Trying to Find the Reason that You're Weird

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I began school speaking mostly German, and learned English in first grade. Even though I was a good student, I was still odd.

As a kid, I thought I didn't fit in because I was highly gifted. I thought my mother got frustrated with me because I was really a deeply evil person who was just pretending to be good (I think this was OCD-related). When I started at a prestigious college and realized I'd only be an average student there, I blamed not fitting in on the fact that my parents came from working-class backgrounds, and weren't able to teach me the upper-middle-class manners other students had. Finally, after years of hating myself, I stumbled across the AQ test on the internet and realized I'd finally found an explanation for my peculiarities.

When I think back to things my mother has said about me when I was a baby, I think I was predetermined to be weird. Hard wired that way. My mother didn't realise it at the time, because I was the oldest, but after the other two came about, she realised that I was just not like them. Caused a lot of problems growing up. Now, I just wonder if maybe my mother wasn't odd and didn't want me to go through the same kinna hell. So I always heard things like, "Why can't you be like everyone else?", "If you would just apply yourself, you could be okay"...as if a punk girl from Liverpool who had suddenly found herself in the middle of midwest hell was going to be anything but different anyway....
I think I learned early to align myself with the outlier groups so that my weirdity didn't look so weird and there was a little safety in numbers. I know that for myself as well, it never mattered if I wore the exact same outfit as Peppy PopPrincess, I still had to add that rhinestone jewelry, or wear those antique shoes, or something else, that just made me look down and go, "Oops, screwed myself again". Now, my mother says that I just had too much personality to contain in one person. There's prolly some truth to that. Funny for the woman who spent so much time trying to shove me in a normal box, now accepts that I wasn't ever going to fit in it!

I never really did get my OCD or anxiety under control, but yeah, I've come to realize neither that stuff, nor my being abused growing up really explains the issues I had/have.

It is confusing to know where those issues end and Asperger's begin though. But I don't think my social stupidity can be explained just by abuse.

I wish I could have been helped with social stuff when I was growing up. I might have done much better, be doing much better now.

I thought I simply had had to little contacts with other children (I lived only with my mother and later also with her parents until I was 6,5) so I developed a likeness for solitude, being separated from my peers (living in this small community consisting only of adults I never missed companions being of my age and in fact I never pondered this concept - it was exquisitely normal for me to live without children, not less normal than having two pairs of limbs and one pair of eyes, for example). I was also smarter, more mature and serious than other children and later teenagers. I also used to put down my weirdness to the fact that being my mother's only child I was always protected by her from all sides and this way my strange habits not only weren't eradicated in a proper time but had the best conditions to grow and flourish. I never thought my behaviour could be called by any name, thinking that it's me who was as close to the norm as it's only possible and others were childish, crazy or whatever.

My 17 tr old daughter kept asking me if we dropped her as a baby, or if I ever took drugs while pregnant. I did none of those, so when she was finally diag with AS, she felt so happy that finally there was a reason that she could not fit in, and now most of the time, she accepts herself for who SHE is.

I vacillate between my two self-diagnoses: AS, and "Weirdness, NOS." I was always a strange person (my earliest memories, at 3-4 years old, are not at all like the "typical" kids I see around) but it never bothered me until the first years I was at my school, 5, 6, 7 years old, when the other kids treated me poorly and I started to realize I was different. But my parents split up around that time too and hid everything that was going on. I didn't realize my parents were divorced until my dad had remarried (is this type of complete unawareness common? or was it common in the late 1970's- early 80's?) At any rate, I don't know if I didn't develop social skills because my parents were emotionally unavailable, or if it is organic/innate.
Often I wonder how different my life would have been if I had been able to go to a school with other "quirky gifted" kids. I see now that my parents didn't let me skip a grade (or more), because socially I was behind- way behind (at 30, I realized that it really had been a social delay, because suddenly the light bulb turned on, so to speak, and I finally felt some grasp of small talk and other social skills that other people seem to have in the primary grades!)
Wow- it felt really good to get that out there in the world!

Yes, I'm feeling like that; as if all the years I spent searching, and/or just feeling odd/outcast/misfit/wrong are now over; and I can finally think about something else.
I had stopped pouring all my energy into "copying" and "trying to look right" and getting this charming woman-speak working etc, once my exposure to rad feminism had "permitted" me to say "that was oppressive" and abandon it (! !) BUT I had then begun actively looking for "why", and it took up masses of my time and energy, in fact people over the years have either pityingly or sympathetically described me as "perpetually searching".
And it's been exhausting. And pretty much stopped me doing anything else.
Now I know , and this knowing also involves the glorious understanding that neither my parents ,nor myself, were "to blame" . I can let go of all that.
Now there's a possibility that I will be able to do something else.

I always knew that I was different, I think, but I was too busy digging a trench in the garden pretending I was a soldier, to think about it. Being 6 was fun. Everything I can remember about me as a child points in this direction, its just taken a while to realise it. Never had an abusive upbringing, but I sometimes wonder if growing up in the countryside with hardly anyone else around had anything to contribute.

When I look at everything, all the little things that I can remember of the last 25 years, its like looking at a finished jigsaw that was missing the box. That "oh, its a tree" moment.

Accepting that I don't fit into the cookie cutter marked normal is one thing, holding it all together is another.

Looking back now, I think my constantly wandering mind, not focused on me being different all the time, is the reason I didn't put much thought into it. Except for my interests, I couldn't keep my attention on thoughts for very long, so it all got put in long term, waiting for me to be able to recognise the signs.

All I know is that I would more than happily have gone to school wearing army kit had my parents told me uniform was neccessary. And I didn't find it weird.

I used to just think it was me being different, perhaps because due to father's job that I'd moved around a fair bit as a kid and that was why I had difficulty making friends and was happy enough on my own. But that never explained why I was bullied and never particularily happy.

Like several other posters I thought it would improve as I got older, went to university and got a job. Whilst the bullying stopped the inability to make friends never improved.

It was only in the last few years has my condition been recognised for what it truly was. However one of the upsetting things for me was to read my childhood summed up in a page or two in a textbook. ( Can't remember right now if by Attwood or Baron-ohen)

I used to think all my traits and querks were just me but there they were, written down and it was almost as if I was filfilling a prophesy.

i think life is a journey. you should enjoy it, this means trying to figure out things about yourself should be avoided at all costs!