"Learning to pass" is it, exactly.
After my daughter (now a young teen) acquired her label, my sisters and I began discussing things that we had just assumed were normal, or individual weirdness. For example, my sister didn't know she was faceblind until she was fifty, she just assumed it was a personal failing. None of us were diagnosed as children back in the Dark Ages, neither was my husband diagnosed as ADHD, which he most assuredly IS. But we've all learned to cope, to pass; we've all gone on to be reasonably functional adults with an appalling amount of higher education between us. Even at my daughter's age, she looks considerably less "autistic" than she did at four or six or nine. She's got friends. She goes to sleepovers-- after which she hides in her room, overstimulated, the rest of the weekend, but being a teenaged girl, the hiding is not out of the realm of normal.
And she's at the age when some of the "gifts" of her Asperger's are actually more prominent in her life than the shortcomings. What kid in advanced classes wouldn't kill for an eidetic memory and an ear for dialog?
