If my experience can help someone else it will feel less like needless suffering lol

What you call “fundamental incompatibility” is something everyone experiences. Even the “normal” people (they don’t exist btw. This is part of the reason I prefer the terms neurotypical and neurodivergent because “typical” and “divergent” can describe a range of phenotypes rather than some binary system that only serves extremes). For a stark example, someone who is religious is less likely to want to be with a person that’s not religious. That doesn’t mean that the secular person in this example should torture themselves with “why couldn’t I just believe in God so I could be with this person?”

That vulnerability cliff hurts a lot more to those people with trauma or atypical brains (kind of the same thing but I’m not going into those weeds). The really difficult part is telling that part of your brain it’s okay to feel those things. Personally I avoid every emotion I could possibly exhibit ever to avoid attention, which I associate with humiliation even when the attention is good. The deprogramming starts with observing your reactions and learning to unburden your system from these protective jobs. Strongly encourage you to look into IFS because it probably saved my life

Focusing on your last comment:

I guess you’ll have to take me at my word, but I used to be a semi-normal (or at least could very easily pass as neurotypical) person.

You’re probably familiar with the term “masking.” Whether it’s something systemic and unstable like the pandemic, personal relationships failing, or otherwise, eventually your system hits a critical point. Your system sort of exhausts itself from the act it’s playing, that mask falls off and the system freaks out because now everyone can see it’s different. Saying that you were a “semi-normal” person tells me you still struggle seeing yourself as defective or lesser because you feel things, or you can’t handle stresses you could before. I think after that demasking happens, either the first time ever or as an adult, it’s hard to accept you can’t go back to pretending your brain operates within the typical range

At the end of the day I’m talking through a lot of my process and experiences, and I don’t expect that all of this applies to you. However I do understand what it feels like to have that supreme lack of confidence in who you are because of a perceived regression. So I will tell you nothing is ever perfect but it does improve over time when you do the work