despite the numerous books that claim to do so - it's just training, but normal people are literally "naturals").

I think, though this is just my opinion, that normal people don't merely just possess social skills. The word skill implies something that you learn, but if I (an autist), for example, simply observe normal people I can clearly see it's more than mere skill, it's more like a "gift" or "talent" because they are just such naturals at socializing.

It's the same as everything else in life. Any layman can become fairly proficient in the law for example, so he can have a basic understanding of it and know just enough to get by in whatever legal situation he finds himself in. However, the lawyer is set apart from the layman because he has that added something, a gift or talent for understanding and applying the law, he truly KNOWS the law and plays a different ballgame with a different set of rules all together.

Why it becomes an issue is the isolation aspect of autism. You see where "gifted" people are normally associated with the exception rather than the rule, social "talent" is so distributed that the socially gifted are the rule rather than the exception, purely due to numbers. Remember, it is frequent, regular occurrence of something that makes people define it as the "norm". It just so happens (call it a cruel trick of nature, or whatever) that being socially gifted (we usually see being gifted as being exceptional) is something that is a very regular occurrence, and I think people forget that there can be someone who doesn't have that gift. When something happens regularly, people take it for granted and forget that the case of non-occurrence can also happen and then when it does, they're kind of unprepared for it and deal with it rather shockingly in my opinion. But, you can't blame them, yes, it is weird or unusual, so... and understanding is about the best thing one can do .

But, that DOES NOT make the autist any less of a human being than anyone else! And, I find we tend to forget that we have gifts they'll NEVER have. We too are gifted, very gifted, just in a different way, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The problem is the numbers game. You see, take a normal person, X1 and say he/she has 100 friends in total. Let's say 1 out of that 100 is a person with autism, let's call him Y, and let's call the other 99 normal friends X2 to X99 (I know, just bear with me ). X1 can easily lose Y and still have many friends (99 of them, X2-X99) and be more or less the same amount of happy, because X1 doesn't have the time or patience to deal with Y's special needs, and decides it's easier and less effort to cut Y out then to deal with Y. But, looking from Y's perspective, even if Y too had 100 friends (unlikely but for the sake of sameness), autism is so unique that they are all likely to be X-type (normal people). Now, you see, Y's friends who are X's can easily turn around and all take the same approach as X1 did, no harm done to them because that specific X still has the 99 other X's to keep them happy, and if you take it, Y being autistic never really enriched the X's lives in the way they felt it should be enriched. So, X's stay happy, but Y gets totally isolated.

That's always been the problem, us as autistic people have always needed to play the normal people's social games if we want friends in our lives, they don't have to play our ballgame because if they fail at being our friend, they simply cut us out and chalk it up as a loss of 1 versus 999 wins, which still makes them a winner. I mean, who cares about one red apple in a barrel of 1000 green ones, right? Just toss it out.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to be cynical, but sometimes I feel as though normal people will never understand what we go through on a daily basis trying to live in the world they created.