I've often mused that trying to work out how other people feel is like a goldfish in a bowl in the living room trying to work out what's in the kitchen, and also work out how humans would experience the inside of the goldfish bowl.
So it is with my autism; it colours my view of the world outside me, and makes it tricky to see objectively and play the "how would it feel if we swapped places" game.
But I'm at long last starting to see a little more clearly & wanted to give two examples.
1. I was supporting my wife recently at a half marathon. I've done one before but it hurt and I didn't fancy 13 miles again, so I decided to support. I ended up stood with two people from our running club - two of the loveliest people you could imagine - waiting for my wife to appear and cheering on the other runners. I know how much of a boost I get from cheers and encouragement when I'm running myself, but when it came to cheering on others I couldn't muster the energy or enthusiasm to overcome my reluctance to engage with the strangers running by. What struck me was the contrast between how I was feeling and how my pals were feeling; they were "loving it" and engaged emotionally even though they weren't running: I was flat as a pancake, bored, and wanting to go home or at least somewhere quiet (I did eventually slip away for a coffee on my own which was bliss). I couldn't have cared less about the other runners.
2. In the past (and there's been another recent example) I've watched an interview on TV with someone famous in some kind of crisis, and simply thought, aha, yep, all perfectly logical and I'd probably say something similar, only to find that everyone else on the planet is now in some kind of outrage over the way the person expressed themselves. The things that caused the outrage clearly zipped by me about twenty feet above my head. This is a repeatable experiment.
Anyway, this is helpful to me because it allows me to place one of the jigsaw pieces firmly and with confidence into the jigsaw puzzle that represents my life, and to go back into my mind wondering what would happen if goldfish could do jigsaws, and how you'd make a waterproof jigsaw, and all sorts of other things that are far easier than the stuff above.
And it helps me relax into my diagnosis and embrace my autism rather than worry about being a fraud; the mud is clearing, at least a little.