Going to Boarding School with Neurotypicals

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I would like to share my experiences with you, and hopefully receive feedback on them from others who have and have not had similar experiences.
I was diagnosed with Asperger's about two weeks ago. I am 28 years old in March.
As a very young child I was recognised as having an unusual natural musical ability. Now, to clarify, I am nowhere near savant level with music, but I have always been able to remember music with very little effort, and to sing in tune with a similar lack of effort.
When I was about 8 years old there was an advert in the local paper, from a private school that was looking for "sons who could sing." Obviously I fit the bill, and due to family circumstances there was an amount of money set aside for private education for myself and my younger sister (who is NT). So off I went through the screening process, and I was judged to have enough potential to be awarded a scholarship to this boarding school. The terms of the scholarship were that my family would only have to pay 50% of the fees for the school, and in return I would sing in the choir for the college that the prep school 'fed' into.
Previously I had attended a village primary school. I only had two friends, twin brothers, who were considered 'unsuitable' by my family and thusly they were more than happy for me to go to another school where I might make more 'appropriate' friends. I had already experienced issues with being bullied, but it was the sort of low level stuff that primary school boys are capable of, nothing like the sort of physical and emotional abuse that I would encounter later.
I started at the prep school a year later than the other attendees, finding that all the other boys had already cemented solid relationships and social groups. (Yes I attended an all boys prep school. Such insanity still exists in the world today!) I was 9 years old. I was an outsider from the start, and my inability to understand why only made that even worse. My skin was barely a few nanometres thick, and I would immediately become extremely angry with anyone who made a joke at my expense, or tried to exclude me from an activity that I felt I had a right to participate in. Coupled with this was the onset of an immediate depression as a result of being separated from my mother, whom to this day remains one of very few people who have put effort into trying to understand me.
So the next 4 years were much the same. I was ostracised by all my peers, living in a state of constant high anxiety. Monday mornings were the worst. After Mass in the chapel on Sunday morning, we were allowed to spend a few hours at home with our families before being required to return in time for bed in the evening. After trying very hard not to cry myself to sleep on Sunday nights (the ridicule one would receive from the other boys for showing weakness was particularly vicious), I would awake Monday morning with the entire week stretching ahead of me. This was too much to cope with, and I would become distraught when the matrons would try to get me out of bed, literally kicking and screaming. This continued until I was 12, and in the last few months of being at prep school I managed to hold it together a bit better.
None of the above was ever reported to my parents. My social status was described to them as "low but acceptable" and my regular Monday morning performance was kept very quiet indeed. Bullying at this stage was mostly restricted to verbal or emotional abuse, physical abuse was extremely rare.
At the age of 12 it is time to leave prep school and continue on to what I refer to as 'senior school.' The process for music scholars is roughly thus. If your family can't afford the full cost of fees to senior schools, which tend to be far more expensive than preps, you must seek another scholarship. The circumstances in my family that had provided the relatively small amount of funds for prep school had changed, and the amounts of money at issue for the future were far, far larger. So, another scholarship I did seek.
By this time I was considered the school's best solo vocalist (which didn't help my popularity. Being called a 'castro' (castrati were gelded male singers who retained unbroken voices into adulthood) by other choirboys was something I never thought made sense. But it hurt nonetheless). I was also becoming proficient in piano, which everyone was required to play, and clarinet which was my instrument of choice (choice of course being a relative term. I had no choice).
This made finding schools with an interest in me fairly easy. I was even given an amount of choice in the matter of which school I would attend. Having previously attended a very traditional 'oldschool' style institution, I was very anxious to attend somewhere more modern. And so it was that we found somewhere that fitted my bill, and the school was interested enough in my abilities to offer me both the standard 50% off and a further means tested 25% bursary. The remaining amount of money to be paid left my parents financially crippled for the duration of my stay at the school, and for several years afterward. Of course I had no idea of the extent of this at the time.
I accepted the offer of a place, and off I went. Some of you may be wondering why I agreed to stay in the boarding school system at all, and at this stage it is important to clarify a couple of things. My family had no idea how bad it was, and I was incapable of explaining it to them. My desires to return to a more normal education were simply brushed under the carpet as childishness. I had no choice.
So at 13 I found myself sharing a house with 60 other boys, ranging from my age up to 18 years old. This new school was co-ed, so there were girls (something I was very excited about!) but their accommodation was kept separate for obvious reasons.
It was at this stage that my life started getting really seriously difficult. The culture at many senior boarding schools is (or at least was) this... Bullying happens, it is considered character building by many in positions of power at the schools, and is therefore left to run its course. This leads to an institutionalised system of verbal, emotional and physical abuse where any attempt at retaliation, mitigation or reporting is met with further, more escalated levels of abuse.
Unsurprisingly, I did not fit in very well. The school itself had no requirements for entry in terms of academic accomplishment, and was geared towards nurturing sporting ability. They were keen to have music scholars around to roll out in front of other schools, churches and concert halls, to highlight how 'diverse' their curriculum was. However, sports were what they cared about, and keeping the sporting kids happy was top of the agenda. Funnily enough, those who excelled at sports were some of the worst offenders and ringleaders where abuse was concerned.
I found myself on the very bottom of the social ladder, unable to even get my foot on the first rung. Even the groups of children who were rejected by the majority of the others considered me a toxic social asset. And with good reason! Of course I had no understanding of this at the time, but I remained the thin-skinned boy I had been previously, quick to anger and retaliate in an unreasonable manner.
It was not until I had been at the school for two years that I started to gain some understanding of why no one wanted to know me. I had had a very small amount of success making friends with individuals, who would rapidly get sick and tired of my lack of understanding. I expected these people to spend all their available time with me, and was mortified when they didn't want to. I was on the receiving end of daily physical abuse, and this went hand in hand with the verbal and emotional gougings that accompanied them. As a music scholar the concept of 'free time' was not alien to me, I craved it immensely, but there was none to be had. What was break time for non-scholars was scheduled practice time for me. It was only in the evening once we had all returned to the boarding house that I had time spare, and it certainly didn't feel 'free.' This time was taken up with being bullied, or trying to avoid it. Kids at state schools get to go home to their families at the end of the day, escaping whatever issues they are having at school to return to a safe haven (assuming of course the parents aren't abusive). I was living with my tormentors, there was nowhere to go. No way to make it stop either. Teachers didn't care, my parents weren't told and I couldn't tell them. Any attempt at retaliation against one boy would result in all the other boys his age coming back and doing it all over again, only worse.
So, as mentioned above, by about 15 years old I was coming into a moment of realisation. I call it a moment, but it was a period of time that lasted several weeks. I started becoming aware of how my behaviour might appear to the people around me, and I was ashamed. I was a total little douche, and eventually I came to understand just why no one wanted anything to do with me. With careful observation I was able to start building a little collection of techniques that enabled me to make some real friends. These were of course the other 'rejects' at the school, who finally accepted me as a friend after much wooing and persistence. Practice practice practice was the name of the game, and that's what I did.
When I was 16 I had decided that there was no way on earth I was staying boarding school any longer. GCSE time was coming up, my academic success was pretty solid, and my music was going well. My social abilities had progressed to the stage where I could explain properly to my parents that I was absolutely miserable, and thankfully they got the point and allowed me to leave, and attend a state college near home.
There's much more story to tell of what happened at this point, but it's not so much relevant to the topic so I'll save it for another day.

I would very much like to hear from anyone who's had a similar experience to my own. How have you coped with later life, having the start that you did? How bad was it for you at the time? What things have you learned that help you to deal with what happened, and what tools have you made for yourself to help with this?

I had a quick poke around for another topic along these lines, and found only threads about Non_NT boarding schools and the like. If I've missed a thread that this post would fit nicely into, please accept my apologies and if you're feeling nice, reply with a link.

I was in a border school for 4 years from age 15-18. It was a normal border school and I wasnt diagnosed that time.

For me the border school had many advantages:

- Everyday had a routine. 6:15-waking, 6:45-7:15 learning and preparing for school, 7:15-8:00 breakfast with always the same stuff ^^, 8:00 school start, between 12:00 - 14:00 midday meal according to the midday meal plan you got 2 weeks before, and so on, and so on...

School events and so on, also have been told to you 2 weeks before. Clear, structurized rules in a written form, that didnt change from day to day, because of an educator having better or worser mood that is expected from you to "smell" from his face. The "punishment" was easy to understand and not thought as a punishment. So if you had bad score in some lessons, your learning time in the evening got stretched to enable you to get a better score again or you got private lessons. If your room was untidy you had to stay until it was cleaned up and so on.

The border school and its educators concentrated fully on the school scores. As long as you had good scores, noone cared if you are weird. Even if you had bad score, they also didnt care if you are weird, they only cared for you getting better scores again.

If it was easier for you to learn during night. They accepted. You didnt like to breakfast in the morning when the diner hall was completely full and choose instead to prepare yourself two breads with chesse every day, and to leave the diner hall again? They accepted. You waited at midday until the dining hall was emtpy and avoided your classcomerades. They accepted.

So every room was for four pupils and you were allowed to move the furniture, so I had my own space in a corner of the room.

All that typical stuff, exhausting you and wasting your energy you need for learning, I had to do at home, was gone. No surprising visits from relatives, no surprising decisions from family, no changes everyday, no explanations why I do that and this, and why I dont do that and this, no parents thinking I have to make them understand everything I feel and that cannot accept that talking and explaining is exhausting and that 30 minutes of this ruins the complete day, stealing me the energy for learning....

From my oppinion I learned accepting myself and finding my own ways. Instead of being forced to try something the way I have been told, to fail ever and ever again and getting shouted at, for the first time I had the possibility to accept myself and do things they way they comforted me, and the way I was able to get the results I wanted. It also helped me a lot, that a classmate of me was also in the border school. She helped me to remind me, when there were special occasions like hiking days and so on.

The only misadvantage for me was dinner, because it was from 17:00 to 18:00, so all border school pupils, came about the same time and the diner hall was really full. (And you cant take dinner as easy with you to eat it later, as you can do with breakfast.) But it was not that bad, because most of the time you always had additional fruits for dinner you were allowed to take with you, so room comerades brought me some. You could say I was a trendsetter for dinnercanceling. ^^