When did you realize you were different?

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I only realised I was different at age 13/14 when I started high
school, and then it was only in terms of social skills. Other
than difficulties with motor skills (I got D in sport at around
the same time) there was nothing else that stood out to
me as being obviously different.

However I spent alot of time beating myself up about my
inability to make friends that year to the point where it
affected most of the rest of my life, self-esteem etc.
Eventually I ended up developing depression because of it,
which is when I learnt to stop worrying about it so much.

It was only when I left school and started university at age
20 and then started trying and failing to find and keep jobs
that I realised how different I was, not just in social skills,
because it just didnt make sense for me to have such
difficulties keeping jobs, I could seem to keep a job for more
than about four months. And this was not due to social
skills difficulties, it was due to difficulties keeping up with
work demands and expectations. I was very slow and lacked
initiative. School was easy for me compared to work, even
if I did lack friends.

There where one or two things that I experienced when I was
young that are associated with Aspergers but they also occur
in those without Aspergers and not enough to make anyone
concerned.

1. I was always a loner 2. as mentioned I had bad
motor skills and co-ordination 3. I was always a bit behind
everyone else in learning, but obiously not enough to cause
any concern, 4. I always liked collecting things and
5. I skipped the crawling stage altogether, I spent a long time
just pulling myself along on my belly and one day just got up
and walked. Same thing with talking, I skipped baby talk / babbling
and one day just started speaking in sentences.
Perculiar maybe but not really concerning. My parents didnt
think anything of it.

I only got diagnosed last year March at age 35.

If you are wondering why I got diagnosed with
Aspergers in 2010 and joined wrong planet in
2008 it is because I had previously been diagnosed
with something different; Non-verbal learning Disorder,
which is very similar to Aspergers. This diagnosis was in
2008.

Hello! My name is Julia.
I'm from Ukraine.
I'm 22 and I'm an aspie.
I've always felt that I'm different. People used to tell me I'm a freak. Then I started pretending. And won a lot of "friends"...
Then I changed my phone number and .
I wanted to know why I'm like this and what it is but I didn't know how to do it.
Recently I saw a movie "Adam". I found that the behaviour and style of thinking of the main character is very alike to mine.
After I read a book "The girl with the dragon tattoo" by Stieg Larsson. Once again, I found the character of Lisbeth Salander very appealing.
Having conducted a bit of research I self-diagnosed myself as having Asperger's syndrome. And so I'm here...
Sorry for mistakes.

I've always known I was different, and so has everyone else; the problem was, before my diagnosis I didn't have a clue what was going on.

When complaining to my mother that everyone was stupid in school because I 'd "get it" the first time the teacher explained something, and it drove me nuts that the teacher would then have to spend hours or days or weeks trying to teach all the other stupid kids.

She explained to me that they are not stupid. They are normal. They are of average intelligence. Being smarter than someone else does not make them dumb. So calling them stupid is a lie. And that I have to learn to deal with it as I will spend the rest of my life around these normal people.

That is when I knew.

It's weird, I first noticed when I was still in kindergarten. There was an afterschool program called latchkey where some staff would stay behind to watch a few students whose parents couldn't pick them up yet, and I got in trouble once (for what I can't remember) but I was told to fill this massive page of paper with a single sentence just repeated over and over again. I filled the entire frickin' thing, everyone else who got in trouble just wrote it like 5 times in massive font, I wrote in a tiny font that I still use today and it took FOREVER, but it didn't bother me. Not to mention I was really fantastic at math, I wonder where that skill went (algebra messed me up really bad).

I never thought I was different until we moved when I was 13 and I realized that I couldn't make friends. It wasn't until a therapist noticed my obsession with books and the fact that I couldn't talk to her, or anybody else, especially about my feelings. She also must have picked up on the fact that most of the time I couldn't, and still can't, look at people when they are talking to me. Personally I thought she was crazy to call me autistic, but the more I read about it the more I felt certain I had it, which I do.

i knew and my parents and my teachers at school knew i was different in kindergarten, i had major social issues, my mother said it was because she didnt put me in preschool and so i didnt know how to socialize with other children since i had no brothers or sisters at home. in 2nd grade the school counselor kept suggesting to my parents to put me in special education but they refused , when i was 9 ,my fathers job transferred him to stay in rome italy for 2 years, i went to an english speaking school their where i fell so far behind i was put back a grade, i was completely emotionally out of control, totally socially behind, i remember sitting on the steps outside the cafeteria thinking maybe i was the way i was because i had a sister named Kristi who passed away at age 2 before i was born and i was always told about her and my mother said i told her when i was 2 that a little blond haired girl came to play with me in my room and that she believed Kristi had come to visit me from heaven, so i thought maybe losing a sibling caused me to be mentally different ,
at age 12 i was failing every class in school. bullyed everyday i started to talk about suicide to a girl in my music class, and i was taken toa childrens psychiatric hospital where they diagnosed me with bipolar, ocd, learning andcognitive impairments, in 2002 or 2003 after a major meltdown i was diagnosed as schizophernic or schizzoaffective.
after hearing of aspergers from a mother of a son who was diagnosed with those mental illnesses but was later discovered to have aspergers
reading all the symptoms i see ive have nearly every single trait of aspergers since i was in kindergarten and probably before.
theres no doubt in my mind and heart i am a full blown aspie!! !

I can never really say I felt different. I was always just me. I was not the same as many other people, but then again, no two people are the same. I didn't feel different in that sense. If there was any awkward feeling, it was that I never did anything right, I couldn't control my emotions, I seemed to have different ideas than many people (although many of the teachers I had had encouraged this line of thinking). I didn't make friends well, and after some time, I didn't trust people. I always thought it was depression. To me, depression was no different than, say, diabetes. So, I suppose if someone with diabetes is considered different, then I always thought I was different because that's just who I was.

I started thinking that people's behaviors towards me was not fair when I was in (I think) second grade. I believe I would have been 8 then. I was sitting in an apple tree at the school playground (I was in my place of solitude - I went up that tree so many times) when some kids came by and teased me for being short. They told me I was so small that I should be in kindergarten. I tried to defend myself, but ended up feeling lost, confused and angry. I had no idea why people would say something like that.

My mother recently told me when she noticed a change. It was when I was 3, and my brother was born. I turned wild, for lack of a better word. She could not understand my change in behavior from that point on, and blamed herself for being a bad parent. I have a 4 page list of symptoms I came up with when I was trying to figure what the hades was going on with me this past several months. My mom gave me the following (I had no idea for many - she didn't think they were important):

Hey everyone, first time posting, I thought this would be a good tread to start in.

I think I first realized when my mom and I moved to a new house when I was 11. I felt (more or less) accepted at my old school despite plenty of bullying, I had a close knit group of friends I could rely on, but suddenly found it incredibly difficult to make new connections that year. Even though it was such transitional period I can't recall a lot, but I don't look back fondly.

Then I was swept into middle school the next year and everything turned sour. Middle school was the most painful, confusing, downright worst three years of my life. I almost went suicidal halfway through.

High school was the first time I ever saw the words Asperger's Syndrome when Craig Nicholls (The Vines) was diagnosed. When I looked it up I didn't really think twice...but this tiny thought never left the back of my head, even though I didn't know it half the time.

I'm 22 now, just dropped out of college and after countless years of preferring alone time (11-16 I didn't "hang out" ever), not knowing what to say/not knowing that I said the wrong things/finding it hard to guide my thoughts from my brain out my mouth (specially w/ new people, objects of affection or in heightened situations), wondering why I always "act so gay" when I certainly obsessed over girls (being a theatre kid didn't help either), feeling pretty smart but struggling in school (being screened but denied acceptance into gifted in Kindergarten) and just generally being "clueless" and just "not getting it" (something me and I'm sure a lot of ppl who know me would agree to) I couldn't really ignore that there was truly something different to me than others.

It seems in the last couple years Asperger's has exploded into the mainstream. Since 2004 that thought had been sitting there, in my brain, growing slowly every time it ran into another instance of Aspergers coming from the outside world. In a matter of months, however, it all came to a brunt. Watching Community was one thing, but Parenthood...my evolving comprehension of the disorder and my own s**t was entirely mirrored in Max and his family's storyline through the past two seasons. The scene this year where they finally sat down with him. It felt like they were talking straight to me. Before that, however, a friend of mine, who I also believe could have AS, cast me in his production of Dog Sees God, a satire of Charlie Brown, placing the characters in a cold high school hell. I was playing Beethoven (Schroeder in the comics), who had gone from a happy, talented, stoic kid to a sexually confused, tormented mess of a teenage prodigy. We had to cancel the show halfway through rehearsals unfortunately, but we both agreed Beethoven should or was written to have AS. In rehearsals I wasn't playing some character, it was me, channeling my miserable teenaged self; everything Beethoven said were like my thoughts and statements. Everyone thought I was doing so well, if we had continued the production I probably would've "came out" to my cast at some point.

At this point it felt like everything was circling around me, like I was being guided towards the inevitable. The research I did wasn't for the show, it was for me. One day I finally took the AQ test, scored positive (in 3 tries: 27, 31 and 21 trying to skew) and also read that AS ppl would repeat words especially in childhood. That one last fact threw me back in time, uncovered a memory from somewhere age 4-6 of my best friend telling me to stop repeating myself under my breath, as I did it often. I remember I knew I was doing but never thought anything about it, never even knew why. In fact I may have thought no one could hear me. After that encounter I just stopped. That memory sent me over the edge I cried for half the day (and I go a year, even longer, w/o crying once). I finally felt like everything made sense, that I found where I was supposed to be. It was an epiphany that shook me to the core; it made previous epiphanies seem like xmas lights compared to this, a blazing sun.

The only problem is me and my family are pretty broke and don't have insurance, so I feel kinda lost. I don't wanna come out and say it but I'm pretty much certain. I've spoken to friends and only one of them believes me. I'm under the impression that I'm on the lighter end of the spectrum and since I was never suspected of anything I managed to fake a neurotypicalness on my own. Until I can get a proper diagnosis I'll say what I am is "N.E.N.T.", not exactly neurotypical; but if anyone really asks I'll tell them the truth: that I know my own mind.




Well, now that that's done I can't wait to make my way around the boards and start getting a even better handle on what this Aspergers thing really is and what it means to me