I'm a high-IQ Aspie, professionally successful in my very narrow, very complicated technical niche. Always felt very different from other people, but tried my best to blend in, not very successfully, but together with tactical use of alcohol as social lubricant managed to get somewhat accepted as one of those smart well-meaning weirdos. Good with me. Discovering I'm an Aspie gave me answers to most of questions I had as to why I'm different and gave me peace. Still, one unusual trait still bothers me a lot.
I have always felt like a machine with engine on but no driver inside. Always had trouble formulating what I wanted. Because I had no specific wants/interests beside the few rudimentary ones - eating, sleeping, reading random information and playing primitive computer games. As a result, I spend my days either reacting to external inputs (school classes, instructions by my boss, requests by my colleagues, family) or when left alone, just staying at home doing nothing. I prefer doing nothing best, hence the analogy to machine with engine on but no driver inside.
I see other people having an internal need to move around, do things, interact with others, build and execute on longer-term plans. I don't have that internal need, I would want to have it but can't find it inside myself. And I also lack that longer-term thinking somehow. Every morning I wake up, and it feels I'm a new person, and have to spend some moments to rebuild an picture of myself in my head, and figure out why and what should I do today. I sometimes try to write down my thoughts and future plans in the evening, to pass over to the morning-me, but don't work that way, you can't download your person in the evening and upload in the morning, so I feel like a blank sheet in the morning :(
Long story short, I was binge-reading Uta Frith and Simon Baron-Cohen writings on autism, and saw there a description of "weakly-developed/absent self" as one of autistic expressions, and it struck me as a perfect match to how I perceive myself.
Since then, trying to find out more about this, but no luck. My thinking -
1) maybe there are ways to train and strengthen the "self" somehow?
2) if I could find out, how the "normal self" functions, I could somehow reverse engineer it in my head, like I do with all those social interactions etc.
3) if there are people like me, maybe they have tactics or strategies I could try
Any ideas, tactics and reading links much appreciated!
Even if no ideas, please shout out if you have felt in similar way. I have read many many Aspie-personal-story books, and have never seen weak selfs there, only the strong ones. So either weak-self Aspies don't write books, or I'm pretty alone here.
