When and how did you first notice that you were different?

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I always felt different from my peers. It was already in the kindergarten. I had massive issues with communication, interactions, also sensory meltdowns, I was fascinated with trams on the city, observing the wheels on the rails, the engine how it worked, also living in my inner world, dissociating, I was basically an alien among humans. I have asked my mom million times what’s wrong with me why I’m so different and inferior to others. Now I’m 36 years old (female) and I told my therapist my story. He informed me I’m most probably autistic. Before I was diagnosed with depression and Tourette. Many people have told my mom and me that there is something wrong with me, but she ignored that. Now I’m exploring autism and I’m shocked to find myself there, but I’m not diagnosed so it may turn out it’s some different condition with similar symptoms. I also have synesthesia and struggle to recognize my own emotions (alexithymia).

I don’t remember not feeling different.

Dunno. I see "being different" as a quantitative thing rather than a binary thing, and I think everybody's different from the average in some respects. I've never thought of myself as wildly different from others, not even after diagnosis. The severity of my ASD was never formally assessed; they said my scores were about halfway between neurotypical and 100% Aspie. Don't know whether that makes my ASD severe or not. If not, it's probably not that surprising that I've never labelled myself as all that different. I was also diagnosed quite late, so I'd gone for decades being completely unaware of ASD. Afterwards my confidence took a knock, but I always thought "nah, any differences are to my credit, I'm not disabled." I still tend to think that.

I did notice a few things that set me somewhat apart from the herd, though I usually embraced most of them as assets. For example, my "little professor" trait helped me to shine in my early years at school, and as it was a well-ordered school I didn't get any s**t from other kids who didn't do so well, so I just saw myself as a bright lad. Dad commented once that it often took me longer to understand a thing but that when I got there I tended to know it better than most.

In my later school years I began to do quite badly, but I just thought it was the natural consequences of things - I'd passed my 11-plus with flying colours which got me into the top school in the city, and as my new mathematics teacher said, "you might have been cock of the walk in your primary school, but now you're among all the other cocks of the walk, so it's going to be lot harder." And my parents were working class, so they couldn't help me with my homework like the middle class did with their kids. There was some acrimony between the social classes at the secondary school too. The older teachers resented the new intake of working class kids, and it showed. We in turn resented the middle-class swots, and it was something of a badge of honour not to perform well academically.

Nonetheless, when the final exams were looming I put my mind to the problem and got a fairly impressive set of passes. After that it was hard to imagine there was much wrong with my brain, though a few years before I strongly suspected I might have some kind of brain damage, because I'd been unable to focus on the work when it was taught to me (I got through the exams by studying the text books on my own, in my own sweet way), and because I couldn't follow the plots of TV dramas (but nobody ever tested me on that).

I sucked at sport because my family had no interest in sport, and sport wasn't important to me anyway. I did badly at some of the mainstream leisure pursuits such as dances and discos, which (I reasoned) was because those things were for idiots.

All in all, I generally felt pretty normal, though perhaps with more discerning tastes than the average person. I didn't do too bad socially. I didn't have tons of friends by the time I was a teenager, but I had enough to keep afloat socially, and wasn't aware of any particular problem except for the occasional feeling that my social life might be in danger of collapsing to zero. I didn't do well with girls for a few years, but I was an early starter and most of the boys I knew weren't even trying to get girlfriends yet. And somehow I pulled out of the tailspin and was nearly always partnered. I didn't much compare myself to other kids in any way, probably because I was too mind-blind and self-absorbed to notice any differences there might have been. It was very rare that I would accept that any failures were my fault. Arrogance can be a great protection to self-esteem.

And with my social life, in my 20s I luckily moved into a district full of hippies and dropouts who were very friendly, so I did well there socially, and was able to blame any problems in fitting in on mainstream society who simply had it all wrong as far as myself and the hippies were concerned. I'd also got into music and had become quite good at it, and music opened a lot of social doors for me.

I did quite well in the world of work because I chose to go straight into science jobs rather than going to university, and my employers usually recognised that I was good at science.

So, there are some differences between me and the average person, but when those differences challenge my ability to fit in or to cope with life, I somehow get by because of my determination to survive and to stay happy and comfortable.

Hope I haven't rambled too much.