People often showed they liked my personality. Teachers, adults, even CEOs. But looking back, I realise something funny: they weren’t just liking me, they were liking my autism. They just didn’t know it.

As a teenager, adults found me calm and ‘mature’ because I wasn’t doing the stereotypical teenage chaos. At school, teachers loved my focus and curiosity when I became a de facto assistant in computer science classes. Later, CEOs valued my ability to detect anomalies and stay calm in crises, even if they couldn’t explain how I did it.

Different ages, different labels — but the kernel was always the same: autism running beautifully under the hood.

School Years – The Early Reveal

In school, I wasn’t just a student in computer science class. I became the teacher’s unofficial assistant. While classmates struggled with syntax or even concepts, I was already connecting computers to printers and writing little automation scripts — sometimes spending more time helping the teacher than following the class. To outsiders, it looked like “bright curiosity” and “helpfulness.” In reality, it was my monotropism^* at work: autism zooming in on systems until they clicked. They thought I was a model pupil; I was just doing what my kernel loves best.

Teenage Years – The Missing Crisis

Most teenagers go through a rebellious phase. Mine never arrived. Adults loved me for it: “so calm, so mature, not doing stupid things.” Truth? I wasn’t calm or mature — I was autistic. While my peers were testing rules, I was testing operating systems and bike routes. Adults admired my atypical personality. I didn’t miss my teenage crisis. I just had a very different one — more command line than chaos.

The chaos was elsewhere: my room looked like a war zone, I stayed up all night on the computer, and when I did go outside at night, it was usually alone or with just one person.

Even with my peers, I was also rarely bullied, maybe because I floated between groups. I wasn’t seeking contact, but I always responded warmly and was helpful when people approached me. I hopped between the intellectuals and the sporty ones, and perhaps I added ‘value’ to each tribe — computer knowledge at a time when PCs were just entering homes, or knowing outdoor gems worth visiting. Whatever it was, people didn’t question my independence, and only a few labelled me as weird.

There are a few exceptions: the rare who saw me when I had what I recognise now as a meltdown. To them, that great teenager turned into a monster, and I was so ashamed!

Professional Life – The CEO Paradox

Fast forward to work — I was often described as a magician. One CEO once said of me: “I don’t know what he’s doing, but I know when he’s not doing it.”  They couldn’t articulate what I brought, but they sensed it was crucial.

That CEO was also the one who supported me during my only meltdown in that company — in fact, the only time in my life I was supported instead of blamed for a meltdown. Maybe she recognised the traits, or perhaps she just had extraordinary empathy. Either way, she saw more than most.

What they saw as mysterious competence was really my autistic kernel doing anomaly detection, spotting patterns others missed, and staying calm under technical pressure. The same traits that tripped me up in daily life became superpowers in a crisis.

Closing Reflection

It’s ironic, really. The very traits that get called “problems” in some contexts were admired in others, all my life. Adults loved my calmness, teachers loved my focus, managers loved my weird system-magic.

So now I say it with pride: people thought they liked my personality, but in reality, they liked my autism. Lucky them. 😉

* Monotropism is a theory that explains how many autistic brains work. Instead of spreading attention across lots of things at once, our focus runs like a tunnel — deep, intense, and often hard to shift.

Some people call it a limitation. I call it my kernel — the core of my operating system. Understanding monotropism gave me pride in my autism, because it showed me I’m not broken — I’m just built for depth instead of spread.