J. E. LaCaze’s look at embracing selfishness has me wondering which parts of my one-time social and romantic lives were “nice guy syndrome” and which were “unknowingly being autistic”, because there’s some fairly evident behavioral, cognitive, and emotional overlap there.

On the one hand, there’s no question that I’ve suffered, and inflicted upon others, from the unearned expectations of “nice guy syndrome”. One the other hand, failing to articulate needs and wants, for example, is something I think can arise from being autistic, especially if you don’t know you’re autistic and so haven’t had any guidance on how to navigate your own brain, let alone the interfacing of that brain with the world around it.

It’s an unanswerable, but I do wish I had a way to look back and determine what had been my relative mix of “nice guy” and “autistic”.