Thank you for sharing your experiences. I think you needn’t have felt so wary of participating though. The point of many of the accommodations, as I see it, is that they should be available to anyone who needs them. Feeling too shy to initiate is enough to use the green badge (that’s what they’re for!) — you should chat with more late-diagnosed autists about how often we doubt ourselves on this! Society would overall be a lot happier, I think, if many of the accomodations we think of as being ‘for autistics’ can be available for anyone, without stigma. While you are right to be wary of the “everyone’s a little autistic” trope, you also might want to be wary of falling for the misconception that there is such a clear-cut autistic/NT binary.
I personally tend to avoid using NT to describe any individual (I tend to use allistic to describe non-autistics specifically), because a) it’s impossible to be sure and, b) it’s very hard to be *completely* typical in every way. Individuals may fall closer or further from the ‘average’ across many different parameters, and sometimes varying depending on context — that’s why neurodiversity is such a great concept.
Like with many discussions about race, there can be a fine line between worrying about disrespectful appropriation, and over-exoticising and making another group overly-precious and ghettoised by not feeling like you are allowed to participate. We’re all people, with more or less differing experiences and challenges. If you had said to a group of people at autscape that, “I am not identified as autistic but I feel really shy and awkward sometimes around strangers”, I’d be very surprised if anyone would have felt like you were intruding or taking over — we’d have been glad of your directness and honesty.
And don’t forget that autism *is* most likely genetic. Your sister is autistic, you grew up with her, tuned in to how she thinks. Would it be that surprising if you’re not all that ‘typical’ yourself? :)