What if you'd gotten the support you needed as a child?

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I was diagnosed at age 12 and I feel the opposite about if I knew I had it before then. I may have just used it as an excuse and use it to hold me back because I would have taken it literal and following it like a bible and let it hold me back and bam I miss out. I may have acted worse too like I did at my school when I was 6 and 7 because I didn't know any better and it was school behavior. I was already getting my support before the label. I think if my parents knew then, my mom may have gone easier with me whenever I would get upset or start to yell or not acting my age. She may not have taken away my obsessions but she still would have shut me up about it of course. My mom may not have gotten on my back about not playing with kids my own age. I am glad I didn't even know I was truly different as a child until I was older because I may have taken it too literal and think rules shouldn't apply to me because I had been around special kids my whole life and they didn't have to do everything the rest of us were doing like staying in line, playing with a toy the teacher had out for us, not having to sit in the circle and you could just play with the toy animals, this boy being allowed to run in the class with his pants down showing his penis, this other boy being allowed to shout out numbers that ended with nine whenever we were counting. I did eventually take it all literal in my teens and started using AS as an excuse and thought rules shouldn't apply to me and I should get my way so good thing I didn't know when I was little. What clicked was when my therapist told me it was all wrong what the parents and teachers do so I realized that day I had learned the wrong lessons over the years and just because I am different doesn't mean I get special rules and get my way and my mom just wasn't one of those parents and she pulled me out of my school when she found out I was acting inappropriate there and put me in another school that was the closest to our neighborhood and I was in mainstream. She wanted me with normal kids who could act appropriate so I would learn those social skills since I was always copying and mimicking people so it was nothing new at age ten.

I don't think there was anything much different before the DX since I was already getting support and my mom knew I had something and she was always my teacher. I just consider myself lucky. I don't know if I would have gotten better treatment from my peers and friends if they knew than assuming I was stupid or dumb or ret*d or mean or rude and perhaps supported me more and not reject me but hard to tell since bullies still don't care if someone is autistic or not or have a disability that is invisible. My school knew I had problems but they didn't care and wanted to do things their way and their way is what made me frustrated and rebel to be treated normal because rules didn't apply to other kids and they only applied to me. But now I know they did that because I was special and I do notice how kids with disabilities get treated different than normal kids so they enforce the rules and social rules more to them than they do to normal kids. They ignore what normal kids do. They even thought I had behavior problems and thought I should be in some behavior program.

Well I wasn't diagnosed with ASD until I was 58; but, back when I was 10 (and a pure F student) I was diagnosed with cross dominance (kind of like dyslexia). Finally having a diagnosis of something my parents and school stopped trying to punish me into being a better student. More importantly it stopped me from punishing myself for not doing better. I suspect that getting and ASD diagnosis in my childhood would have stopped me from punishing myself very harshly for over 50 years for being weird and would have saved me endless pain and heart ache from trying to be an NT