for those with AS/HFA: were you born mild or did you adapt?

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im still going through a series of tests and research and still looking into my early childhood. i was born, pretty mild.

ASD:
repetitive phrases
avoided eye contact
need for routine
didn't share enjoyment
didn't engage in pretend play
obsessive interest
more interested in toys than other kids
preferred to be alone
had sensory overloads to sounds, lights and textures
poor balance and coronation
had trouble holding objects (scissors, feeding self, ect)
couldn't adapt to change
didn't show facial expressions
i dont think i could hear hard consonance
screamed a lot
had meltdowns when i couldnt cope with what was going on
high pain tolerance
saw only details
stacked objects

NT:
likes to play hide and seek
learned to speak at a good age (first word at 6 months 'babababa")
enjoyed being held
hit the milestones (with force)
learned to read and write at a good age (about 4)
played a lot (mostly alone)

It hard to say but id say i was very mild from the beginning but did a lot of adapting.

Were you born Mild or were you generally Low Functioning and adapted?

My handicaps are not "mild." I just hide them well.

You're just too young yet to realize how much they are holding you back. You'll figure it out after you've been fired for the 15th or 16th time, simply because "you don't fit in with the rest of the staff."

I was born pretty mild, I used imaginative play, but often got derailed into performing repetitive actions with my toys. At nursery school I only played with specific toys and didn't deviate. Even at the age of 3-4 when NT children are only engaging in parallel play and not really interacting with one another, I was still the only one playing by myself very often. I had strong verbal skills and enjoyed interacting with my parents, but watched the same video and listened to the same CD virtually nonstop, and it drove my mom nuts. I also had a lot of stimming behaviour, including bouncing up and down so frequently that I damaged the tendons in my ankles. I think I was one of those whose AS traits didn't fully manifest themselves until the social expectations outweighed my abilities.

i guess thats what i mean when i say mild, how well have you been hiding your symptoms. and how bad were your symptoms when you were born?

I feel I don't have enough self-perspective to really answer your question. I have no idea if my impairment were/are mild or if, like Willard writes, I hid them well. 3 years of therapy did not solve my problems, but it taught me that that indeed you can hide an incredible amount of things about yourself to everyone, including to yourself.

I just want to comment on one thing I read in your list :

These are not only NT traits, those are also the main (some say only) things that discriminate AS and HFA. People with AS don't have any developmental delay for language, while people with HFA start talking later and then catch up. Many specialists now claim that the difference is too small to make a difference between the two syndromes and they should be merged as only one diagnosis.

He is right some people might think I have mild AS as I am able to hide many of the symptoms, the problem with hiding the symptoms is that it requires intense concentration.

Regarding the imaginative play, I was extremely imaginative. I was basically (still am) living in my own fantasy world. It's just I didn't play with others. My cousin and I used to play with little toy cars, and she would always try to engage the play with me (by making the cars talk), and for me, I don't find making cars talk to each other fun. I would just simulate traffic, roads, etc. So I am very imaginative, in a certain way. My imagination doesn't "create" new stuff, it just bases off of reality. Whenever someone would try to play with me, I never played with them, we just did our own thing next to each other, despite him/her trying to engage mutual play. I had relatively normal milestones. I did refer to everything as a certain word a little longer than usual, but otherwise normal. I skipped the crawling stage, and I only rolled. And yes I always listened to the same 2 cd's throughout my whole childhood, now that I think about it. I did play soccer in K-1st (at school, not a league), but I just stood near the goal and waited for the ball to come to me. I really got the most enjoyment out of being by myself on the swings. I played soccer, basketball, and flag football when I pretty young, (parents signed me up), I had absolutely no idea what I was doing lol. I had to look at my parents during soccer and they would point to where I would run. And in basketball, I just talked to my friend the entire game (When I was in the game, not on the sidelines!). I tried out for baseball a few years later, and has the most embarassing moment of my life. I thought I would sign up to try to "fit in" and get a bit more engaged in social activities. At the evaluation, we all lined up to see how many balls we can hit, and there were thrown VERY slow. He threw about 5-6. Every kid hit most of them, and I didn't hit one.. Let's just say I didn't play baseball from there on..

I always preferred to be alone. Whenever a friend came over, I would hide hoping they would leave. I had obsessive interests, at the time was army, cars, and I even got into deoderant bottles & bottle caps.

I actually was very good in public, calm and content. I had a ton of meltdowns otherwise, though, and according to my relatives i cried a lot. I had trouble holding objects as well. My parents kept buying me snow globes, (one of my special interest at the time), I would always drop it and glass would shatter everywhere.

Also, watching a home video, I never even looked or responded to when someone called my name. I just kept paying attention to whatever object or thing I was engaging in.

Overall, I think i'm pretty mild still when I was a baby and toddler. Things really started up when I went into middle school. That's when the school avoidance started, social anxiety, obsessiveness, etc.
I thought I was just social anxiety until the start of high school, when I was diagnosed. Everything made sense from there on.

I personally think I've always qualified as 'mildly' autistic, but it should be noted that if my symptoms had been left unsupervised and without the proper guidance, I would probably be a lot less well-adjusted than I am right now.

I would definitely say that I adapted over time, but much of this was due to my mother.

I was born mild. I still had the strict timetable when I had to do things the same time every day. My eye contact was somewhat worse than it is now, probably because I was more interested in my toys than I was in people. I rocked on occasion and I stimmed by tilting my doll's bottles back and forth, they were the bottles that had liquid that looked like milk and orange juice. Other than that, I tested mild at the age of 5.

As a child:
Poor gross motor skills
Very poor fine motor skills
Severe sensory issues
Had meltdowns often
Used to shutdown at times
Almost never cried
High pain tolerance
Avoided eye-contact
Very poor personal hygene
Had troubles with pronounciation (was solved when I was around 8 )
Had troubles learning to write
Completely oblivious to social rules
Often smiles or laughed when others considered it inappropriate
Had troubles holding objects (they either fell from my hands or I broke them)
Self-help skills delay
Slight motor skills delay
Tone of voice was either too high, too low, too monotonic, too fast or too slow, or it expressed an emotion I wasn't feeling (my mother often commented I had an angry tone when I wasn't actually being angry)
Obsessions
Used to cut things with scissors a lot
Anxiety issues
Had troubles paying attention to stuff I wasn't interested in

I think that is all. I have always been very imaginative in my ways of playing.
About group play, up to the age of 5 my mother had to bring me to groups of children to play because I didn't approach them on my own. I always ended up arguing because I was bossy and wanted others to do as I wanted. This is why I used to play with younger children (when I was 5 I used to play with those who were 3) who did what I told them to do. My games used to bore children my same age because they were only about observing plants or ants. This was at the park because in kindergarten I never played with other children.
In elementary school I either played on my own or with groups of boys. The games other girls played had too many social rules that I couldn't understand. The boys had only a simple rule: the strongest won. It was easier for me. I also played with "boyish" girls who didn't like "girly" games.

I think I classified as moderate AS/HFA. I was diagnosed with ADD and then with ODD as a child but counselors had already told my mother that I might have had some form of HFA/AS, even though I was not officially diagnosed with AS up to the age of 13.

My father was born as MFA/severe HFA as far as I know (severe motor skills delay, speech delay and other delays) but has improved a lot thanks to his brothers' cares (when he was 13 he was already moderate AS).

I don't know if this is possible, but I was beaten into adapting. There was no way I could ever throw a tantrum or be a picky eater when I was younger. I'd be beaten within an inch of my life if I even tried that. There weren't many toys to play with, but the toys I did have I dissected them all, not really played with them. I'm glad I wasn't beaten for that. I was imaginative but pretty much kept to myself.

As I aged I learned to disguise my symptoms better. I'm still painfully alone but I tolerate it. I still make faux pas when I speak so I try to do talk as little as possible. I still have no friends because I'm unable to maintain any due to communication deficits. In my life I've had numerous jobs, maybe 25 or so. I don't know which of the firings can be blamed on autism, needless to say, I'm very unstable in that area.

Born autistic. As a toddler could not hide anything because I had little social awareness.

My autism was low/moderate classic when I was born.
Over the years i have gotten closer to HFA in many ways.
But i think prolly my autism will always be apparent.

Probably a bit of both.

I was never Dxed with anything growing up, so I wasn't obviously autistic, and AS was not recognized in the US at the time.

Add in parents who believed in discipline, and I suppose I learned to repress/hide many traits when around others...at least as far as "acting out" would apply.

I was pretty mild in some ways.


Growing up:

AS:
A bit clumsy and poor coordination and balance
I played sensory games, but I did so in the privacy of my home, not among other children
Food a serious problem, so much icky and wrong
Some body language passed me by as a child, but is clear to me now looking back. One incident when I was 6 comes to mind in particular.
Spent a lot of my time alone in my school years
Eye contact became something I avoided as I became an older child; I can’t pinpoint it exactly but it was an issue in late elementary school
Had problems learning to write in cursive, was 2 years delayed compared to my classmates
Didn’t tie my shoe laces until 9
Obsessions
Enormous problems paying attention to boring or uninteresting stuff
Lined things up (but only alone)
Took a little while before I learnt to say ‘st’, it came out ‘t’
As a baby I didn’t crawl much at all, and my mother said she wondered if maybe I found it painful
No shared attention as a toddler
I hated trying new things
I too was more interested in toys than in other children
When I was about a year old I refused to walk (which I had liked up to that point), and my mother found I had a glass shard in my foot. It didn’t make me cry or whine.
I was usually easy to be around when sick
Book worm

Either way:
I didn’t cry much as a baby or child
Thunder was scary when I was a small child, but in middle elementary school I lost that fear and became afraid of the lightning instead (not the light, but fear of being struck)
There were lots of games I liked playing, but I was in it for the game, not the children involved, which apparently is typical of aloof children
Well-behaved and calm when my parents brought me to stores, downtown etc, and when we went to visit others, I never nosed around.
Aware of some social rules (and generally knew what I shouldn’t say (but not necessarily what I should). That’s not to say I always acted nice, but when I did say something bad, I knew what I did), but far from all
I took some social cues, but missed others
I was never naïve, nor was I trusting with anyone besides parents and grandparents; I understood stranger danger perfectly, and I didn’t put unduly trust in people I knew either
Learned to read and write at the expected age
Learned to speak within the expected age, but wasn’t early
Small children apparently are supposed to have basic feelings only, but I had advanced feelings (like humiliation and indignation)
I never let anyone push me into anything when I really didn’t want to. (My mother remembers seeing some other girls try to talk me into swinging the jump rope for them, and I said clearly “No!” and when they tried to push the end of the rope into my hand I pulled the hand away angrily. This was in before I turned 6.) But despite being very determined, I wasn’t blind to or indifferent to all kinds of peer pressure.
In elementary school I did pick on some other children, which some here considers NT, but which all my experience says is a human thing.
As a child I would talk nonstop to my mother; now I wonder how I always had so much to say. I also talked to one ‘aunt’ in one of the daycares I was in, but not the other ‘aunts’. In school I didn’t talk openly to teachers, and I was very quiet in school. I’ve read of aspie children who has to be taught to not hug the teacher; the thought of hugging my teacher never even occurred to me
In my preschool years I also seemed to come up with stuff to say to playmates, but that became harder in elementary school and harder and harder the older I got.
I was very embarrassed by adults acting childish. I don’t mean like they were playing with children, I mean like they were putting on a show for them. It just made me uncomfortable. I never found that to be the least bit fun. I don’t know if that’s an aspie or NT trait, or neither.

NT:
Lights and noise weren’t a problem
Loved being picked up by family. My mother has told me that as a baby I would babble and if they didn’t come pick me up, I’d cry, but I’d stop the moment I was picked up. There was no stiffening or going limp as I’ve seen people talking about before.
Never had a meltdown
Had temper tantrums
Even as a little child (before 6) I could read basic facial expressions
Eye contact meant nothing to me when I was little, so it wasn’t a problem
Learned to swim and ski at 6.
Rode a bike without training wheels at 7, which apparently is within the norm, which seems to be 3-8
Was told by teacher in first grade that I read with amazing feeling (and I can’t stress enough that I wasn’t in spec ed)
Had pretend play
I had parallel play, and interacting playing later
Had imagination and was always praised for the stories I made, by family, teachers and classmates alike
Strong preference of fiction to non-fiction
Picked up things from other children (like cursing which I apparently learned in daycare before I turned 3. My mother has told me that I’d curse – and couldn’t even pronounce it right – and look at her expectantly; obviously I had observed other children doing that in daycare and knew what reaction to expect)
I had some ToM in the way that I understood about giving someone say a box with a chocolate label and knew it would be surprising to find something else inside; I got that before the age of 6. I could also at least in some cases predict what someone’s reaction would be and play them.
I liked the typical children’s jokes and I never lacked a sense of humor
I never had much problem with figures of speech, some were self-explanatory, others were not, but I never took them literally
Exclusion came natural to me
I never wandered off
I didn’t like being left alone. Sometimes my mother would put me in the play pen while she went into the kitchen etc, and that made me cry immediately. It was particularly in my first year that I was in the play pen.
I got sarcasm at an early age, and I remember laughing at it at the age of 11
I have never been entirely blind to hierarchy (and I don’t even think society would work without it). (This happened at adult age but still: That’s why it was difficult for me to do anything when I held a sort of position and the one who was one step above me did something wrong. He was the ‘boss’ so to speak (but not a real boss), and that stopped me.) All aspies are so not blind to that.
I’ve never been bind to public humiliation and social embarrassment, and there were people I would not be associated with because they were weird or something about them was embarrassing

I made it until 30 and at that point people really started noticing. I think I learned some good coping skills with the NT world but doing so has caused me to become diagnosed with severe unspecified anxiety. Kind of wish I was diagnosed at an earlier age.