Rayoflight, it doesn’t sound to me like you have a spectrum disorder, it’s more that you grew up with emotionally unresponsive parents and therefore your brain didn’t develop as many receptors to understand emotion. (Not to criticize your parents, it sounds like they tried their best in other ways as you described earlier. It could be that they have aspects of ASD and didn’t realize what they were doing. But honestly, throwing it in your face like that sounds really bad, not nice and totally not constructive.)
I mean, I don’t have ASD, and I also need to sleep in a dark room at night. I don’t think that’s a serious enough issue for you to say, oh that’s the sensory aspect of the disorder.
It is possible to have one or two issues that make someone on the autistic spectrum, but then again we are ALL on the autistic spectrum by that standard, except maybe people who are exceptionally emotionally astute and responsive (and those people tend to struggle from depression because they are so aware of their own and other’s negative emotions.)
So what’s my point? Basically I think the whole labeling issue is pointless for someone like you who is quite functional. There have always been people who were slightly less aware of social cues and most of them find their place in society and a high percentage of them are very successful. Labeling is good for jars, but pretty useless for a human being.