Autism

It's a reason why I've not been actively pursuing a diagnosis. I'm managing it well and having a paper trail would just make some things more difficult.

That you have to do all of that for a driver's license is wild... physical and psychological evaluations?! For a drivers license?!

Maybe you need to work on masking. Pretending to be a "normal" person to fit in is a big pain, and something I personally hate. But if you act "normal" when meeting new people, they will treat you like everyone else. It's tough to act this way but it might help you.

(It also sucks that we can't be accepted the way we are, but that's how the world is. As much as we might want to change the world, we also have to live in it as it is day to day)

I went through some similar issues at work. I'm pretty good when it comes to understanding technical stuff with their proper names and schematics, but I struggle awfully at understanding organisations (who to talk to when this issue arises, what to do when that stuff comes up, etc). I've been called disappointing because of it, yet as far as I can see I'm the most technically competent person on the team, by far.
It's really frustrating and I have to rely a lot on other people when it comes to organising.
Thankfully the guy I mainly work with is very understanding and helps me a ton on that.

Well, I dont think anyone can answer this definitively. But I recon its multiple things:

• autism is still widely unknown/not understood
• we‘re just starting to see people advocating since more and more keep getting diagnosed
• teachers are often not autistic and/or come from a generation that frowns upon disclosure of medical information
• lots of prejudice
• since you have slovene as a language, I recon you might be from slovenia, which is in europe. Europe is far behind the US in autism advocacy and slovenia as part of the balkans could be even further behind (feel free to tell me otherwise if you‘ve ever visited france, germany or GB for example)
• autistics afaik often report problems with speaking their mind or explaining their thought process (which would include me) and therefore get underestimated

Those are just my thoughts and opinions. Nothing of this is proven fact and I am happy to stand corrected. Just trying to give some ideas of why this might be a unhappy coincidence.

You can always decide to change this and write up a lecture or speech which you can hold at some event if thats your cup of tea. You can then educate large amounts of people in a short timeframe. Good luck.

because people look for indicators they recognise to assess intelligence and you don't fit their mental model as easily.

you could be cynical and say much of that presentation is manipulated and not a reliable indicator of intelligence, it's just that intelligent people are usually better at controlling their signals - unless they have difficulties with social nuances like us. you could also just shug and say you're different and they don't get it for a while, and that's fine too.

everyone is lazy and uses shortcuts to interpret a complex world. when you're different the shortcuts don't work and people make mistakes. they're also being lazy 🦥

Because most people don't understand that developmental disabilities aren't always intellectual. Same reason a lot of people treat bind, deaf, or other physically disabled people like they are also intellectually disabled.

it's just prejudice.

Same as Black people are subjected to automatic devaluation/abuse, so we are, too.

What's sad about it is that evidence doesn't have any validity to Kahneman System-1 mind ( read "Thinking Fast & Slow" to understand prejudice/ideology )..

Richard Feynman's autistic body-language was obvious-as-hell to anyone who knows to look, go see the youtubes of him, & see for yourself...

and that guy was some 400x as quick at physics as a normal physicist ( literally: a normal physicist did a lecture, giving 365/2 days of his work, Feynman wasn't at that lecture, he heard about it, and 1/2 days, ie that night, he not-only recreated the guy's work, but he took it further than the original guy did. He was THAT fast. ).

Autistics are underrepresented in motor-vehicle crash-statistics.

With reason: we're more rational, more predictable.

Prejudice will never allow facts to interfere with imprint/belief, however.

That is law in herdbeasts ( who have System-1 but not the considered-reasoning System-2 ) & in humans ( who, in theory have both systems, but we work to eradicate considered-reasoning, preferring ideology/prejudice, .. rather completely ), both.

Speaking from my own experiences.... (i'm diagnosed with autism and high-IQ)

People seem to read vulnerabilities they cant really place as general mental fucked upness. For example, I struggle when two people talk to me at the same time, or ask me several questions at once. Have a couple of these incidents happen and some people start treating me as if I'm missing a chromosome. I think when people are dealing with something thy know little about, some would rather fill the blanks with ignorance and stereotypes. You could invite them to learn more, but also... meh, their loss.

People who are familiar with autism, or being overloaded on info... they often automatically slow down, ask about my challenges, ect.

I've learned some tricks to demand respect though, you can't expect everyone to be sensible. I have an elaborate vocabulaire, and though I prefer to talk informal, sometimes talking slightly more formal than the person in front of you can keep them on their toes.

Another direction, I also like to deploy, is to just play the dumdum they think I am. It means less expectations, less bullshit. And honestly, nothing is more satisfying when halfway trough the year they find out you know the source material better than they do.

Another thing that has really worked for me is to surround myself with people who are eager to get to know me as an individual. In time this has also helped me grow the confidence to convince or even demand other people to understand how I work even if it originally isn't there priority.

Hope his helps

Bit late to this post, but whenever you're on a bureaucratic process where declaring that you're on the spectrum doesn't have any specific advantage that outweights everything else, you just don't bring it up, because you may come across idiots or even bad regulation.

I've already known a couple people in my country who were denied their driver's license because they mentioned their Asperger diagnosis. I didn't mention it, and when I ran for the driving test, while the examiner was somewhat nervous that I wasn't constantly trying to drive over the speed limit like everyone else, he appreciated that I was always actively looking in all directions to be extra cautious against any potential danger.

I feel this post so bad. I'm autistic but according to people that know me well, I'm also highly intelligent. Yet, when I first meet people without masking, they treat me as if I were stupid. This is such an issue in my life that I have often joked about getting a shirt that reads, "I'm autistic, not re****ed", but my NT friends have said that it's a bad idea. Anyway, this happens until a situation presents itself in which my intelligence is demonstrated, then people treat me as some sort of genius/savant. It's ridiculous, but I'm used to it.