What’s the difference between being austistic and just being socially awkward?
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Social awkwardness is largely contextual. It’s not that some people are social and others not so much as people specialize in different social settings in much the same way that some people speak French and some people speak German.
If you send a mathematician to a Fashion Show, they’re almost certainly going to come off as ‘socially awkward’. But if you sent the average attendee at a Fashion Show to a mathematics conference, they’d feel equally out-of-place.
In contrast, autism is a developmental disorder that impedes your ability to deal with social cues of any kind. A convention of mathematicians, a convention of fashion designers or a convention of football enthusiasts are all social settings. A convention of autistic people? They can’t relate to one another appreciably better than they relate to anyone else. They’re not speaking a different language so much as having difficulty processing any language.
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