Unsurprisingly, she doesn't think so. When I asked whether she had ever been tested, she replied:
No, I haven't, and I don't have any reason to believe I'm on the autism spectrum. I'm curious as to why you asked, though. What makes you think I might be?
I wasn't going to give her my real reasons for thinking so, which I hint at here and here and here (for example) … and in other posts linked out of those ones. Any suggestion that she is in any way imperfect makes her furious, even though (or perhaps because) she thinks of herself as a failure in many ways. (See e.g. here and here.) So I wanted to write something that put any onus on me but might make her look at the data just a bit. I replied:
Obviously I’m no doctor.
But I was reading something about it the other day, and realized that the specific manners in which I often tried to communicate with you would have been very unsatisfactory for anyone afflicted with Asperger’s or anything like it.
Reasoning backwards made me think that IF (hypothetically) you had suffered from any syndrome along that spectrum, then it would be perfectly obvious why some of the ways I tried to communicate were in fact so unsatisfactory for you. (And I think neither of us ever claimed communication with the other to be a real strong suit.)
That’s only enough to raise the question, and clearly not enough to deduce an answer. Logically speaking, my communications could have been unsatisfactory in plenty of other ways too. But it made me wonder. And I know you have collected enough zebra-weird diagnoses over the years that it’s entirely possible there was one I didn’t remember.
If nothing else, you can tell Counselor that I asked so the two of you can get a good laugh at what a silly question it was. :-D
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