Have you been told before that you do things awkwardly?

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My parents are critical of my quirks & the way I do things. It got to the point where I tired to avoid doing lots of things around them cuz it upset me when they criticized me & lead to arguments & sometimes my Aspie meltdowns. Things are alot better now that I live with my girlfriend. She's not bothered by lots of things my parents are & doesn't get why they get bothered by things that shouldn't affect them.

My dad keeps saying a walk 'wrong' and that if I don't learn how to walk normal I'll never amount to anything.

Sure. As soon as I do something, it becomes awkward even if it's perfectly normal when others do it. Get flagged as weird once and, forever after, everything about you will be weird. It doesn't need to make sense---it just is.

I am renowned for my awkardtism.
Awkwardness can be endearing.
I hope.

this reminds me of a text post i read on tumblr one time:
"im not 'cute' awkward, im 'what the hell is wrong with you' awkward"
i feel that sums me up perfectly

im more awkward if im out in public than i am if im at home, unless i have company then my awkward factor goes up. mostly its my body language and the things that i say that are the most awkward and it embarrasses me so i try not to put myself in those situations but if i have to and i do/say something awkward i dwell on it for the rest of the day.

Goodness yes! Through childhood and my teen years, my parents made my life hell by constantly finding fault with the way I did everything. I read many of you describing eating "wrong" which I did, walking funny, which I did/ still do, holding things the wrong way....ARGH. Now that I am middle aged, however, and a professor, these characteristics are regarded as eccentric, and are said to somehow fit my perceived stereotype, so mostly no one bothers me. I will sometimes get questions such as "Are you alright?" or "is something wrong?" and I have learned that this is intended as a polite way of intervening...as opposed to the always popular "What the &*%## is WRONG with you?" (that question seems to be a common experience among members in the autistic community, from what I have heard).

I still get the "Are you okay?" sometimes. I'm not sure why people feel the need to intervene. I tell them, "I'm fine, I'm just clumsy." Sometimes that works. Other times they are more persistent. "Why are you so nervous?" Well, I wasn't nervous until you started interrogating me!

Revealingly, I got the part about walking not just from my parents, but also from classmates and teachers. During a school trip to a zoo, they compared my gait to that of a gorilla. There must have been something truly wrong about it, because otherwise they wouldn’t have known to single me out for that reason. It was utterly incomprehensible to me how I did it wrong—how it was any different from the way other people walked—so chances are I still do it wrong, because I never learned how to correct it.

I must have also talked in a really weird and off-putting way, because nearly everyone in my age group seemed to feel an urge to mock my speech. That angered me a lot because I didn’t think their parody sounded like me at all, but I began to understand when I heard my recorded voice. I tried to speak in a more acceptable way, to no avail; for example, even opening my mouth as wide as I can, I still sound like I’m talking through my teeth, as if I’m afraid of being understood. Something I also hated is that my peers would often ask one another, right in front of me, what I’d just said, and would often come up with something distorted beyond recognition, and usually offensive, giving them a good excuse to get back at me.

Yes, all sorts of things...maybe not that people specifically use the word "awkward" but they think I'm not doing something the right way.

And they want to tell me or show me how to do it the "right" way. Even sometimes to the point of trying to yank something out of my hand and do it for me. One day someone is gonna get injured doing that.