It's a Spectrum, Not a Gradient

People like to say everyone is a little autistic.  This implies that Autism in the population is a gradient.  At one end are people who are least autistic, and at the other end are people who are most autistic.  While this belief is very common, it's false.

There is no such thing as slightly autistic or a little autistic.  There is the possibility that a person can have a few autistic traits without having the distinct neurology that causes autism, like a sensory issue or difficulty maintaining eye contact, but that alone is not sufficient for an autism diagnosis.  Now this further compounded by the issues surrounding masking.  Masking is something that autistic people learn to do early in life and is essentially an autistic person learning to mimic neurotypical people in order to fit in with others and avoid a lot of the negative impact of being so very different.

Masking can make it difficult to assess whether a person is autistic because they've hidden and suppressed their autistic traits for so long that they may not even remember that they had ever had those traits in the first place.  There are many people of all ages who have no idea that they are autistic and masking.  Maybe they're some of the people that say "we're all a little autistic" because they are subconsciously expressing a bit of truth about themselves.  But that is just speculation on my part.

So no.  We are not all a little autistic.  Autism is a divergent way for the brain to develop.  We experience the world and life in a different way than neurotypical people.  Our brain functions differently.  You can't partially have a different neurology.  Either you do, or you don't.

There's lots of resources out there that are probably better at explaining the spectrum than I am.  But I'll give it a shot, and explain it how I see it.  

There are a lot of different traits expressed by autistic people.  We each express some traits but not all of them, and the traits we express are to different degrees.  When talking about color, such as in color theory, there are a few different ways one specific color is identified.  First, it has a hue - that is, the percentages of each of the primary colors that combine to make this specific shade.  Then, it has the percentage of lightness - how light or dark the shade is.  Then, there's the amount of saturation - how rich the color is, where it falls on the range from gray (completely neutral) to the purest expression of that hue.  Autistic traits are similar to this.

Let's say each hue represents an autistic trait.  A person on the spectrum may have each trait to some varying degree of severity, and then there is the degree of how much that trait is visible and the degree of how much it affects us.  Stimming is one trait.  I stim constantly.  I'm rarely still.  But I wouldn't say that it affects my daily life to a significant degree and none of my stims are harmful to myself (with two exceptions that are borderline but I'll discuss those in another post).  No one comments about my stims and, other than some mild embarrassment when I realize I've been bouncing my leg through an entire meeting, it is just part of me and I've not seen it as negative.  Those are the three aspects of that trait - what it is, how much I experience it, and how the experience of it impacts my life.  That, is why autism is a spectrum.   We each are like a color wheel with all these different colors that represent the traits we personally experience and express, how much we experience them or to what severity, and how that affects our lives, creating a beautiful rainbow for each autistic person.  Together we make up all the colors of the rainbow which is an innumerable amount of unique expressions.

I hope that this has clarified what the spectrum is and that no, not everyone is autistic.  If we were all autistic, the world would make a lot more sense to those of us with ASD and we wouldn't feel so alien around the majority of the population.