"I eventually decided to learn how to read body language. I did some training to recognize expressions, focussed on one skill at a time, and viewed every conver

"I eventually decided to learn how to read body language. I did some training to recognize expressions, focussed on one skill at a time, and viewed every conversation as practice. I improved to the point that people comment that I'm surprisingly good at reading them." Wow! I thought I was the only one who did this. As a kid, I too felt like I was missing out on something everybody else understood. Similarly to you, I just kind of naturally viewed it as something I could learn and get better at. Over the years, I did, and now I'd consider myself better than average at it. Unlike you said, though, I do feel others' emotions. Sometimes too strongly, I think. "I read descriptions of Aspergers and it sounded much like me. Now when I read them it sounds not very much like me, because a significant component of those symptom descriptions involve poor social skills." Poor social skills are a common symptom, but I do strongly believe that for somebody with high intelligence these skills can be learned to an extent, like you and I feel we did. In my by-no-means-professional opinion I would not say that "learned" social skills rule out the presence of autistic symptoms. That said, the lack of ability to share and care about others' feelings does not sound like the mild end of the autism spectrum as I know it. Anecdotally a lot of people with these diagnoses feel others' emotions strongly, they just struggle to understand others' emotions more than the average person does, ie: "Colleen is really sad today, and it's making me sad, and everybody else seems to intuitively understand why she's sad but I don't. And this kind of thing happens a lot."