Not knowing you were different

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I always knew since elementary school that there was something "wrong" with me but I had no idea what it was.

I didn't even find out until well into adulthood, 11 years ago.

I've never felt different. I've felt lonely and left out before, but never different, really.

I've known that I'm different since elementary school but I never really thought about the how or why to it and I've rarely cared what others in general thought of me. While I knew I was different I assumed it was to the same degree that any two people are different than each other.

Even though my mother used to compliment me on my good memory my memory isn't so much good as I remember things others in my family don't. I can't think of any examples. Of course it could also be true that my memory has degraded as I've gotten older but I don't know.

I say my memory is not good because even though I can remember a event from when I was five or six and things my younger sister did or said when she was very young there are many things I don't remember which worries me sometimes. I remember very well a day when my sister teasingly(based on her tone of voice) called me made-up insults when she was around three or so. I have only recently realized that she doesn't remember this or other things from our childhood because of she was too young at the time to have remembered those things. Somehow that fact didn't sink in til this last year.

According to my mother she has told me about my being born early all my life(which is something I have always known due to that) and she has told me, she says, about what the doctors at the time had said I had and about misc things concerning my birth.

I know know these things and can remember being told them but I few memories of being told these things. I do remember being told some at age 12, asking why I hadn't been told these things before and being told that I had been told these things before. I also remember, at the, time telling my mother that I had no memory of having been told before.

I was not very aware of how different I was til I was 20. And I was not aware of AS at all til a few years ago. My mother and I have been talking with doctors a lot in the last few years and she often mentions my background and that I had IEPs though school til I was home schooled(last three years of HS, at my request). She says she and I attended IEP meetings with my teachers and other people. I have no memory of ever going to one.

Of course one of my symptoms is lack of awareness of my surroundings and I do daydream much of the time.

I'm 26 now and I've been aware I was different since I was little but not not aware of how much I was different til about 6 years ago and only aware of AS for the last few years.