It seems to me that social isolation can result in a lack of peer to peer social education. With the absence of such, it's left to people with SPD (or potential SPD) to create their own methods and find their own answers about the nature of things.

Like a remote tribe in the amazon, we are left to develop in parallel to the society around them: speaking own language, creating our own culture and customs, developing our own sciences and methods, and telling our own myths and legends.

In order to function with the outside world, we have to develop a keen sense of intuition rather than true understanding. The alienation of essentially entering a foreign society when we step out the door causes the dysfunction, because unlike the other cluster A personalities, schizotypals are social creatures, but don't understand how to adapt to normal conventions and often miss the mark when attempting to do so. Always having to translate and intuit our output and input leads to the strange way we have of being both very literal due to our learned responses, and very metaphorical due to our expressing our inner world in a way that others might be able to interpret.

The misunderstandings and judgements that come as a result are what enforce our isolation, further causing social withdrawal and compounding the problem. The thing is, our internal logic and mannerisms make sense, and are logical, practical, and effective, though sometimes inefficient. The problem is that we need other people to operate on at least the same level of intuitiveness that we have. We need others to meet us halfway, which most people do not because they never needed to before and probably never will need to again. It makes me wonder how many SPD's go into education, seemingly prodigies in their chosen fields, only to fail because they can't adapt to professional standards. For example, the computer code we wrote might work perfectly, but it's no good if the next guy it gets passed to can't understand or work with it.

I've found that I tend to understand, and be understood, better by other people operating on an intuitive level. People who don't speak my language at all and who I have to communicate with through gestures and body language. Other people with with mental disorders such as schizophrenia, who are operating from an alien point of reference but are used to intuitive communication to express themselves. Even with animals who speak a simple language of needs and desire are easier to connect and communicate with than "normal" people.

Errr... I think I'm going off on a tangent here, so back to the question at hand. How many people here with SPD have are socially deprived and "fringe" due to the things I mentioned above? And was it a case of the chicken or the egg for you?