Published on 12, July, 2020
Or are you like me? Expecting at any moment to be outed as an intellectual fraud. It's an area of high,possibly pathological,insecurity for me. I think it connects to the bullying related trauma. Being treated as a lesser person by my school age contemporaries, especially as a teenager.
I am confident that I am intelligent. However, I have a disconnect between being confident that I am intelligent in the abstract and very deep doubts about my abilities to be useful in the world, my basic 'competence'. This was much more so in my younger days. Now that I have an academic and scientific research career behind me, and have published papers that have been cited by other scientists over 1,300 times, I no longer question my abilities to any great extent.
I suspect that it was a confidence issue, many rather dim neurotypicals have supreme (misplaced) confidence in their abilities. However, I think that autistics get so many criticisms in everyday life and social interactions that, even when we are very intelligent, we have been conditioned to doubt our convictions constantly.
Martin said: However, I have a disconnect between being confident that I am intelligent in the abstract and very deep doubts about my abilities to be useful in the world, my basic 'competence'.
That sums up my experience well. I'm a complete dunderhead when it comes to real life situations requiring the need to be practical, but have some reasonably good scores when it comes to high range IQ tests(yes I know they're controversial).