When did you start to know you were different?

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It was that for me, too, until I discovered that not only was it going to be rather hard to connect at all, but that the typical children were interested in things that didn't interest me--so if I managed it, it would be boring!

When I started school and was around other kids and saw that I wasn't anything like them.

I knew when I was in middle school. Everyone seemed to be accepted with little to no effort at all yet I could never be and I worked my butt off. In high school I quit trying.

I didn't need to figure it out. People always made a point of letting me know how weird I was. They wouldn't let me walk through life without insisting upon it every single day. Discovering Asperger's was a mere confirmation.

I concur.

People were always telling me i was weird.

and i knew for sure i was different at around 11.
under the age of 11, i started to think that i was different but i was putting that on the fact that my mum was punk, and i didnt have a dad, and we were poor (in a very conservative and posh town)

For as long as I can remember, I never fit in anything.

I remember being alone at recess and never play or share anything with anyone, just content to be by myself.

I also had the conscience that I sucked at the work they gave us in kindergarden and was clumsy in sports. I still remember my kindergarden teacher telling my parents how bad I was at sports and how I had no artistic talent in painting and drawing, because I was doing abstract stuff and not "realistic" enough for her taste. What a b***h. I couldn't get perspective for drawing/painting and still don't.

Mind you, those were the 70's and AS wasn't known to exist, they knew something was wrong but would not consider me "autistic".

I hated school the first minute i entered it.

Even with the geeks and then the goths and punks when I was a teenager, I was the excluded in an excluded group. "Too weird" or "radical" were words I often heard­.

Trying to fit in (that and finding the nihilist meaning of life) gave me a massive depression, 2 suicide attempts and is a probable reason why I got cancer so I don't care anymore.

I just go my way and it seems to work so far.

Last edited by aintnowreck on 04 Sep 2008, 12:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Exactly so but at age 4 in kindergarten. And I remember wanting for it to leave me so bad so I could feel normal and relaxed like the other kids obviously did.
I felt like an outsider who didn't know how to fit in, like I was living in a dreamworld of my own and hadn't the tools to do what the other kids did.
The anxiety that it generated continuously and it never stopped although I always hoped it would one day leave me. One day it will.

I've known since I can remember, though the big revelation came with school.

I was excluded from the usual groups people formed in grade 1 (when I was 6). I don't remember that much of it really, but I do know I sat by myself a lot. Some of the kids teased me and called me names. I remember a group of girls who sometimes let me play with them. I think I was really quiet and didn't talk that much, except if I had a specific imaginative game like playing house or something of a sort where I had a character to play.

It was worse in high school though. I was teased there too. I remember 'my friends' calling me Blinky Bill because I used to blink a lot. I still do blink a lot. I only realised just how much when I saw myself on video camera recently.

I did realise I wasn't like other people. I used to have to think a lot while everyone was having a conversation and try to follow the conversation to find a place in. Often by the time I had something to say, the conversation had moved somewhere different. So I didn't used to talk that much.

I've noticed that I was different than everyone since I was in Kindergarden. I didn't fit in with my peers. I hardly had any friends in school and I got teased and picked on a lot. Dawn

Kindergarten was the beginning of a bizarre experience I was forced to go through. They called it school.

When I started developing my ego as a todler.
Why? Because I had a deformed face.

I win?

Most of my life.

through my friends.
i was seven, in the first grade. i had invited a little girl over to play, and when her mother brought her i remember listening in to their conversation, completely bewildered while her mother thanked mine profusely, saying things like "nobody ever does this, it's so nice to have some time to myself", etc. i remember being very confused until i realised that the little girl i considered my best and only friend at school had some kind of problems of her own, mentally and physically, that for some reason i just hadn't noticed or cared about. we played really well together, anyway.
in second grade i made a new little friend, but one day she had a seizure on the playground, and afterwards the other kids and teachers gave me loads of crap about it. it was because of me, i pushed us too fast on the tire swing. i thought she liked it! i felt bad, but afterwards i realised that there was something different about her, too, and wondered if perhaps there was also something different about myself.

oh dear, always... as long as i can remember

in my case, i WAS different, for completely other reasons;
which explains why it was never noticed

at 9 months, my parents moved from The Hague tot Belgian Kongo,
where i picked up enough wallonian french - so that made me a peerless little white boy in the darkest of africa, until the arrival of my little brother just before my second birthday
at 3, spent first winter in holland (no memories); soon moved to Liberia,
where we were two dutch boys in an even worse part of africa, on an american compound; there was a sort of improvised kindergarten
- have to own up: the roots of my english are american

returned to holland at 6; when we finally settled somewhere it seemed sensible to leave me at the school i had already been attending - my entire school career turned into a separate life that had nothing to do with life at home;
so i became what i was: apart; admitted podgyness didn't help; and i was (apparantly & obviously) smarter than the rest - smart enough in fact to immediately notice intelligence was not necessarily a safe quality to present

i survived, and all other problems could be explained differently -
until, recently....