Thanks for your detailed reply!
Just to clarify: I'm still overall like 20-30% happier than I was before - during the first one and a half weeks it was just like +75% (I should add that first part to the post I think - totally forgot but very important).
I also get the buzz right after the injection you mentioned... it's more of a light-headedness though and not what the permanent improvement feels like (that goes more in the calm and happy, serotonergic direction).
Thanks also for reminding me of the journal part, I should get started on that.
yes ofc, I would take it, she should take it, I wouldn't be sad in the slightest!
I'm through the coping / bargaining stage of telling myself this is a 'superpower'. I think most autists are very much more miserable than neurotypical people so they dissociate by engulfing themselves in their special interest(-s). In the end, they might discover something and receive external gratification / some semblance of success.
But it doesn't matter for them because they were dissociated and didn't even experience life in any meaningful way. Yet society likes them that way so they enforce the behaviour by telling us we're smart special flowers.
Dissociation I think is a key coping strategy for many of us. Not only because of what I wrote above, but because whenever I drag myself out of it, I become self-aware enough to experience how autism effects me every second of my life.
Living with that knowledge is hard, but better than dissociated.