I feel I have sacrificed the gifts from my Aspieness in order to fit in. Maybe if I had been diagnosed earlier I would not have spent a whole life trying to fit in, and would have been able to forgive my own social deficits, thus saving the energy and intellect required to pretend to be normal, which I could have dedicated to things that I really wanted to do, such as research into science and/or languages. (Woman with autism)