Retrospective hints from others that you were AS

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I was thinking back earlier, for some reason and I remembered this one couple who were clients of the vets office I worked at. Both of them,in retrospect, extremely aspie like. MD/PhD, both of them. One in research, the other an eye surgeon. They were the ultimate nerdy people to most people who worked there, including the vets. Now, I don't come across as a nerd but I thought they were so cool, and when the Dr's <his name> and <her name> came in, I would make it a point to assist with their cat. They had this one cat that was like 20 or something, for real. It had kidney failure and all kinds of s**t and they were spending tons of money to fix it. Anyway, I was like all "friend crushing" on them. They were in their 40s or so, no kids, just the cat. So. They were going to go out of town. They asked me would I come take care of their cat for a week. They also said I could chill at their house if I wanted to watch videos cause they had a huge collection. They offered me more money than I thought it was worth so I only cashed every other check. So anyway, I went. I took care of the cat. There were tons of videos that my husband would have loved, Dr Who, (every f*****g episode), all kinds of Sci Fi, everything. I remember being very touched that on her side of the bed, she had this one book about philosophy that I had been reading and she saw and wanted to borrow and she had actually been reading it.

Ayway, my point is this. When they came back, I came over, handed them their keys and stuff, showed them the paperwork about the cat that they wanted me to keep and sat around for a few. Then as she walked me out, I asked her "Why did you ask me, when there were other people who are more experienced and know more about this than I do?" She said "You can't tell?" That kind of makes me wonder how well I was passing back then.

Anybody else dx'd later in like look back and have more hints now?

You only had the one then?
My whole life is a big neon arrow pointed at Autism.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any personal stories to share. But that's kinda funny; it seems like something I would do.

I was diagnosed at 5, most of my 'neon arrows', whatever they might signify in this context, consisted of sitting next to random people on planes, buses and in coffee shops, at which points I immediately dropped into intense academic, technological or engineering discussions with them, ending only when we needed to go somewhere else.

To have HFA is to be a student of the world. I too learned an amazing lot of random stuff whilst taking care of my piano teacher's neighbors' elderly cat and dogs, such as but not limited to, BMW motorcycle design, sustainable gardening, how to play pan flute, downhill race ski geometry, obscure German car options, antibiotic resistant disease theories (er... thanks mom), suburban architecture and the weak points in U.S. Federal Police security parameters.

Aha, a twist to the plot...they seemed weird -- but it was OliveOil who had the disability!

Hints:
Them: "Why are you so quiet?"
Me: "I don't have anything to say."
(this interchange occurred countless times with subtle variations).

Them: "Don't you move?"

Someone needed my sister to babysit (semi-emergency), and sister wasn't home so I offered to do it. They said, "But you hate children!" (??)

People told me I worked hard and never talked.

When I got my first job at age 12 or 13 (working on a horse ranch), mom explained to the stable owner, "She doesn't talk!" and the owner said "Aw, I'll get her talking!" (not a successful plot...). One day when my mom came to pick me up she and the owner got into a conversation about me. Mom said, "She'd never dress up for anyone. If she really likes you she'll take a shower for you."

Little sister's married middle-aged friend was hitting on me and I didn't know it, so I never responded (for or against) like a grownup should. He would complain with little poetic jabs like, "You are a snow maiden with a marble face frozen in an ice garden!" and I would think, 'Oh, he is telling me I am not a kind person. What did I do? I thought I was being polite and friendly?'

There's more...but I gotta go to work.

Hints/Clues that I was autistic?

- as a child my mom said I didn't want to be hugged, or didn't seem to know what to do when I was hugged.
- people were amazed at how much I loved to read and how much I actually did read
- my mom was concerned with how solitary I was and how few friends I had and that I didn't seem to care
- considered very smart as a child by teachers, fellow students
- "shy"
- "late bloomer"

There might be other things that could have been clues/hints, but these are the ones I can come up with easily.

Limping2victory, are you sure you're not me?

In addition to everything on your list, as a kid I collected lists of girls' first names because of how pretty they sounded. I spun in a circle every chance I got. I hid in the smallest, coziest places I could find, and read all day. I walked around in my own little world, where everything had magical qualities and invisible creatures inhabited everything.

I also became aware that people didn't really like me, and I could never figure out why. People were inexplicably angry with me, for reasons I could not understand. Although I had friends, they called me things like "ditz" and "space cadet." I was reading at a college level by third grade, but learned to tie my shoelaces right around the same time.

Everything clicked into place when I started reading about Asperger's last month. I'm going in for my assessment on the 12th.

Many.

I went through a few weeks after diagnosis replaying all this stuff.

Back around 1983, a girl who was a friend of my flatmate in college suddenly said to me, "You don't think you're normal do you? Because you're not.
I said that I thought "normal" was not a valid concept but the product of social conformism born of a conservative, controlling political agenda. "Oh no," she said, "There IS such a thing as normal. And you're not it."

Then there was the time the people at one public relations firm did not see me come back from lunch and they were talking about me. Then they tried to cover it clumsily. What was it about me that made them talk about me in that way? I couldn't figure it out. They liked my work. Later my girlfriend came to visit me at lunchtime, and I heard one of my colleagues say to another, after she left, "some people should not have children." I suspected, but wasn't sure that this was also about me. I didn't think about it for years, but with the diagnosis, it came back.

Then there was the friend who took me aside and told me she had Asperger's Syndrome, a kind of autism. She told me to take a quiz, but I thought she was saying I would see how I wasn't like that, so I didn't bother.

Or the person at work who said in a weird sort of stage whisper as I walked by, apparently talking to her friend, but making sure I could here. "There are all these people with autism walking around--and they don't even know it!"

Or my old boss who called me into a meeting and told me she had aspergers and described the symptoms and looked expectantly at me.
"Is there any particular reason you are telling me this?" I asked.
"I just wanted you to know," she said. "Do you ever feel like that," she asked, looking expectant again.
"No," I said, "I really don't feel that way."
"Oh," she said, "well, never mind, then."

Thinking about the conversation, I thought did she know? Can it be that she knew for years before I did? I had to know, so I called her and she confirmed that that meeting was her attempt to tell me.

There are many more memories, of misunderstandings in schools or at birthday parties when I was very young--but those are some of the big ones.

Then I also remembered the sessions in elementary school with the specialist who trained me to look at her face. Before that I had never thought about looking at people's eyes--sometimes I did, often it made me uncomfortable and I didn't. Then I began all this looking at temples and the bridges of people's nose, or looking at one eye for a certain count and then looking away, feeling weird and self-conscious all the while. That was in the 70s so she didn't have a word for me, but she certainly knew there was something off. But I kept gettin 99% and 100% on tests, so whatever it was, it was not the worst thing.

And there was the special movement therapy class and the teacher who found it hard to believe I could not catch a ball...

And the way I could not really tie my shoes until 8th grade. All kinds of related memories came back. It's nice to have finally understood those comments, though. Some part of my intuition flagged them as significant and filed them away, but I was never able to make sense out of them until I seriously studied aspergers, trying to understand what the school people were saying about my son. Then it all came home. I felt a bit like Neo waking up in the Matrix, truth be told.

Edited to add:
Another thing that came up was that I looked up an old record of testing from 8th grade.
They noted in the report that I had once had three friends but had none at present and that I had an "extreme" interest in Astronomy.
All of it made so much sense, once I knew.

My parents gave me plenty of hints.
My father complained that I only liked animals and not people. He thought I should go to a finishing school because I didn't act like a normal girl.

My mother said I wouldn't smile when I was little and I wouldn't hug her. She said I was slow and babyish.
She wouldn't let me read her books and only allowed me to read children's books even though I wanted to read her reader's digest condensed classics.
My mother called me fussy and persnickety and the princess who couldn't sleep on a pea because I couldn't sleep when my sheets were wrinkled and I couldn't sleep with curlers in my hair and my hair looked terrible because of that.
I had meltdowns and she called me sick in the head and schizophrenic.

I got bad grades in school and they were surprised to find when I was in high school that I had a high IQ.
They also told my parents that on an aptitude test I got a really high score in abstract reasoning and really low scores in everything else. They were very puzzled about this.

Because of my grades and test scores and because I didn't make friends or talk to the other kids, they called in a psychologist to the school to talk to me. He walked out because I didn't respond to his questions the way he wanted me to.
I grew up in the 50's and my whole life has been a struggle.

Another thing that happened with me was that I was having trouble getting along with my dad for most of my life because I felt like he didn't understand me. I felt like he was cold and overly logical with me. In frustration, I ended up Googling things like "father acts like a Vulcan" and it led me to the online Aspie test (Baron Cohen's). I "took" the test for my dad, and got a high score that showed he was on the spectrum. At the time, I didn't think I was like this at all! I'm female, so Asperger's manifests differently. I'm often sensorily overloaded and highly emotional with meltdowns and anxiety. However, people have always commented on how similar my dad and I are. I thought they were crazy, but they were seeing things I could not see. I told my cousin I thought my dad had Asperger's, and he said, "yeah, we ALL have it." I denied that I did or that he did, and he just laughed and said we were a family of geeks and we definitely all were on the spectrum. Then a few years later I ended up talking the test myself. Lo and behold, I'm also a Vulcan and my cousin (who is generally right about everything) was right about this too.

It's funny, my dad doesn't think he has it but his younger brother does. However, my dad and I share a Special Interest (genealogy) and our obsession with our family tree drives my stepmom nuts. Our relationship is getting better now and a lot of it is because I feel like I can finally see that he and I really are similar, and we enjoy dorking out together.

Edited to add: Another Special Interest my dad and I share is Star Trek...perhaps obviously!

I have told this many times before but in the late 90's my boss told me that I had a little bit of autism. I thought he was the one with the quirks and bad social skills for saying that.

Before I got that job the economy was booming for everyone except me. I was repeatedly told I did well in the interview and your resume looks great but we are going in another direction. After my diagnosis I realized what they were really saying was nice try but you did not fool us.

In the 80's I met an old high school classmate. The conversation got around to hard rock/ heavy metal groups we liked. He said something like - you understood the whole time, I never knew.

"Where's Waldo?