Having a sense of self when you were young

Post Reply New Topic

This is a little difficult to explain...

Until I was about 12 years old I never realised that I was an individual person, and that everyone around me were individual people. I think that because of my poor ability to filter what is around me, I felt like I was EVERYONE and every thing around me. I felt their emotions, always aware of where everyone was and what they were doing, like my mind was as big as the classroom I was in.

It wasn't until I began high school that I realised that I could make my own choices, that I had likes and dislikes, my own emotions separate from those around me, and that I fit inside just my body.

Even now when I go to social things I am super aware of everyone else's emotions, what they're doing. I feel responsible for their wellbeing, but mostly I feel overwhelmed by how much my brain is trying to process.

My timeline is much shorter than that, but along the same lines.

as early as i can remember (1st day of kindergarden) i have had a good sense of myself. i've had too much empathy at times, especially for the underdog, but was always able to distinguish myself from others.

Sometimes I feel a sense of surprise at the thought "Omg there are so many people and they all live a different life."

That's normal brain development. 12ish is a milestone for consciousness.

I may have been 16...or 20.

This is fascinating to me as a NT.
I only felt that sort of worldliness when I tried shrooms for the first time. You describe exactly how it felt, like I couldn't filter the world and I was part of everything.
THis was also when I felt like I could finally understand the 'frequency' that my AS bf operates in and I felt like we really connected.

And then the trip ended and I was back to being NT

edited

I was a definitive freak, and I thought it acceptable at the time until I was 15ish it was very funny looking back

I remember when I was about 6 or 7 years old standing on a bridge over a road and having a overwhelming sense of my own mortality and thinking to myself "what is the purpose of life?" While this was going through my mind, my Mom says I just went totally blank. like I was in a trance.
This was the reason they thought I had epilepsy when I was young, as they thought I was having a very mild seizure.

I had a strong sense of self from an early age.

I had a sense of self pretty young too- I think partly because I'm an only child and was by myself a lot anyway, but also because I got singled out a lot by a teacher in elementary school who didn't like me. She kept on saying "That is not socially acceptable" or "YOU are doing (insert whatever wrong thing here)"

_________________
I got a similar aspie & NT score so you can call me bi-neural

That's the opposite to how I've always been.
I am ME and everything else is separate.

I spent most of my time by myself, so yeah, I did have a sense of individuality from early on.

I do recall looking at myself really hard in the mirror around age 7 or so. I had a certain amount of facial recognition problems around that age, and I was worried that I might forget what I myself looked like as well as other people. I would stare at myself and whisper, "This is me. This is me. This is me" over and over again, trying to memorize everything about the way I looked.

I was always aware that I was separate from other people, but I was very slow to develop my own opinions and make my own decisions. I was very compliant, and when given choices, I had a hard time making up my mind, so I usually followed my older brother's example. If I needed to make a decision, I would try to figure out what other people were excepting me to choose rather than what I wanted, even if my parents probably wouldn't have cared. Some of that was due to not wanting to draw attention to myself by making an unusual choice, but other times, I just didn't have an opinion.