We're not odd, we're the future. I'm going to dive into this using my own experience to open a new thread, fitness for the less able, including the mentally atypical: and the first thing I'm going to do is define Aspergers from within.
An Aspie is someone who has a natal condition which makes us less capable of identification with our peers. We don't care as much, and so are less manipulable, which makes us less popular: often the first hint is when a child voluntarily disassociates themselves from their peers and gets bullied as a result.
We can no more change this than a homosexual can: to us, you typicals are wired differently. So are women. So what? There is probably a long list of other such atypical conditions. We live with it, so should you.
From a psychological angle, Aspies are the lite end of the autistic spectrum. I'm so lite I carry little burden at all (indeed, I feel something of a fraud, as I'm able to quip and joke with the best), others are far further into their own world - and I'd like to put a marker down for them. They are humans too, just far more individual than most. If you cut us, do we not bleed? If anything, we're far more in need of sports support, as we don't identify with the team ethic. Teams kicked my butt - literally - from one end of the pitch to the other in my adolescence. Later on, in management team-building exercises, we'd occasionally be asked to build rafts - which would inevitably fall apart halfway across whatever lake they used, because they were built by people who occasionally manage a granny-knot to tie a parcel. The military trained me as an assault pioneer, I'm an occasional member of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, most of whom are well on the scale! A Rahere-built raft doesn't fall apart, square lashings are frapped and cross-pieces braced so they don't twist in either axis. So, when they ignored me, I'd cut to the core and jump straight in, having a good time swimming while the idiots wrestle with ropes and loathe me. If that's the point of the thing, save time and show that it's not so much a question of overcoming the disappointment of failure as refusing the script in the first place. Social sadism doesn't work if you reject the masochism of accepting it and, thinking outside the box, turn the entire thing into a farce. At least I came prepared dressed in a swimsuit under my clothes! Is that am embarassment, laughing in the face of tutors who know less than me, or is it applied, slightly outré intelligence? That's an Aspie for you, living in the world of applied satire because it's the only possible response to political **ahem**s whose intelligence is between half and a third of mine. You don't have to be clever to be strong, although it undoubtedly helps, which is what I'm on about: Aspies need a different approach from the one here. Peer group pressures's actually a "hygiene" factor in Herzergian terms, a powerful demotivator, to us. We're not like you, we cannot change, so it's rather oppressive to try. It's like trying to force a LGTBQ to go "straight", it won't work.
Asperger's work was only known in Germany when I was young, his works were only translated into English in 1981. I was only diagnosed - as a mild case - in 2015, when I was 60. It seems to come with my IQ, which is considerable. Others who knew the Sydrome recognised parts of it in me, I had no reason to pursue it previously, which to some extent was a very Aspie reaction, if you can't come to me, don't expect me to come to you, I don't have what you expect I should have to allow me to do so. I've thought through and rationalised in depth where I stand, I recognise others stand elsewhere, I'm immune to your charisma. If you try to force me to sign up, I'll rather die, which creates an odd relationship to the average gym jock.
In my case, it's aggravated by a childhood abuse incident. In primary, I had a superb teacher who took me from a poorish sportsman to close to Olympic standards. The mind-game to control my body for perfect performance, I recently met and got to know quite well the Chief Coach of the Romanian gymnastics team which produced Nadia Comaneci, he knew exactly that form of the inner game of mastery of one's subject, and that is something an Aspie will respond well to. Then I moved to Secondary and the sadist torturer, and the end of my sports spirit. He tortured me, to a standard outlawed by the UN
I went to University at Loughborough, which was alongside the Sports College. There, I learned the psycho-dynamic he used: he was into winning-as-killing, defeat the enemy at all costs, the essence of Sports. I was on the other path, though, taking the first steps in what would become a different and far more positive dynamic, positive competition to build the better man, and thence to the Peace Agenda between States. I matched and demonstrated capabilities which at first astonished, and are now a norm, for the Security Services. Where the old-school unreformed jock wants "kill! kill!" negative competition, the essence of what we should be is sharpening each other by contrast in positive competition, games played for enjoyment and nothing more, The Little Engine Who Could, "I think I can, I know I can, yes, done it." It doesn't matter that Jock Thug also can, it's enough that my Personal Best just got a little more wholesome.
So don't fret about "odd", make that "special". The Aspies I know are the children of parents who were already outstanding, and took it further. I completed an aspect of my mother's work, without ever planning or intending to do so - modern miracles R us. Advanced technology as in the original sense of the word, knowing a technique, how to do something. In my case, that comes in through some spiritual dynamic, which tests at Reiki Master level, yet is far more than that narrowly-defined Organisation. With improving health, people are getting cleverer, and wiser, and will walk this path more and more. Our job is to add more to the motivation, so it's no longer about "fastest, highest, strongest", of which there's only one winner and six or seven billion losers, and more about "faster, higher, stronger", which is about who we are at heart, our own truths turning ego into social well-doing, turning doing the best we can do into being the best we can be, poor though it may be.
