I was diagnosed when I was twelve years old. To be honest, I don't recall exactly how I felt. I guess it was like, "Oh, I have Asperger Syndrome. Okay, then."
I wasn't particularly devastated nor thrilled about it, but the diagnosis did pique my interest.
Joined: 23 Feb 2011 Age: 32 Gender: Male Posts: 367 Location: MEXICO
11 Mar 2011, 2:36 pm
I feel complete..
Like I've been swimming with ankle weights, and now I'm on the track sprinting.
I've been struggling for a while, and It feels good to have something that fits so well, instead of just being labelled; anxiety-depressive or OCD, ADHD etc, which none of these quite fit in particular. Where as PDD - Asperger's does.
'If you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree it will live its entire life thinking that it's stupid' - AE
I just wanted to create a poll to see what people thought when they were diagnosed!
It would have been nice to have been diagnosed earlier, I'm 19 :s
Last edited by Kail on 11 Mar 2011, 3:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I don't remember getting diagnosed. But when mom first told me I had it, I felt like a freak and wouldn't believe I had very little of it. How could I believe it if I was suffering daily in life and having problems fitting in and trying to be normal and struggling with school work? I thought AS was when you struggle with school work because that is when my mom would mention it. If I had very little, would I not struggle a lot with school work and it only be sometimes? The rest I was oblivious about. I was unaware and I thought what I did was normal. It also meant then I wasn't normal and I had something wrong with me and I thought if I tried harder, maybe I could get rid of it. Even when mom would tell me how my brain works different and how I learn different, I felt even more abnormal and a freak. Sometimes when she tell me what is AS, I couldn't see how it was AS because to me it was normal. She use anecdotes about me that was part of my AS and I still couldn't understand. One of them was about "stop that teasing" incident and I thought that was just a misunderstanding and she miss spoke so I couldn't understand why that was AS.
Joined: 6 Feb 2011 Age: 33 Gender: Male Posts: 286 Location: Alabama/Georgia
11 Mar 2011, 4:50 pm
I was 13 and mostly annoyed at having been forced to endure spending time with another human being.
_________________ "A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what's left of your unit."
August 1993 issue of the Army's maintenance magazine
Joined: 25 Nov 2010 Age: 56 Gender: Male Posts: 156 Location: Michigan
11 Mar 2011, 9:01 pm
Confused and angry. I kept thinking, "Why didn't someone tell me this before?"
After a round of that, I started to make some sense of the previous forty-odd years. I ended up playing some type of whack-a-mole with the past: I'd clear one experience, then another takes its place. It's a process that needs to play itself out.
It may be what happens when you slip through the net when you're a child.
I was shocked. I wasn't looking for the diagnosis, I had preconceived ideas of why I was the way I was and of why people reacted to me as they did. It took a little for me to come to terms with it.
Joined: 8 Nov 2008 Gender: Male Posts: 8,062 Location: USA
11 Mar 2011, 9:21 pm
"Yes, I was eccentric" probably best describes how I felt. I was thrilled because it started me on the path of better understanding my eccentric life. I am happy to be a member of the autistic community.