What were you like as a little girl?

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I don't remember much from when I was little. My mom told me when I was a baby I was very quiet and hardly ever cried. And when I did all she had to do was put in a Clint Black cd and turn it up and I would automatically be quiet. She said it was like I had an off switch. I remember being a weird kid growing up. I was into a lot of guy stuff. I preferred transformers over barbies. I didn't really know who to trust so most kids would take advantage of me. I tried talking to people but I ended up getting bullied cuz I was different and didn't understand most things when it came to social stuff. I ended up having a my own little circle of imaginary friends and I was happy with that. I got bullied for it but i didn't care. I was the weird kid but to be honest I think I turned out ok

I had a kaleidoscope I adored. When it was lost in transit I thought my life had ended.

I liked lego, dolls, pet monkey, and books. I loved playing outside on my bike, skateboard or just swimming as far away as I could on the beach. I loved being alone. I wrote a lot. I could read newspapers by the age of 3. At 6 I spoke 3 languages. I was physically ill if I knew I had to go somewhere with other children, or where there were any. I did love school, but thats because I was bright. But in saying that, I was disruptive and had short attention span. I was also bullied.

My Mum almost always cut my hair very short, like a boy, and I hated it because my hair was something I found soothing when stressed. I was often anxious. I didn't smile much, but that doesn't mean I wasn't happy sometimes. I never allowed my Mum to put a dress or skirt on me from the age of 1. All that changed when I was in my mid twenties.

I had the same freaking embarrassing issue. People actually told me couple of times about it and I didn't care that much. I was a crazy freak.


My mother says that I didn't cry in the infancy at all.
I appeared to be emotionless.
I was very tense around new people.
Socially I was actually very normal till 10 although I was bullied in kidergarten when I was 6. My mother abandoned me at 6 with my blind and deaf great grandmother and the only way to get food was to go to kindergarten which was right near our house. I preferred to starve instead of dealing with bullying children. I didn't understand all the gossiping, backstabbing girls did. I didn't understand why everybody loved that brat with NPD in our class.

When I was a little girl, I was very shy but curious. I would rarely talk to other children, and some of my classmates would even ask me why I would never talk. Somehow, I made a few friends and was a bit more outgoing when I got older. I was actually very quiet until I got to college and found people that are just as weird as me to talk to. In elementary school, I was so afraid to talk to others because I never made eye contact and always felt like I would say something inappropriate for the giver situation. It took me 16-17 years just to be brave enough to have and voice my own opinions, rather than just copying what NTs said because I thought they were always right.

As a toddler, my parents commented on how I would always ask questions about random things. I learned the alphabet and how to count at about 18 months of age, and I would never shut up after that. I would always ask about what certain store and road signs said because I couldn't read at the time. My parents also told me that I asked about electrical systems and animals a lot. I was a weird kid.

As little (3-4) I was very active and experimenting, I´ve been told. My mother:"OMG! She has been quiet for 8 minutes. What "good ideas" has she had while I was on the phone?".
Serious, perfectionistic, took everything apart to see what was inside. Expensive toys sometimes had to be removed from me.
Music obsessed: jazz (until 3½). Then came Mozart and Beethoven.
Language obsessed, spoke very detailed, sometimes solemn (once at 5y: "Mother, I do not understand the words of these men" ) Gave long, super-detailed explanations, as for instance to where things were put.
Was completely unsuspicious towards unknown adults (to my mothers great fear), and didn´t know how to observe rules between kids. Had some good friends, though. Never had any toddler shyness.
Hated physical contact, and had a sometimes explosive temper.

I was WILD. I yelled, I laughed, I ran allll over the place. I was investigative, I was conversational- I loooved to talk. I would play with my toys and walk/run at the same time. I loved music.

I was precocious. I was adorable. But, I was difficult too. I had meltdowns very frequently. I had many sensory issues. I both loved and hated school (I grew to dread it more so as I got older. Lucky for me, I was homeschooled through middle and high school!).

Very quiet, people often wondered if I could talk at all
Scared of everything
Cried alot
Obsessed with ferries and ski lifts among other things
Loved watching TV and still do
My favorite toys were small castles with lots of details that you could dismount and play with

I had no desire to play with other children but conversed with adults. If I was with other children, I took over as leader and directed our play and games. I was highly confident, curious and had the supreme fortune to live in a safe, rural area so I could run outside all day and play in the woods. I had constant conversations with imaginary friends and visitors. I would make small clearings with stone, stick, leaves and moss formations that I would dedicate for different magical uses. I believed I was a good witch. I talked to trees. I conducted "scientific experiments" endlessly. I believed I was an important scientist making fascinating discoveries. I was sight reading by age 4.
My grandfather had primary custody of me and he spoke to me as an equal and was kind enough to meet my food needs. I only ate two different types of meals and could not abide the taste/texture/temp of other foods. This took me a long time to outgrow.
My bright spark and "strangeness" all went underground within months of starting school. Although I was tested and labeled as "highly gifted", I had terrible learning difficulties in school and was mocked by my teachers, who thought I was "uppity" and "bossy". My birth parents resumed custody of me and we moved up to two to three times per school year and always over the summer. I disappeared in the sea of survival and I haven't seen much of myself since.

I was very very talkative to my mother, but the nursery staff thought I couldn't speak.

I was the solitary, weird kid from a very early age. I did have one friend from preschool, but she moved away and I didn't make any more close friends for years.

I was the 'brainy' kid who was always telling people odd facts I'd learned, or taking a book up to them and showing them what I'd found in it (I could read before age three). My nickname for several years of infant/junior school was 'Actually' because I used the word so often.

I had weird emotional reactions to things. Like, one time we were doing a series of lessons on Ireland, and the teacher played a folk song about a leprechaun who posed as a coachman and drove a bunch of passengers into a bog and drowned them all, and I burst into tears and was absolutely inconsolable. Yet when my grandfather died, I was actually quite excited because it meant we got to look round his house at all the bric-a-brac he'd had stashed away (none of which I'd ever been allowed to touch), and couldn't understand why my mother was crying.

A lot of the time at infant school (that was age 4-7 in the UK), I wouldn't stay in one place for very long. They'd be in the middle of assembly or a lesson and I'd wander off to another, empty classroom and start investigating the stuff they had in there. After some meetings with my mother (I remember in one of them, inexplicably, having to spend a long time explaining to the headmistress a large, complicated drawing of some aliens that I'd made), it was decided to put me in remedial classes. They were round the back in a hut where none of the other kids ever went, and the other remedial kids never mixed with the rest of the school. Some of them were quite severely educationally backward, and I swear to this day one of them, at least, had Down syndrome. As there was nothing wrong with me educationally, I quickly got horribly bored. When they put me back in regular classes, after a few months I think, even fewer people than before would speak to me because they knew I'd been in the 'sp****cs' class'. Way to screw up my already dubious social skills. At junior school, I spent a lot of time staring out of the window because lessons bored me.

Oh, and another reason the teachers didn't like me was, I wouldn't eat school lunches. I had a big issue with anything sloppy, and that word describes most school cooking in Britain in the 1970s. This didn't get sorted for years because they thought just sitting me in front of a congealing plate would somehow make me want to eat. I got put on packed lunches in the end and I was fine (actually, I put on quite a lot of weight pretty quickly, and my mother never quite forgave me). Even today I still have issues with certain kinds of fruit and vegetable purées, and I've only really been OK with mashed potato in the last few years.

I had frequent, intense obsessions. The first one I can recall was when I was about six or seven - I became obsessed with a family of cartoon cats in a comic I used to read, and I nicknamed my entire family after the names of this family of cats. (I have a cousin who's in his fifties now who, to this day, I think of as 'Ginger' even though he doesn't have, and never had, red hair.) I didn't hide my obsessions very well as I got older, and I got a lot of bullying about them (I think in another thread I mentioned the John Lennon death anniversary song I used to get regaled with

Also, I annoyed my mother hugely by not being a typical girly-girl - i.e. I was funny about being 'groomed', as in having my hair washed or styled or anything, by anyone - but my mother was an old-school 'you must suffer to be beautiful' kind of woman, who liked me best when I was sitting silently somewhere looking sweet in a Laura Ashley frock and a complicated updo involving lots of pins stuck halfway into my scalp, and liked me not at all when I wasn't. (She never grew out of that attitude. She died four years ago. I do not miss her.)

Following on from that, she used to tell me I was so scruffy and weird I 'must have been left by gypsies' (yeah, I know it's not PC to call travellers that now, but this was the 1970s). I actually, seriously believed it, and I used to wait for the gypsies to come and take me away with them, because I clearly didn't belong in that family. (Actually, I'm kind of still looking for my tribe, but that's another story.)

When I was really little, I absolutely hated being held. I'd pitch a fit if anyone but my parents held me, and even with them I stayed stiff as a board. Once I was moving around on my own, pretty much no one could get their hands on me.

I was also fairly solitary. I recently saw an old home video of my parents sitting out and having a beer with a few neighbors (all of whom had kids around my age), and while all the other kids played together, two-year-old me was perfectly happy to play alone in the dirt about 20 feet away. My mom actually kept having to chase after me to keep me from wandering off further. In elementary/middle school, I'd shut myself in my room for hours at a time and act out stories with my Barbies. (Others weren't allowed to play Barbies with me because they did it wrong.)

One detail I recently remembered is that my mom used to always tell me I was "talking someone's ear off." I was shy around other kids, but I was perfectly happy to chatter away at random adults about whatever happened to come to mind. I didn't really get what was wrong with it at the time, but I learned that if she said that, it meant I should stop talking soon.

Also, I had (and still have) a strong aversion to any scratchy/itchy/stiff/"just wrong" fabrics. I still vividly recall being forced to wear a velvet dress with a petticoat skirt and a stiff lace collar when I was three. There were various other offending outfits my mom and I disagreed on over the years, but that's the one that stands out most in my memory.

Edited to add:

Can't believe I forgot one of the biggest ones. I've always had an obsession with even numbers. Nowadays I pretty much keep it to less noticeable habits (eating any snack food in pairs, adjusting my stride to get an even number of steps between lines in the pavement, etc), but when I was a kid it was fairly pervasive. The main thing I remember was when I went through a phase of being particularly obsessed with exponential multiples of four (4, 16, 64, 256...) and would only drink from the water fountain for those intervals of seconds. So if I was a little thirsty, I drank for four seconds. If I was thirstier, it went up to 16. And God help anyone in line behind me if I was thirstier than 64....

"Well, actually..." Is the most frequent phrase out of my son's mouth. He'll be five next month, but has been saying this for well over a year.

As a little girl I:

-Barely slept.
-Talked non-stop at people. No 2-sided conversations for me as a kid.
-Played with stuffed animals, my little ponies, hot wheels, but never dolls. I liked marbles, magnets, bits of metal, bolts, glass bottles, rocks, coins, odd jar lids, etc. more than anything else though. I had a rich imaginary world, but I would stare at my toys instead of moving them or making them talk. I didn't see the point, but it made people think I was weird.
-I was hyper. Always ran with my arms above my head.
-Always wore tights on my head or hats. Panicked about lots of fabrics, things touching my waist, and I hated dresses.
-Didn't understand how gender or ages worked. I was surprised when I realized I was supposed to have a gender role.
-Didn't notice or play with other kids. Ended up being bullied because of this.
-Had to do everything my own way. Challenged every rule.
-Excelled at math and English.
-Freaked out at the textures in foods. Ate almost nothing.
-Never killed insects. Was convinced inanimate objects had feelings.
-Couldn't throw things away.
-Hated change.
-Preferred the family cat over everyone else on the planet.
-Was convinced I was a changeling or an alien, and at every birthday I would get really excited because I thought my real parents were going to come and get me and take me back to my own world. When I was 13 I read an article about Kurt Cobain's death where it mentioned that he had felt the same way. It occurred to me that I might really be human after all, and that meant I was stuck here. I became obsessed with the book I Never Promised You a Rose Garden because I thought I could force myself to become schizophrenic and then live in a world inside my mind. I got over this after a few years, but it was really hard feeling like another species all the time around people.

My nearly five year old son is almost exactly the same way I was (he wears a rabbit-ear hat instead of stockings on his head), except he's a bit more hyper.

I recall having an epiphany when I was about 17 that conversations were actually supposed to be two-sided. I don't remember specifically what triggered this realization, but my exact thought was "Oh...I think I've been doing it wrong." Up until that point, I just knew that sometimes my mom would tell me I was "talking their ear off" and that meant I should stop. It's still something that I really struggle with (especially if a topic comes up that I'm passionate about), but at least now I almost always catch myself eventually and can apologize.

Growing up as the oldest of ten children, I spent my first 17 years feeling like I was just "holding on" and surviving. Very quiet and academic. Always thought THAT experience was why I have so enjoyed being alone all these many years since then. But eventually when researching AS after two nephews (from different siblings) had been diagnosed I said "Aha!" Suddenly it all fits.

Probably easier for me to write this in bullet points.

Personality Wise:
x: Very quiet and shy.
x: Not very inclined to smile or laugh.
x: Didn't like making eye contact.
x: Didn't like to make noise out of fear that I would be annoying people with my noise.
x: Very prone to anxiety and hysteria. Cried a lot.
x: Didn't like change or having surprises forced on me.
x: Very nervous and fearful. Scared of most things.
x: Very academically inclined but not artistically or athletically inclined.
x: Very attached to my father until I realized how awful he can be.
x: Had a rich fantasy life and would constantly make up different worlds and characters.
x: Liked to have my things arranged in a specific way and I liked to arrange them myself.
x: Wasn't inclined to leave the house if I didn't have to. Liked being at home.
x: Spoke in a rather formal and serious manner. Loved to use big words.
x: Thought that social conventions were stupid and irrelevant.
x: Was content to be alone, all day and every day.
x: Took rules very seriously.

Likes/Dislikes:
x: Didn't like to wear dresses or skirts (still don't).
x: Was a picky eater. I especially hated sweets, chewy things and soft, mushy foods.
x: Loved to write stories but hated to edit them or show them to people.
x: Loved to read.
x: Would happily listen to entire albums of music.
x: Obsessed with all things related to horses (still am, to an extent).
x: Enjoyed being cold and hated to wear coats and jumpers (sweaters).
x: Hated to use umbrellas (still not fond of them).
x: Didn't like taking showers or baths because they took up too much time.
x: I loved any kind of superhero themed cartoon or game.
x: Hated to play with baby dolls.
x: Loved to swim but hated swimming costumes and swimming caps.
x: Liked to watch the same television shows and movies over and over again.
x: I had (still have) a strong hatred of things and activities I view as pointless - carrying around an empty bag for example.
x: I would constantly correct other peoples verbal expression, grammar and spelling out of belief that I was helping them.
x: I was fascinated by the concept of boarding school and desperately wanted to go to one to escape my home life and my neighbourhood.