Quirk or wiring?

April is autism awareness month. Yesterday, I posted a comic strip about navigating social situations as an autistic person. I want to spend this month going deeper, with regular posts on experiencing autism. A good place to start is the difference between a psychological trait and a neurological one. A lot of autistic experiences look like personality traits from the outside. Introversion. Shyness. Social awkwardness. These are things many people relate to, and that relatability is both a bridge and a trap. It creates the impression we're talking about the same thing, just more so. They are also not helped by the common misconception that 'spectrum' means a "vertical" scale from normal to autistic, rather than a "horizontal" one within the neurological condition of autism. My wife has transverse myelitis, a condition where the myelin sheath around the spinal cord degrades, disrupting nerve signals. The result: both motor and sensory pathways are affected, and the automatic reflex arc