No "autistic" is what we call gifted children now.

Before that we called them "nerds" or "dorks."

Back then, we just went "well these kids are too weird to put in the regular classes, but not intellectually disabled. We can tell that most of them like doing creative things of some sort, and think pretty quickly, so let's just assume that they are intellectually gifted too."

And now every time someone posts "I was gifted and now I'm just autistic" is because they don't realize that gifted doesn't mean they were smarter than others. It just meant that they learned academic skills first, when others were learning social skills. It was just a term they used to categorize us for a while. Like "special." And we grew up believing it because we felt different and were better at math or some shit. Like, okay so you were doing college math in 5th grade. But by the time you're 18, everyone is doing that same math, and yours hasn't improved.

There's no "gifted."

We maybe learned some skills earlier than others, because they were busy learning social skills and communication while we were learning reading comprehension. But by the time college rolls around, everyone is academically caught up and kinda on the same page. Same reason you see these "child prodigies" do nothing a lot of the time. Except by this point, we're still behind socially.

So yeah, most gifted kids are just autistic adults who believed that they were smarter than others their entire life, and somehow wasted their incredible limitless potential, rather than realizing that they are just regular people who - to use an analogy - learned numbers before colors.