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There aren't too many people who understand when you tell them that you choose which grocery aisle you go down based on how many people are in it, but it's something he does whether others understand or not. It's not anything to be embarrassed about, or so he keeps telling himself. It's not like he's some phobic teenager or anything. He's a profiler. He's an FBI agent-- he knows how to be self-assured and strong and confident. It's just...not him, and being something he's not is draining. He does it all day. He's perfectly normal, sociable at work (or at least he tries). He's allowed to be a little eccentric in the scarce downtime he gets.
Right?
It takes him longer to buy groceries than most people, and the length of time he spends shopping increases exponentially with the length of his shopping list. It's part of the reason he mostly lives off cereal. Takeout isn't really an option, not when he gets so precious little time to himself. He doesn't want to interact with anyone when he finally leaves work, let alone a stranger.
It's not that strange. Really. It isn't.
He spends all day struggling to read people, and it isn't just the unsubs. It's the police they work with, the victims, the families...even his coworkers. He's trained himself to pick up on all the small cues that these people give off (and that's not strange either, it's his job), but to do that he needs to be actively trying to do it. He's not, usually, and then it's just so much guesswork to figure out what the people around him are feeling, thinking--guesswork he's good at, mind you (psychology degree!), but it's exhausting. He wonders, occasionally, if everyone else has some hidden system of communication that he doesn't understand. He understands the way people think and feel and work well enough, but it's all intellect and not instinct. He's just lucky he isn't wrong more often--at least his intelligence makes things easier. If he didn't think so quickly, he's not sure he'd ever reach the same understandings his coworkers come to so easily.
But there's nothing wrong with him. There's not. He's different, yes, but he isn't defective. He knows that, even if the rest of the world doesn't, and some of them do know. The team has always understood, has always accepted him without putting a label on him.
At least, none of them have done it out loud. He's sure they know the symptoms as well as he does, even though they've never mentioned it. He feels their eyes on him every time he stumbles through a conversation with a stranger, every time he misses a joke or interprets something too literally, every time he gets too excited about the topic of conversation. But they're all merciful not to mention it, and the one time it was brought up by an outsider (unsub, actually, and Gideon had been perfectly capable of diagnosing his 'autistic leanings'--he'd simply chosen not to) they'd exchanged glances and changed the subject.
There's nothing wrong with him. There are plenty more people out there whose minds work the way his does, and among them have been the greatest scientists and heroes history has seen. He isn't broken. There are other people out there who understand what it's like to walk around in a constant state of apprehension, knowing you're about to do something wrong. Someone out there understands that he was genuinely surprised when Morgan laughed at him today for spinning in his chair. He knows people that understand that it hurts when people tell him how weird or unusual or eccentric he is, just as he thinks he's finally got it right, just as he thinks he's finally fitting in.
He's not defective, not a freak, and there's nothing wrong with him, but he does get uncertain, a little insecure, overwhelmed. And that is why he's so overwhelmingly grateful that Garcia can read him the way he can't always read her, because she catches him as he's stepping off the plane and tells him he can skip the grocery trip tonight--he's got dinner ready and waiting in his refrigerator. All it needs is to be put in the oven for 15 minutes, and by the way he should really think of a better place to hide his spare key.