Clothes are a determining aspect of the Human phenomenon. I do wear them, too!
Let me ramble about this:

All the while I am not known for being sharp-dressed, I remember a time when I felt excitement around fashion. That must have been around puberty, where curiosity towards the expanding world, the feeling of the own potential and wild hormones take over much of life’s trends.

Still, I had my good old clothes that I knew the feel of.
As a child, so go the stories, I wasn’t gonna have any new beanie or didn’t get the point of trying on shoes that I didn’t even like from the outside.

It took many years, before I switched from wearing my current pair of glasses or everyday shoes to rags before buying new ones, towards having a 2-shoe-system and two pairs of glasses at my disposal.
I can even tell of the newly found advantage of being able to make a non-essential choice about those outer aspects, which supplies a small amount of feeling empowered every day.

Were I not aware of the existence of fashionability or taste, I probably would go for cargo leg wear and all sorts of hoodies with pockets. Aren’t pockets so practical for transporting allll the useful tools and trinkets you might need out and about? And don’t get me started on jackets, aka ‘the man’s purse’! 😀
The more palpable functions a piece of clothing possesses, the better I feel owning it.

Modularity is a wonderful thing as well! The easier to combine anything in the closet, the less thought must go into the whole process.
Then again, some people might be not familiar with the possibility to pair some shorts with a hoodie or even skiing socks, the coolest kind of sock, so versatile!
Colours are somewhat more of a novelty, a personal touch of choice, as my favourite Red doesn’t pair with many colours. Another detail is anything written or depicted on my clothes. There is a brand clearly stating my own name, a no-brainer when it comes to choosing new clothes, but I really like to make up my own designs to get printed on clothes, so that they may always have meaning on top of function.

Choosing what to wear is hard enough, but with an unruly waist, sometimes clothes get tighter than we want.
But next to the fact that I notoriously often choose poorly in regard to weather and temperature (hoodies are just too comfy), I also don’t recognize the faint possibility to exchange tighter shirts for wider ones, because my wardrobe seems to be pre-calculated for the most part and not subject to spontaneity.
This leads to dismay more often than I care to admit.

And why don’t I ditch that 10-year-old jacket that I refuse to see as worn-out yet?
Because it has the most wonderful Velcro patch, which I use for stimming when shopping, for example.

Sensory-wise, clothes are ever-present; so they’d better make us feel nice, shouldn’t they?

This article scratches the surface of that pressing question, “Should I be diagnosed or better not?”.

And that is the first point I’d like to make: A determining factor is how pressing the matter becomes. (unbecoming wordplay: how de-pressing it becomes)
As for me, at a point a few years ago it became so unbearable, I sought diagnosis. But for others, who objectively could easily fit into the criteria, it is most apparently not pressing, if even a question in life at all.

The second big thing about it is about chances and struggles. Two opposing factors, determining a life’s success, though depending on our decisions towards them.
An official diagnosis opens up bureaucratic access to specific sources of help and support, differing mostly in regional availability.
Not every person, doctor or employer around me understands or endorses the changing process, but it all remains a matter of understanding neurodiversity, and we seem not to be quite there yet in society…
To say it in an abstract way: The way I live up to my good will might have changed, but not the good will itself. In a perfect world, there would be no question about that at all.

Being diagnosed does alter only one factor, to have the most official external affirmation of this complex and deeply-rooted neurological phenomenon.
It is one fine thing, to feel truly connected to a group of people you share so much more with than with the majority of those around you, but the rationally strong side of autism doesn’t allow for certainty without the best-known source.
In the past, I only pondered autism when I had bad days, but in my better days I just polished the armour again and tried to fit into whatever shape had a good rulebook to follow.
This might be the strongest point for me. That I lived through years and years of denying myself closure about a pressing struggle, navigating the daily minefield towards my chances, which could never account for the level of difficulty I was living on.

For when you go and get a diagnosis, it becomes a serious responsibility to act true to your nature and to your needs.
Following this responsibility might stir up your surroundings, abolish old habits, destroy perfected routines and holds up a plane mirror in which my own projection of myself didn’t fit the shape I began to see.

All this change hurts and seems to lead me away from what I thought my life should be.
But shouldn’t my life be about evolving, about healthy choices, about taking myself seriously, about being happy, in order to make the people around me happy?

Even though I am going through changes now, my diagnosis helped me to go in the right direction and to never doubt the reality of it. And the reward is a life more true and more direct and more unmasked, just how I like it.

A secret I couldn’t solve for a long time. How I could be doing grown-up stuff maybe, but how to truly be grown up, a great mystery!
Being a grownup, that’s the job of those who have already grown up. But at a point, a point of dreaded change, I have more in common with them than I used to look up to.

Still, there are goofy grownups, stern grownups, respectable grownups and idiots and role models and walking warning signs and complex individuals paving the ways of society.
As a person of his mask, I am always looking for an ideal, some golden thread to follow. I have mastered many areas of life with this strategy, for better or worse.
But I couldn’t figure out how to be a real grownup, which all humans seem to become eventually.

But then I found it.
The thing that makes a grownup grown up, despite varying age, silliness, vocational position or family configuration.

It is the amount of responsibility one takes on.

It makes sense, that a 16-year-old moving out is more grown up than a 25-year-old stretching their legs under the loving parent’s table and even the same person can be a grownup at work and a child-per-definition at home, in the absence of responsibilities. That said, becoming a parent should result in one of the greatest responsibilities of a human.
Some responsibilities are handed over, some are bestowed upon, some are lying around, some are more and some are less highly regarded.

The universal traits of the average grownup, be it a lack of goofiness, being weirdly organised or thinking twice, are only a reaction to the assumed responsibility, of whichever kind and whichever place.

Responsibilities don’t exclusively affect the outside world, though. There is an oftentimes neglected part of a human’s life, which is better off being graced by immediate responsibility and even care. And that is our inner world, the lifelong journey of discovery into our depths and the response to what we might find.

In the past years, I had much inner evolving to do, in terms of assuming responsibility for what I found out about my inner workings.

A child gets its world built and in turn builds its world.
And thinking of it as world-building, at some point I had to learn to live in the grownup world I’ve been cooking up inside my brain. With the funny twist of not adding that very brain into the grand equation.

Wouldn’t it have been “the responsible thing to do” to plan out that world with the highly specialised perks and inevitable limitations of the autistic brain?
If only I knew… Or did I, in fact? Because I built many parts of my inner and outer surroundings to be autism-fit already.
But do these function with standard requirements of a perceived grownup? Or do they rather fit the characteristics of the life of a child?
To make sense of this mystery time and time again, I like to remind myself that being a grownup has no other determinator than the amount of responsibility resting comfortably on my shoulders.

And my, have I grown evolved lately!

We don’t have to be grown up to reach our potential, we need to take on responsibility of our own potential in order to be grown up.

We are surrounded by this buzzword. It makes everything so much easier, better, faster!

Today, it seems impossible to move forward without artificial intelligence, and vast amounts of natural intelligence are being employed to make artificial intelligence as natural as possible.

But why am I so fascinated by this topic, especially when I usually write about experiencing life with autism?

Without a clear purpose, AI is useless.

Basically, this is true for any computer program. It is created for a specific reason, and every routine has a purpose—at least in the beginning.

Input and output interfaces are defined, and software only works properly with a well-defined and useful query. The same applies to AI. And the same applies to me.

If I don’t have a reason or motivation to do something specific, or anything at all, I just lie there. Sure, some hardware triggers are built in, but even those are less reliably activated by their software methods than I would like.

Without basic programming, AI cannot function.

We imagine AI as something that “thinks on its own”. But even its very existence is based on a clear objective and purpose.
We even get creeped out when AI seems to defy that purpose or acts beyond our understanding. However, it would never do so without some kind of trigger or prior preparation and training that enabled it to adopt such behaviour.

My programming was shaped by my parents, my family, school with its teachers and students, workplaces, friends, travels, and the resulting incremental accumulation of knowledge.
This also includes learning how to learn independently, constantly refining my own software to ensure compatibility with both my own hardware and external interfaces. It often feels like walking a tightrope while balancing it out with paradoxes!

Without predefined rules, AI will always take the path of least resistance.

AI can be guided by certain guardrails, either set by the programmer or by the user (if programmed to allow such input), to align its solutions with human preferences as closely as possible.

Otherwise, you might get either overly concise responses in an AI chat or endless dissertations instead of friendly answers in the tone humans prefer.
It seems that the form of the response often carries more weight than the bare content. Of course: It’s how humans understand things, and that’s what matters most.

Also, no AI would lie on its own; lying is a purely human concept. Yet despite the surplus computational effort involved in lying, it somehow seems essential in society. And this is where things become contradictory: the rules of this rule-breaking are often intangible.

Without sources, AI would have no foundation. Every piece of knowledge is based on something.

We’re familiar with certain AI services that directly cite their sources when presenting information.

I’m often asked questions like “How do you see the world?” or “How does your daily life work?” or “Why do you do things this way?” For these (and essentially any other question), I’ve been able to provide comprehensive answers for as long as I can remember—because questions beginning with “Why” have always occupied me deeply.

I rely on my internal encyclopedia, which I’ve been feeding throughout my life. Over time, I’ve become increasingly selective about my sources of knowledge, so that I prefer collecting “reliable” information (like car models, cell phones, or geographical facts) over consulting the ever-changing and emotionally warped world of human information.

But I still foster an unabridged fascination with this very unknown and the royal league of human-social skills, of which I’ve managed to build a range of social abilities, thanks to Knigge, Carnegie, and plenty of observation.

And yet, my statements often receive feedback like “not helpful,” prompting me to revise my algorithm. When I get feedback like “everything’s fine” (which happens far more often overall), there’s no reason for further improvement and I can redirect my energy elsewhere.
This explains the annoying focus on “the negative”: positive feedback requires no optimization because everything already works as intended. You see this pattern in many people too.

A thing entirely different: human identity and personality

Does AI know how a human feels? How does AI know what kind of response will resonate with someone? How does AI “see” its user?
Can we expect AI to give answers beyond what its sources and communication guidelines dictate?

In programming, it’s indispensable; board games would be unthinkable without it; works of art would be literally one-dimensional; and even our world of thoughts could hardly separate one thing from another without it.

My life consists of countless moments where I behaved inappropriately in the face of the prevailing rules and said or did improper things despite feeling to know best.
So why did I not hit bullseye?
Because I got lost in my layers of abstraction and landed in a divergent reality that, up to a point, ticked all the boxes flawlessly but still couldn’t do everything that human intuition covers.

What is Abstraction?

Abstraction is a depiction of a thing that reduces that same thing to certain basic features. On one side is the concrete and unambiguous thing, on the other side are the most important features for the current process. Often there are multiple layers of abstraction, so that the features become fewer and more important at the same time.

Before we view and process each and any impulse as uniquely new information, we build up a library of nested compartments that allow us to approach the matter more quickly.
This is not without fault and requires constant adjustment and fine-tuning, but it helps more than it sparks effort. Every human does this with every piece of information naturally; though sometimes more, sometimes less.

What Does Abstraction Mean to Me?

This separation, subdivision, and gradual generalization of information suits the rational property of my brain perfectly. As a hyper-feeler, I quickly learned that I can put the often times rather unwelcome emotional reactions in chains this way.

This works well as a customer service employee to not let an outburst of anger get even close to you, but also as a colleague to maintain a pleasant attitude.

So far, I’ve looked at my ability to abstract as something I can do well, and that helps me.
But I realized far too late that I’ve moved further and further away from my actual needs and feelings, just to conform to the rules of my environment.

While I consciously experience and utilise these layers of abstraction, the majority of people seem to operate those intuitively and even automatically.

How Does Abstraction Work?

Using the following (abstracted) graphic on emotions in everyday work life, I want to show as an example how layers of abstraction separate my inner self from external human influences and how I imagine that this would work both ways:

Isn’t That Great?

It’s super great as long as both parties find each other and the good feeling is based on truth.

While I do operate my layers of abstraction consciously and am always able to derive the truths (even if that usually requires a lot of energy), many living beings around me seem to sort out their feelings much more unfiltrated.

I rarely find myself in the position personally to let my feelings pass unmediated or doing something “just like that.” No, without my layers of abstraction, I’m overwhelmed all too quickly, for which I would need a particularly secure space before I allow it.

This imaging suggests that I’m rarely directly connected to myself, and I can confirm that: It’s an autistic experience.

Behind the multi-layered protective wall, I’m safe from direct contact with the outside world, but due to that it’s not guaranteed that signals reach me as intended, or that my signals are received as I thought out.

Now, what is Real?

Real is what we agree on.

Only this can take place at different levels of abstraction. Otherwise, we would just tell our life stories when asked “How are you?” or not be capable of irony and sarcasm at all.

The latter are still denied to autistic people, but that’s only because we haven’t found enough layers of abstraction there yet. Once those are in operation, it’s often everyone else who can’t comprehend our humour and the twisted, inappropriate things.

What helps then are translators or help in the form of siblings, friends, and advocates. Because where true understanding is lived, we will quickly agree, and that feels truly, genuinely, and undisputably good.