A reader of The League of Ordinary Gentleman website writes in to explain why despite his unusually high IQ, he has become a trucker: his Asperger’s. Excerpt:

Because the real problem all along wasn’t that I was failing where I should have succeeded. The problem was that I was trying to succeed where I was doomed to fail. I just didn’t understand that because I didn’t understand myself. And it’s not really that I was doomed to fail as an engineer; it’s just that I was doomed to fail given that I didn’t understand my true strengths and weaknesses. I didn’t know when and how to ask for help because I didn’t know why I needed help. Everyone, including myself, naturally assumed that because I could do the hard stuff like math and physics that I could do the “easy” stuff like figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do today. Everybody else seemed to have it figured out, busy working on this or that, whatever it was, while I basically… pretended. Pretended to be doing something, and hoped no one would notice. To this day I don’t really know what half of them were actually doing. Maybe they were pretending like me and were just a lot better at it.

On the loneliness of an Aspie:

 But at the same time we’re rejecting normal social relationships we also crave them. It’s like you’re locked outside, with your nose pressed against the window, watching the normal happy people inside the party, like a dog who’s been banished for peeing on the carpet. When I’m home for a weekend there’s no friends for me to call and go have a beer. There’s no circle that gets together for cookouts in the summer. No holiday parties to attend. Frankly, it’s damn lonely and it puts just that much more strain on the one real relationship that I maintain, my marriage.