Accepting my fate: I'm completely average.

As a kid, i'd always take pride in the fact that my memory was better than most peoples. I thought i was super smart because i was hyper-verbal, and could recall exactly what i needed to know at the right moment. I also had the innate talent to read people, even if i didn't put too much confidence in it. Maybe i was a little overconfident, but i was convinced that i must be a genius. Other kids were only too happy to prove me wrong as i got older. They were athletic, super smart at math, personable, could lie their way through anything, and what was i? Just the snowflake who thought normal things made her special. I guess i never felt like i had any redeeming qualities, so i picked up anything i could to look cool. It was a really cringey part of my life that i never want to think back on, but it also made me realize something: People are scared of being average. We've pushed being special and unique so hard that we're scared of being normal, maybe that's why we pushed it. In any of the anime or TV i watch, there seems to be this over-arching theme of characters realizing that they have this super crazy power inside of them, or they have this gift that they never realized because they were trying so hard to be normal. It's good to be different, i get that. If you have differences, of course you should embrace them! But in this frenzy to be unique, we ignore the people who aren't. We make average an insult. As a person on the spectrum, there are definitely things that make me unique. And yeah, i'm proud of them. But i'm not afraid of fitting in either, and i do put in the effort to have normal conversations. When i don't immediately creep the person i'm talking to out, i feel victorious. But according to society, that's not enough. When i see an aspie character or anyone who is socially awkward in my anime or on TV, they always seem to be intellectually gifted. These characters are these super amazing geniuses with one flaw: they can't be normal. This is not me. A lot of people on the spectrum are not like this. When i see ASD presented like this, it feels like i'm not enough. To be disabled and successful in society, i need to be gifted. I'm only gifted with being able to survive. I can't do math, and i can't draw an entire map from memory, and i can't play a song forwards and backwards after hearing it once. However, like a lot of people, i am gifted with the talent of mediocrity. I think surviving is a gift in itself, and this is what we should be focusing on. Sometimes simply getting by is something to celebrate.