(Oh no, it's another wall of text. I really need to stop doing that. Especially at 2am on a school night.)

As I've said in other threads, I'm not an officially diagnosed Aspie but I definitely suspect that I have it. And I guess I'm something of a hybrid of the "stereotypical" Aspie boy and and the "stereotypical" Aspie girl (if you can even call it that).

For example, my interests lie in math, music, and medicine (although the medical part is pretty limited given my choices to pursue the other two). My hobbies are somewhat creative in nature such as crochet, drawing, and what could be considered drafting (i.e. drawing in a very metered way with an emphasis on lines and shapes); however, I could never be a music composition major. I know the Greek alphabet and in fact used to take notes using that alphabet in order to keep people from wanting to borrow my notes only to never give them back. I'm learning IPA now for the fun of it as well.

I'm socially awkward and usually pretty clueless. Today during a rehearsal, we were on break, and I was messing with my music when this guy comes up to me, and to make a long story short I basically was super aloof and didn't realize what was happening until he walked away. I'm blunt and a bit sarcastic (deadpan) and enjoy self-deprecating humor. All at the same time, I can scream "OOOOHHHH MMMYYYY GOOOSSSHHH I LOVE YOUR SHIRT" with the rest of them but it usually feels fake and empty. Deadpan is my go-to for vocal inflections. So I'm functional, just tuned a little bit differently, and if we can't find a mutual frequency then it's all just static. Also, I'm pretty non-confrontational, so my relationships with other people are stable enough.

My empathy is the logical kind - I can see a sad person and know that they're sad, but unless I know that the reason they're sad is also something that has evoked sadness in me already, I will feel nothing. I'm really bad at handling other people's emotional outbreaks. Um. There there? -awkward Sheldonesque hug and pat pat- (The other person might start giggling at that because of the Sheldon parallels so I guess it works?)

I'm kind of bad at emulating empathy and emotions as well because, as I said, it doesn't often feel real. And if it doesn't feel real, I won't put as much effort into it. I have a hard time with this as a music performance major because a good performer is marked by his/her musicality and ability to communicate emotions, however strong or subtle, through the medium of their music. Technicality is secondary. I'm the person who practices the technical for the technical and does just fine with it technically, and who fails to see the musical opportunity within those technical exercises. I've been able to successfully "connect" emotionally to maybe three pieces out of all of the repertoire/etudes/exercises I've played. The rest of the time, if I'm doing shaping and musical stuff, it's probably robotic and it's probably because it's written in or copied from some other performer. (This makes playing the composition majors' pieces difficult because there is no reference recording except for the robotic MIDI files generated by notation software, for which I have an unfortunate affinity.)

My roommate told me the other day that I remind her a lot of her crush from high school who is a diagnosed Aspie male, that some of the things I say are almost exactly what/how he would say.

Does my experience help answer the original question? I don't know. I don't even have an official diagnosis, so who can really tell? (If it helps, when I answer honestly I usually score half-and-half NT/Aspie on the Baron-Cohen test with just a slight edge given to Aspie.)



Regarding the stereotypes brought up earlier, I've heard that grown females/women with Asperger's are a lot more likely to be diagnosed as Borderline PD than as autistic, probably due to the usually-present instability of their social relationships.