How did I become an aspie?

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My parents, grandparents (both sides) are NT. My cousin is autistic, but it isn't aspergers. Why do I all of a sudden have aspie traits?

Even diseases with a known gene can appear 'out of the blue'. It's all down to modes of inheritance and gene penetrance.

There are probably environmental and social factors at play too.

If you have an autistic cousin, you likely got it the same place (s)he got it. Autism can manifest incredibly differently within the same family, and if those differences between the different people involve language acquisition or a few other things they can cause one person to be diagnosed AS and the other autism. If you both have it and both of your parents/grandparents don't have it, it's quite possibly some kind of... I can't remember genetics well enough to know if it's dominant or recessive I mean here, but that kind of thing. It's quite possible for there to be nondisabled "carriers" of a condition who, when they have children, end up combining in such a way as to have the particular disability. It's also possible for a condition to skip a few generations, such that it ended up in your/your cousin's generation without affecting either of your parents or grandparents in any obvious way. It's also possible for your parents or grandparents to be affected in a "subclinical" way -- they've found sometimes that autistic people's close relatives have some of the same brain abnormalities the autistic person has, but without actually being obviously autistic, but rather just having a few traits here and there.

I'm in a much more obviously genetic situation (runs on both sides of my family, in every single generation). But even in my situation, for instance, my brother is considered AS and I am considered to have "autistic disorder". Our variants of autism are so different from each other as to be opposites in practically every possible way. And yet we both obviously got it from pretty much the same place. So don't discount a common link between you and your cousin just because you're diagnosed with AS and he's diagnosed with autism. It's very likely that what you two have is connected. It's even common for identical twins on the spectrum, to have different spectrum diagnoses, different apparent severities, etc., and they share practically all their DNA. There is speculation out there in scientific circles, that even very different presentations of autism, can be caused by the same root cause. (Like... they have the same underlying issues, but the way those issues manifest on an obvious level can be so different that you'd barely think the two people had the same condition.)

Of course, you could also have it for nongenetic reasons, but don't discount genetics just because there's no screamingly obvious inheritance pattern. (For that matter, not all genetic conditions have been inherited from anyone, they can be spontaneous mutations.)

What she said. Genetics is more complicated than most people like to believe it is.

You are not DX'd yet so you may not be Aspie. There are a number of things/reasons to have "Aspie" traits. You may even be ADHD as that is very, very close to Aspie in traits including lacking of social skills. Wait until you have had a chance to go though the testing and the DX process and then worry about things like this. I suspect you have other possible things happening just from all your posts so far.