Your first realisation

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Mine was that I knew I wqs different when I was incredibly shy and did not make friends easily. I am not sure if I also thought that the other kids were mean or less intelligent, but this may be just me as an adult misremembering.

Anyway, I thought I was all done with it when I was a teen. But have always had trouble keeping good friends. And really making them too.

It took being told that the whole management staff thought that I was weird at my last job. That hurt, but it got me where I am today, w better job, a diagnosis and a happier life.

Now, maybe I will meet a male adult whom I could care about and life would be wonderful.

I new there was something different about me and could never figure out what. I was sad that I didn't fit in, didn't have a girlfriend, and was picked on in school. As I got into my twenties I began to think I had something wrong with me that I couldn't see. I still at 34 don't know why I can't interact with people and I honestly don't understand how some of you have learned to read social signs. At least I know now that there are others like me and that gives me some sense of closure.

How I am learning social signs... my family is helping me with realizing when I am talking too long. I am also looking into apps for facial expressions and sarcasm assistance and stuff.

Tina

I became progressively aware that I didn't like most people very much and that they were not very nice to me. I made friends easily but as life got more difficult I became very shy. I lost my gawkiness in high school and I enjoyed being attractive and got plenty of male attention. I adapted to the classroom and worked my way through college. It became more obvious that I did not fit in with the group anywhere. I got a job as a special education teacher and while I love the kids I have never been a team player. Doing what is right often conflicts with the educational agenda. I did not relate to most people and life was a struggle for me every day. That has never changed. My son began having trouble in middle school and I became one of those crazy parents because I listened to him. That experience became the worst of several horror stories in my life experience. An advocate pointed out that my son's verbal IQ scores was much higher than his nonverbal scores. I typed this in google and NLD came up. I found my dad, my son and myself there. That led to my ASD research. My son has the AS diagnosis, my 8 year old grandson is severely autistic. I don't need a formal diagnosis. I have known for about 7 years. I am glad that I found out and glad that I found people on this website that I actually can relate too. I like myself better now. I understand that my life has not been just a series of bad luck. I do not consider this to be a disability in the big picture that I see. I am thankful every day to be me. Ii is the shallowness of the NT world and my inability to function in it that baffles me. My obsessions are mostly about trying to find away to knock down walls, like prison walls that trap me inside. This consumes so much of my energy that there seems to be little time to enjoy a special interest. I do not push myself as hard as I used too though and that it why I am glad that I didn't know sooner.

This thread is bringing up so many memories for me.

I never really felt different at school. I don't recognise that I was treated any different to anyone else. I was kept back a year in grade 2, my speech was slow to develope, I was very shy. All farily normal stuff.

I do feel that my paranoia grew over time though. I had a fear of girls in primary school, which slowly developed into a full blown intense fear by the time I left high school. Talking to a pretty girl was so impossible, I would get toung tied, stutter badly and run away. The tomboy girls I could relate to and loved playing with, these girls I could relax around and be myself with. But the pretty ones would lock me up. I could barely way hi to them without quaking.

In my 20's when I was looking for a girl friend; all my friends were finding partners and even getting married. I couldn't find a girl friend at all, not even a short one.

I suffered from depression in my mid 20's which lasted 4 years. I believed it was my lack of relationship that caused it, so turned my back on socciety so that that would not happen again. I became a hermit out of choice.

None of this caused me to believe I was expecialy different. Just unlucky, or just how my life turned out. Everybody would ask when I was going to get a girl friend, or why I didn't have one. But I didn't have a reason for why I didn't. I didn't know what I did that was different to everybody else. We all went to the same parties, went to the same night clubs. Other than being shy, I didn't believe I was different.

It wasn't until I got the diagnosis and started reading books that I finaly began to understand just how different I am. But it's not something I ever saw myself.

I vividly remember the first day of Kindergarten. My Mom brought me to the classroom on the first day. After she left, I stood there staring at all the kids playing. It was loud and noisy. It was one of those fight or flight situations. So, I decided to walk out of the classroom and all the way home (we had lived < ¼ mile from the school). This continued for several days.

That was simply my first memory. My parents have earlier memories, involving difficulty with sharing and withdrawal from social play in nursery school.

That was many years ago. I didn’t learn about Aspergers until just recently (while taking an Intro to Psychology course offered online by Yale). During the lecture, the professor mentioned Autism and Aspergers. I started reading up on Aspergers and had one of those “Aha” moments.

The feeling of not fitting began during second grade, so I was 6. That was the year we moved to another city and, of course, different school for me. Then different schools for 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th thru 8th, and finally high school. So not a surprise I always felt like an outsider. I was! I really didn't recognize that my outsider-ness wasn't getting any better until about the third year of high school, when I was 16 or 17. I realized that I only ever heard about the weekend parties the Monday AFTER they happened, that I was not a part of any clique, almost never saw my classmates outside of school, had no understanding of the dating rituals (the point of all the who-is-dating-whom-this-week chatter baffled me), and didn't fit in in a whole bunch of other ways.

Through college, a brief stab at grad school, then the working world, I kept thinking that eventually, I'd find where I fit in, or that with practice i would develop those social skills that had been underdeveloped because of the many school changes during childhood. Over the past two years I've come to realize that I won't, and had committed to being a loner the rest of my life well before reading about aspergers and recognizing so many characteristics in myself, individual traits that I've identified over years of therapy, but that have not formed a coherent whole until now, in the aspergers context.

I always made up lots of reasons why I was different. The first being that I was adopted but later found blood family. I thought maybe I was different because I was really smart. Then I thought I was different maybe because I was 'not right'.. more like a guy than a female although I am not at all gay. Then a younger guy with ASD said that 'we were the same' and he listed all the reasons in a text. Even then I didn't take the hint. And frankly I still don't know if I am AS or not. But what I do know it that I can't lie and I TOTALLY DON'T GET the social BS that women do. I have no freakin' idea why they are so sneaky and why they talk, talk talk and it's all weird and for a purpose that I don't get. The women are constantly outsmarting me and making me look stupid and when that happens I want to beat them to death because they are evil. So I really don't have any female friends, just males because they don't play those games. Also, when my computer gets a virus I look through all the programs and codes and I find it and remove it like a splinter and nobody and figure out how I know which one is the virus. I just 'see it' is all I have to say. I also see patterns in EVERYTHING.. I can figure things out that nobody can. It's really strange...but I use that as my secret weapon. What bothers me the most is the people are 'not on the level' and they seem like they always have an angle and it's so deceiving. I'm at the point where I feel like 'why bother'... with having friends or making friends because I'm always waiting for them to 'act weird' and then be mad at me for something that to me is just about being honest.. but they see it as 'all hell broke lose' and frankly I'm sick of it all. Why can't people just be honest.

Lynnzy's post stimulated a train of thought that culminated in long-forgotten memories of being 12 and having a kid from Honduras in my class for just one school year. First time meeting anyone from another country, and being fascinated. Another place, another culture, another language even. Much of that year, I wanted to be from another country, too. Then there would have been someplace to return to where I actually belonged. I don't remember a whole lot about him, only that he was fun to talk to. It's been a recurring theme in my life that I get along better with people from other countries than US natives.

^ Sounds like a very reasonable theory.

I noted elsewhere about growing up in the '80s (late '70s for me) that elementary school teachers knew something but didn't know what. However, I was pretty clueless; I didn't really pay attneion tot he fact other kids didn't have imaginary friends or use made up words at 7 or 8.

I think I attributed a lot of stuff to my poor vision/hearing as far as not socializing as much unless invited to play. Then I had this regular routine of going to a friend's house or him coming to mine and playing that was so much of a routine that it just never occurred to me that I might love the routine for reaons other than just he was a great playmate.

the first time I realized it might be something like Asperger's was when I met a friend online and was helping him with some tings. I read up on Asperger's and (this was maybe 12 years ago) it seemed possible, but I'd gotten enough good friends in church & there was that routine from 3rd grade through high school (when we'd be doing other stuff, too, not just playing video games) that I'd forgotten how little I'd ever initiated friendships on my own. One person via e-mail even said that was a key component, and I never really thought about it till it gradually become more logical a few years later.

I did write out a note to a few high school friends detailing little incidents which seemed to point toward it fromt he thigns mentioned on Wikipedia, but hadn't looked at the DSM-IV. The friends just said, in essense, "Interesting, I'll have to think about that.'

When i looked at the DSM-IV there were only 2 in part A I clearly had and I only kind of had one other and then 1, maybe 2 in B, because the extreme literal nature wasn't specifically stated. But, then I realized there that had to be in the DSM-IV and it made even more sense. The only question is, is it enough to be a real handicap in everyday life, all else fit for me being right ont he border into Asperger's, which made sense because that's where the Wired Magazine test said I was.

So, I guess you could say things fell into place so I never had a point where I knew I was definitely different; it was a very gradual thing. But, I'm not really sure *why* I never thought about the fact other kids didn't have imaginary friends, etc., at the ages I did, because I would read comic strips and was very literal about things like going from calling my mother "Mommy" to "Mom" - I did it at age 8 because Billy still called his "Mommy" in "Family Circus" at 7 but no kids I read did so at age 8.

Maybe back then was when I was smart, when I kept things simple. Because when I did try to act totally NT in my early 20s was when I had the most problems.

Interesting question.
Maybe almost every day.

I don't remember thinking I was different as a child -- say 5 or 6 years old. I remember seeing that I was being treated differently by the teachers. And not understanding why. Because I was just me, the same way that all the other kids were just who they were. But the teachers reacted to me differently. It varied. In kidergarden I didn't understand play time. I didn't know how the other kids knew that it was time to get up and go over to the blocks and start building with them. Or go to the pretend kitchen with the cardboard stove and the cardboard refridgerator and play house. Now that I think about it, the boys headed to the blocks and all the girls headed to the cardboard kitchen. (This was 1964. I guess gender-appropriate play was pretty well reinforced back then. But to this day I don't know how they so consistently knew that either.) I didn't join the others because I didn't know how they knew what to do and I didn't know how to go over to them and join in. But it was the teacher who isolated me. Instead of taking me by the hand and leading me over to the girls group and introducing me or trying to get me interested in something over there, she took me to a table and put me at it by myself with some paper and crayons. Trying to introduce me or get me to pretend that cardboard appliances worked hat may not have been very successful. But she didn't even try -- just put me by myself, separate from everyone else. Similar scenes repeated throughout kindergarden. (And my mother later told me that Mrs.H____ was a saint and if she hadn't been so good with me . . . . )
Looking back at first grade, it seems like the teacher didn't know what to do with me, in a quiet kind of way. Didn't interact with me much. And maybe didn't like me(?). 2nd grade I remember writing (well, printed in really big, 2nd grade letters on paper with hugely wide lines) a thing a few sentences long about what happens when a mosquito bites you and why it itches. The project must have been to look something up in the kiddy encyclopedia set because I sure didn't know that on my own. And obviously I copied what the book said. But the teacher was really impressed, which made my parents all gratified and proud. But the teacher wasn't impressed in a good way -- it was more like a 'you're so smart you're kind of a freak now and I'm uncomfortable about you' kind of way.
Middle school - the mean girls made me a target and picked on me for most (well, all) of those years. But my dad had become disabled and we had become poor, so I had one set of clothes that I wore everyday for the whole school year. So yeah, on top of whateever personality differences I had, I really didn't fit in.
High school - hung out with a few other kids from the art-sy, would have been hippies but that era was pretty much over, group.
College -- didn't fit in. But I was at a women's college near one of the miltary academies so half the girls were there to marry an officer.

The difference didn't really hit home until something happened at my job when about was about 39. I missed a deadline, that apparently got my boss yelled at. No one actually explained to me what happened. But at the end of the day, after everyone else left, she starts counseling me about how I'm not responsive and can't I see these people have needs, and how no one should ever have to work with me and why.
The problem was actually that another department wasn't doing their job and I couldn't get them to, and I couldn't finish my part of the project until their part was done. But that wasn't what concerned her -- somehow for her that cause still translated into I wasn't being responsive enough, or congenial enough, or something like that. I have noticed that at work it often seems that congenial, social people can get away with inadequate work, where more reserved people (Aspie or not) can get castigated even when they consistently do good or superior work.

But it was the discovery that there is something called Aspergers, which has a particular pattern or grouping of traits and characteristics. And really it was finding info on the web written for Aspies by other Aspies that helped me identify -- in a good way -- how I am. By providing me info to contrast the ways I am different from how NTs are. The examples I'm going to give are over-simplified, but to illustrate what I mean without taking too many words . . . . The idea that much of the point when NTs talk is establish a social/behavioral connection with each other, and they often don't care much about the information was astounding to me. Whereas I don't get the whole create (and create and create and recreate) the realtionship, throughout the whole conversation untill all involved feel satiated. My view is: We're both there. Or if more than two, we're all there. Its a given. Why keep reaffirming it. Why not use that commonality to do something interesting. Like you tell me something I don't know. Or I'll tell you something that is new to you. Or we can both stare at the same gorgesous sunset, without having to make it real by talking to each other abouit it. Or solve a math problem. Or . . .whatever. But to me NTs look like they just spend a lot of time reinforcing their own "Me-ness". I'm me, so I'm going to talk to you. And you talked back, to me, so that reinfiorces that I'm me. And to be more me I have to relate to you. So I'm going to talk to you to reaffirm that me-ness and then you'll affirm my me-ness by talking to me. Enough already.

El

[qu I have noticed that at work it often seems that congenial, social people can get away with inadequate work, where more reserved people (Aspie or not) can get castigated even when they consistently do good or superior work.
ote]
I noticed the same things. I don't like spending time 'conning' someone into liking me. I hate playing those kinds of games. I'm honest, a hard worker, loyal, and helpful. Why should I spend all kinds of time playing 'mind games' about liking this one or that one or whatever. I only do what is vital to get by. I can't work any place it seems because some socially fancy female always 'socially manipulates' a situation into an 'non-reality' to suit their needs and it's usually against someone like me. People should just be basic, honest and upfront. All the other 'social games' bs is not worth the time because it doesn't accomplish anything but waste my time. That's how I feel.