Imagine that thinking is you driving a car. Most people can take the freeway when they need to get from point A to point B. And when they don’t know where to go they plug it in a GPS and learn pretty quickly the easiest way to get there. The minimal amount of twists and turns it takes and they can find their way home after (or mostly). I have access to some freeways, but on a lot of them my car is too big to fit in the lane. Or they are shut down. So I need to go around. I’ve gotten so used to back roads that now I’m able to match another persons eta who’s taking the freeway. But I will not know what they are talking about when they tell me what exit they got off at. I know that the store is past the McDonald’s and if you hit the back road called “back road Ave” you’ve missed it. And similarly, they didn’t know there was a McDonald’s back there and have never heard of back road Ave. that’s the thought difference between autism and neurotypical. Any outward symptoms that people notice that people are like “something is weird about you. You’re not normal” is either road rage, stop lights, yield signs, and general frustration when my usual back road trip is interrupted by a herd of geese crossing the street. (Geese for me is overstimulation with audio and touch). Because any effort to get the geese to move out of the road faster just makes them hiss at you and hate you and make your life harder for longer. That’s my analogy.