I want to be a researcher but I don't think I'd be any good at teaching. What do I do? I would like to study for a PhD and hopefully become a researcher. There is nothing I can think of that I would like to do with my life more. However, my social and communication abilities are bad. They are bad beyond the point where it could be dismissed as me being a 'quirky professor'. People assume that if you want to go into academia, you want to teach. However, I don't think I could do it. I have Asperger syndrome, so there's a limit to how much I can improve my social skills. No matter how much I try to be 'normal', it doesn't work and it's massively draining, to the extent that I find myself struggling to do basic tasks because I get burnt out. There are staff at my university who seem to like me, so it's not as though it's impossible for me to form positive relationships with people in academia, but that's very different to being able to teach classes. Is there any point in me trying to pursue an academic career? Can I focus on research and do minimal or no teaching? I know that there are autistic people in academia, and that I'm pretty 'high-functioning' for an autistic person (i.e. I have it easier than a lot of autistic people, even though I do struggle a lot), but I don't want to set myself up to fail.
Staying at the university, i.e., eventually becoming a professor, will be hard / impossible without teaching. There are, however, research facilities that are usually financed half by industrial projects and half by funding from the state. If you get a job in one of these, you will have to aquire money by getting research projects accepted, and are then free to do research without any teaching obligations. Note that your contract there will probably never be any longer than 2-3 years at once. I will then hopefully be refreshed, but you will not have a lot of stability.

The main question may be whether you think you can do your PhD. That involves giving several presentations (at conferences and during your defense), a rather high level of stress tolerance, and probably occasional preassure from your advisor, especially during the last year.

I had a colleague who might have a slight form of Asperger, and he quit about one year before finishing his PhD, because it got to overwhelming. But there were several factors involved there, including him not being happy with the direction his research was going. So that might have nothing to say!