Yup, it's wild that the pathology is so clearly obvious once people know to look for it, and yet we still have to have these conversations.

I'm getting from your reply here that you completely understood my original comment, meaning your comment to me asking about it was simply to provoke this conversation, not to actually talk about my point. Which is interesting, because I'm really interested (some may say eSPECIALy interested) in this topic, and would happily talk to you about it, had your original question been this message instead.

I'm also willing to concede that the autism diagnosis and acceptance is still really new for me, so I'm going through the phase of putting back together who I was and dealing with the fact that a lot of things that I've blamed myself for, for literally years, were simply because of this condition, and that some of my coping mechanisms have in fact been making me worse for a long time. It's weird to re-learn who you are as a person at 32 years old after having felt so sure of it for so long.

Which is what I think leads to these overly long explanations. I've been so misunderstood for so long that I'm literally afraid of it happening now.