Asperger’s / autism vocabulary 201 ~ a proposal toward a 21st-century shift

Yesterday, I celebrated six months of awareness of my true nature: I am autistic (Asperger’s).

This does not make me an expert (at least, not in the academic sense).  It doesn’t grant me a magical power to speak for anyone else.

In the last six months, I’ve investigated this topic–and indeed this “alternate world” (at least, for me) with abnormal intensity.

But really, all I was doing was searching for terms and ideas that more-eloquently described what I had already been experiencing throughout my entire life.  I had already felt those feelings, thought those thoughts, and struggled with those invisible differences; what I learned during my searching merely helped me identify and articulate them.

During this search, however, I noticed some patterns (ha) that struck me.  The official diagnostic criteria and other conventional authoritative sources of information focused on what they observed through their own perspective lens; specifically, what they…