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When did you find out about your AS?
Elementary school (age 5-12) 15%  15%  [ 13 ]
Middle school/High school (age 13-18) 24%  24%  [ 21 ]
College (age 19-22) 16%  16%  [ 14 ]
Young Adult (20's) 17%  17%  [ 15 ]
Adult (30+) 28%  28%  [ 25 ]
Total votes : 88

Intrepid_Squirrel
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20 Mar 2012, 3:26 am

I think they call it the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which your incompetency in something actually hides your incompetency by creating an illusion of superiority. Not gonna lie, that was exactly me, reflecting back on my life in school...

It's a really weird feeling realizing that it took me 21 years to find out that I had AS.
It explained A LOT once I started reflecting on everything in my life (and my past).
I still wonder if my family or my old friends knew all along.
I'm certain what few good friends I had were mostly friends out of pity. I was one hell of an unstable, callous kid back in high school.

I feel like people should be speaking up earlier if they know someone has AS or might have AS/NT. I only started to really start improving on my social skills and myself in general once I realized what my faults were. (Unfortunately, since noone told me, it was a really long process of picking up on pieces of embarrassing moments and social incidents throughout my life).

Thoughts? Share your experience!



skenasis
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20 Mar 2012, 5:34 am

I was 22 when I was diagnosed.



peterd
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20 Mar 2012, 5:41 am

It's a really weird feeling that it took me fifty-two years to work it out. I'm not used to being the last one to solve a puzzle. It's weirder still that here, eight years farther down the pipe, I still don't know what it means.

How come so many of the respondents to this poll so far were older before they found out? Because we're living in a world where adult autistics don't really exist...



Kiseki
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20 Mar 2012, 6:36 am

Not officially diagnosed and- TBH- knew nothing about Asperger's in relation to autism until a few years ago. I was watching American Idol and I thought Siobhan Magnus was mighty interesting. I made her into a special interest, which in turn led me to discover people thought she had Asperger's. I then started reading everything I could on Asperger's and freaked myself out by scoring high on all of the available tests. I would have never never thought I had a form of autism. I actually thought I was great at reading and understanding people yet, looking back on my life, I realized that could not have been further from the truth.

I was misdiagnosed with Tourette's as a kid. I'm curious what my life might have been like had I not slipped under the radar. As it is now, I am a 32 yr. old female and I basically just come off as weird and quirky.


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infinitenull
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20 Mar 2012, 7:05 am

Intrepid_Squirrel wrote:
I think they call it the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which your incompetency in something actually hides your incompetency by creating an illusion of superiority. Not gonna lie, that was exactly me, reflecting back on my life in school...

It's a really weird feeling realizing that it took me 21 years to find out that I had AS.
It explained A LOT once I started reflecting on everything in my life (and my past).
I still wonder if my family or my old friends knew all along.
I'm certain what few good friends I had were mostly friends out of pity. I was one hell of an unstable, callous kid back in high school.

I feel like people should be speaking up earlier if they know someone has AS or might have AS/NT. I only started to really start improving on my social skills and myself in general once I realized what my faults were. (Unfortunately, since noone told me, it was a really long process of picking up on pieces of embarrassing moments and social incidents throughout my life).

Thoughts? Share your experience!


Self diagnosed based on clearly fitting DSM criteria (bother IV and V)... I found out: the day after I turned 30... (kinda)

I went through a few times in life that I started to try to figure out why I had different mental inefficiencies, but never really found anything that fit...

January 1, 2012: I took one of quizzes that float around... and it said "yup that's you" so I started to research, read up a bunch and joined here the same day... It's been a current interest since. I am not sure that ASD will stay a long-term interest but its definitely still something that I read about every day.

As for working on improving social skills and yourself: 21 is a good age to have something to define as your road block to improvement and adulthood. It's sort of a pivotal age where most NT's even seem to forget that its time to grow up and really be honest about what life truly means.


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Sora
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20 Mar 2012, 7:06 am

The very first time when I figured out that I must have autism but was still under the illusion that autistic people have an intellectual disability and cannot speak at all? (Edit: I had read up on classical autism on wikipedia, ignoring AS and PDD-NOS at first because I thought the terms were too weird and too confusing to pay attention to.)

When I was 16, just before I turned 17. I was miserable for the first time about the way I am because I thought I was only person who had autism without an intellectual disability and who can speak and because of it, I concluded that no one would ever acknowledge that I have autism because I'd never receive help without a diagnosis of autism.

The official diagnosis was a little later.


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Last edited by Sora on 20 Mar 2012, 7:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

OJani
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20 Mar 2012, 7:08 am

Although I wasn't diagnosed with AS, I might have been. Well, I wish I knew about AS and HFA years ago, so I could have worked on it more effectively, making my life more tolerable for both me and my surrounding.


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cyberscan
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20 Mar 2012, 7:32 am

I was told by my mom when I was very young (about 10). I knew that I was "autistic" but I never explored it or gave much though about it until I was in my late 30's However, I knew I was different than most other people.


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OJani
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20 Mar 2012, 7:36 am

Intrepid_Squirrel wrote:
I think they call it the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which your incompetency in something actually hides your incompetency by creating an illusion of superiority. Not gonna lie, that was exactly me, reflecting back on my life in school...

That's true for a certain period of my life, say, age 8-18, but the transition from the illusion of superiority to low self-esteem happened gradually, with occasional low and high tides, reminiscent of bipolar.



Ddddd
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20 Mar 2012, 7:38 am

The first time someone seriously mentioned that I might have AS was in August, 2010 (18 years old). They kept repeating it until I looked up the disorder (around December 2011) and I self-diagnosed this month (March 2012) and I'm on my way on getting an actual diagnosis (so that would be when I'm 20 or 21).


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c0bo
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20 Mar 2012, 9:37 am

Well I was diagnosed when I was 4 but I didn't know that I had Asperger until I was 16.


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ZipoCXG
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20 Mar 2012, 9:43 am

I was only 10 when I learned that I possibly had AS, but I wasn't officially diagnosed until I was 12 and in the 7th grade.



Ganondox
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20 Mar 2012, 11:13 am

I discovered I had AS right after I was diagnosed, which was at 8.


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Koi
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20 Mar 2012, 3:01 pm

I was only just recently diagnosed!

Just several months ago.



Joe90
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20 Mar 2012, 3:39 pm

I selected the top one, although in the UK it was when I was 4 years old at Infants School. Well, I didn't discover it, the doctors did. I was a typical child right up until the day I started school, and apparently I ''couldn't cope'' with school or something, and the teachers were worried and my parents didn't know what was wrong since I showed no signifficant differences as a baby, so I was took backwards and forwards to the doctors and psychiatrists until they found a diagnosis when I was 8. So it took 4 years to discover I had AS.


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Tuttle
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20 Mar 2012, 3:41 pm

I was told I was probably an aspie at age 13. I was diagnosed at 22, after graduating college.