when people first meet me they always say dumb shit like "really? you don't strike me as autistic at all actually. π€"
then after several months of constant meticulously-structured off-the-cuff forty-minute essays on the history of ice cream sprinkles, it begins to sink in...
really it's code for, "i don't know what autism is actually even if i think i do but i hear it's bad and you seem like what i consider a normal person, not 'one of them,' so it's easier to assume you're wrong about yourself than to question my preconceptions about other people."