I didnt display the signs as a kid...

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Ive been researching, and i dont really recal displaying many of the signs of AS as a kid....i mean, i had narrow interests, but that's pretty much it. and i wasnt very social, i did have a few friends i ONLY hung out with at school or occasionally at a house, and the rest of the time i spent in the forest, pretty much....i was a very isolated kid oblivious to most everyone else, but i dont think i spoke very articulately, or was particularly clumsy, or talked funny, or any of the symptoms.
but i display a lot of the symptoms now...? does that rule out my having it? does this mean i have something else wrong with me???

Not displaying ALL signs of AS doesn't mean you don't/didn't have it. You may also have displayed more signs than you realise.

It could just be that the signs have gotten a lot more obvious as you've gotten older.

I know that I certainly wasn't aware that I had anything 'wrong' with me as a child, but as I've gotten older and had to interact with a lot more people and so on, the signs have gotten more obvious and/or I've become more self-aware of them.

my parents didnt really ever seem to notice anything "off" either. i mean, for granted they arent the type of people who would think or admit their kid might have had a problem....really my mother only ever noted i seemed much more scientific than the average kid, liked observing things, and had very developed fine motor skills. if im not mistaken....arent good fine motor skills going agaisnt the AS symptom of being clumsy?

You might be surprised to learn how many people observing you during those periods of your life were muttering, like Hank Hill: "That boy ain't right, I tell you what."
Its funny to me now, I was exactly like Bobby Hill at the age of 10 or so, and I thought I was perfectly normal.

whats wrong with bobby hill?

Perception is different for a child. I didn't think there was anything wrong with me..but then it became obvious by the way I was treated in school...by students and teachers...

The school knew "something wasn't right" with me in Kindergarten (1970), but not much was known about autism then.

Other "issues" came out over the next 12 years until I graduated HS. Same deal every time--"nothing wrong with this kid except that he's lazy" (and defiant, and obstinate, and anti-social, and a handful of other unflattering adjectives).

Not until I was well into adulthood (and a "failure") did my mom or any of my siblings (who were already adults when I was a child) tell me any of this, and not until last year did I learn to recognize these as manifestations of autism.

If you're only 17, you cannot yet have any real perspective on your childhood, because you are still living it to some extent. Give it time--skeletons will emerge from the closet of your past eventually. But you have the knowledge (of AS) and tools (Internet) to be able to cope with it much better than I ever had, and I envy you in that respect.

Had I only known, I could have done so much better...

It depends on your household. If your parents, for instance, were very academic and scholarly, they may not have noticed that you didn't make friends too easily and were drawn into your own world as a child. My mother certainly noticed that I played very differently from my brother and was stuck in my own little world and didn't make friends easily at all. However, I had good grades, I displayed notable musical talent, and was generally likeable. Those were all enough to overcome my differences. That and I suspect that I am very mild.


Not at all. Hypotonia (the issue you're talking about) only happens with some, not all. And it's not always fine motor skills; it's often gross ones. I would be a rotten musician if I didn't have fine motor skill control, and that's simply not the case. However, I was very clumsy just walking around as a child. I tripped over absolutely everything imaginable. It's still probably worse than average, though it's better than it used to be.

As a kid I was quite oblivious to the fact that I was so different. It did sort of catch up with me because I learned that playing alone while my brothers and sisters hung out with their friends that I was different.
There were things that I had experienced younger, like sensory issues that I thought were completely normal.
I probably didn't need a routine back then like I do now and I was less anxious, well, I never went out.
Just because you don't display all usual signs doesn't mean you don't have AS.

I was going to say the same. You can also get more severre symptoms as you get older, because life becomes more complex in high school than it was in like elementary school.

well, the teachers did seem to treat me like i was "special" XD...at least some of them. and i certainly got the lazy...etc labels.
but i had a few friends i always hung out with...i was never playing alone excpet maybe when i went to a daycare...that's it.

Yeah..I had some friends too..but not so much in school...Mostly neighbor kids who didn't speak much English...and weird girls who liked to prey upon my naivety. I also had a neighbor-family that I constantly imposed myself on..and I was always going over to their house, which was directly behind mine...and made people angry by crossing boundaries and being unintentionally rude.
I started getting summarily bullied around the first grade.
I think I was a lot more outgoing before I entered school..I have all these vivid memories of stuff I used to do. I ran sort of wild..I often wasn't supervised..I would go places by myself, and I couldn't have been more than 5, based upon where I was living at the time...younger, if some of this stuff happened before I was in kindergarten. Occasionally, I was in day care..Most of my day care experiences were normal..I did have the feeling that all the kids seemed to be "together", and I was separate from them, and I didn't understand what they were all doing,
I remember that at one place where I went briefly, there was a little girl who used to follow me around and she called me "dad", because she said I reminded her of her dad....kinda odd...I was sorta boyish..but I was really just a runty little girl at the time, I guess...That is the only time I recall really interacting one-on one with another kid at day care.
I was sorta abused and treated differently by one day care lady.
Kindergarten seemed normal, but I kept having to leave the classroom for weird tests and also repeated hearing tests, or because I wet my pants, or because my blood sugar had fallen and the teacher would send me to the cafeteria to get a cookie. I was deathly afraid of going on the monkey bars, and my only friend was a boy named Jerry.

Things really didn't seem to start spiraling downhill for me in a lot of ways till i reached first grade...and they got progressively worse from there...

I did sorta seem to "normalize" a bit when I hit adolescence...I was still very odd, but I did attempt have some sort of "normal" social life.

Growing up, i thought i was normal. I don't remember much from those times, but as i got older, and more stressed, i display more symptoms. I keep going back and forth whether i have it or not cause i have always had friends. I have been the "new girl" several times, so that didn't help much with making friends, but somehow they made friends with me. I have always been shy, so making the first move conversationwise, i am sure was not what i did.

As i got to know what AS is (as my son has it), everything makes sense now. Everyday i find something else that fits AS traits from growing up. I have been obsessed with unicorns from early elementary til after h.s. and dogs (still am). On a valentine given to me from a friend in class, instead of writing happy v'day, she asked why i liked puppies so much. All the girls liked cats. I have been called weird, and crazy (in a good way, i think lol), i was a class clown, although super shy. I read my yearbooks from h.s. where people sined it and wow, it told me a lot of how i was back then. Many said i was shy, crazy, quiet, etc. I was even held back a year before starting K because socially, i was not ready. I would only play with the teacher/daycare worker. I tried K, but they said i only played alone in the corner away from everyone. I notice now why my mom always told me i was miss innocent (the pleaser) and the tattle tale (rule bound) and so many things my son does now reminds me of myself growing up. My mom calls it payback lol! My mom had always called me intellegent, i'd be a mathmetician when i grew up and said twice they tested me for the gifted class, but i failed the test miserably.

I think the symptoms come and go. I notice this in my son. There were many traits he displayed earlier on that are non-existant now. But that doesn't mean he doesn't start with something else.

It’s important to realize that saying “X is common among those with AS”, is like saying “X is common among teenagers/women/cyclists/some other group”. Liking a particular musician might be common among British teenagers without not liking that band being an indicator that one is probably not a British teenager.

I believe that one research project conducted in Australia found that about 50% of respondents with high functioning Autistic conditions reported impaired/poor/undeveloped gross motor skills. That makes such issues very common (especially compared to the general population) in this group, yet it is about as common to not have such issues.

My mother - who was, overwhelmingly, the one who spent the most time with me - tells me that I seemed to be generally normal. However, I was her first and only child, she had never spent any significant amount of time around children and did not socialize with other mothers and babies even after she had me (and although I doubt she is on the spectrum, has various problems; she has suffered from depression and is very wrapped up in herself). With no 'control' to compare me to, it seems very likely that if I were not doing anything utterly bizarre and wasn't noticeably distressed in any way, she would have assumed everything was fine.

The specialist who diagnosed me was also quite adamant that someone relatively mildly affected could certainly have presented as largely normal as a small child.

I have read of a lot of people with AS having the same experiences as me. They got along fine when they spent all their time in their own home with their own family, did not have problems interacting with their parents (and siblings, if they had them). It was after they started school and were exposed to outsiders that they began to realize that there was something different about them and found that they had problems understanding how to socialize with other children. My earliest memories of school involve being bullied, and this became worse and worse the older I got and the more 'fine-tuned' my social skills were expected to be.

As I look back now, there were all kinds of indicators of something being slightly 'off' about me. I did have a few friends up until the age of 10, but I still spent most of my time playing by myself. I was always the one who stood out as being poor at sports; I could never hit things, catch things, think and move quickly enough to be in the right place at the right time. I remember sitting at the typewriter that my mother gave to me typing out vast lists of information that I would update regularly. I liked science kits, reading textbooks, and drawing detailed diagrams of robots and machines, while other girls dressed up and played with dolls and hairstyles. I did have some Barbies, but while I liked arranging and making things for their house, I was somewhat at a loss as to how to go about actively playing with them. Many of my memories of my childhood are of objects, patterns, smells, not of other people.