How Different Were You As A Child...

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A different take on the other thread...

How different were you as a child compared to the other children?

I was different in the things I did which became more noticeable as I became a teenager. Things like my hobbies carried on where other children dropped theirs as they grew older. At the age of about 15 to 16 I had a carrier bag collection under my bed and I would use one bag at a time to test which ones lasted the longest. I did repair them with tape when they had holes in to give them a fair chance as I did not want them to die. A Carmarthenshire Council recyclable bag seemed to have the record.
Then one day I came home from school and they were all gone. My Mum had found them and dissaproved!

It was things like that which made me stand out. Wierd things! And I was usually very quiet so I would not draw attention to myself. I learned it was best to be "Almost quiet" to do this because being very quiet meant that teachers would learn this and try to bring me forth so I soon learned to be quietish but occasionally contribute just to avoid being singled out as being too quiet.

More introverted
More uncoordinated
Clumsier
Less sociable


An easy target for bullies.

I was bullied a lot in grade school and middle school, so an easy target for bullies including two teachers during when I was in middle school.

During my high school years, I was very much an outcast because of my desperation to fit in.

"ret*d" was still being used as a medical term back then, and I was considered "ret*d". I possibly may have had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, my biological mother often hung out in a local bar where people did buy her drinks. But I guess I will never know for sure. I had lots of meltdowns and temper tantrums and could not sleep through the night. I was adopted and consider the lady who adopted me as my mother more than the lady who gave birth to me. My mother has trouble with her memory due to a childhood head injury and her recollection of my early childhood changes. Sometimes she says I had a speech delay and needed speech therapy. Other times she says I was nonverbal.

Special interests were my main autistic trait way back then just as much as they are now. I feel like the exact same person I was as a child, just an "evolve" version (when Pokémon "evolve" don't they just get older or grow up?) but it seems like everyone I grew up with turned into entirely different people.

I had a spiky profile as a child. A lot of things I was "normal" with but I still displayed ASD symptoms otherwise I wouldn't have got a diagnosis at 8 years.

I was very sociable and articulate as a child and I didn't have any speech delays when I was a toddler.
But as a child I seemed a little behind my peers with self-awareness. Although I had social anxiety in the classroom (I suppose that is self-awareness?), I still acted embarrassing when around my friends or cousins of my age, because they would often tell me how embarrassing I was in the playground. In my mind I thought that children who didn't know you wouldn't judge you or care what you are doing, but it turns out that when you reach about age 7 children start to know what is socially acceptable and what isn't. For example, if I were to pick my nose at 5, the other children probably wouldn't notice or care, but if I were to pick my nose at 8 other children would notice more and not want to play with me because I'm "gross". But when I was 8 I was still at the mental stage where I thought nobody else cared what I was doing, so I was confused when my peers started to say, "that is so embarrassing, kids will laugh!"

So I think that's what made me different; being about 3 years behind my peers socially, in some ways (not in every way, after all, kids are entitled to act childish!)