The alternative, I guess, is that everyone correctly realizes they can't understand the full context of OP's position, and no one gives OP any advice and they continue down the road they're currently on. Just my view :)
By contrast, people who have not learned to put so much value on their being "above average" don't have as much trouble pushing further into that painful territory because to them, everything is pain anyway.
That way I've seen people with little talent go further than, or at least catch up to others who have it in abdundance, through discipline and work. My formative experience in that respect is from a different life when I was studying for a modern drums degree.
For example, perhaps people are telling you you're smart because they like your er other assets. Or because they feel obliged to because you're their boss. Or because they know your parents. etc etc.
Bottom line, there's confounding factors that can throw the calculation way off.
Would she also conclude that because some fruit in bowls is hollow plastic that there doesn't exist any real fruit in bowls?
I think you're also perhaps projecting a bit. You stopped (very) short of giving the OP a diagnosis of ASD ("high functioning"). Again, that's way, way too much to read into 1590 characters (not counting spaces) on an HN post.
Personally I think there's no way to answer OP with anything approaching good advice when going only by what they have posted. I understand that everyone will want to try anyway, but sometimes the best asnwer is to say "I don't know".
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[1] Funny aside. Suppose Alice has "extremely high intelligence" (EHI). Her EHI will make her aware of two facts: a) everyone seems to think they have EHI, or at least intelligence above the mean; b) only a tiny minority of those people can be right. The obvious corrolary is that Alice herself must be of average intelligence and only feel like she has EHI because that's a common cognitive bias of people with average intelligence. Therefore Alice will assume she has average intelligence and discount evidence to the contrary. In other words, people who have EHI will very rarely believe they have EHI, let alone say they do.