What keeps me up at night?
That time my retarded @$$ sold her soul and became the Baroness.
Apparently I came with a certain set of skills.
Quite the career trajectory for a brain somebody once documented primarily by what they believed it couldnโt do.
Looking back, a lot of the skills I relied on were things I had already spent a lifetime developing just trying to navigate the world autistic.
Pattern recognition. Hyperfocus. Systems thinking. Research. Attention to anomalies. Remembering seemingly insignificant details. Watching behavior long enough to establish a baseline. Noticing when something changes. Compartmentalizing information. Following something down a rabbit hole long after everyone else has moved on.
And masking.
When people arenโt particularly intuitive, you learn to study them.
Tone. Cadence. Facial expressions. Posture. Language. Hierarchy. Routines. Expectations.
What people say compared to what they do.
You observe before participating. You learn the patterns. You adjust.
None of these things are exclusive to autism, nor does being autistic inherently make someone suited for intelligence, investigations, military, cyber, or protective work.
It just happens that some of the things I spent years developing in order to function were also useful in environments that valued observation, discretion, persistence, analysis, adaptability, and noticing what didnโt belong.
A somewhat unexpected return on investment for a developmental disability.