Your first memories of being "different"?

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Being mobbed and bullied in the Primary school playground about age 5
although I had not liked nursery school either it had not occurred to me it might be because I was different.

I kinna thought this too. It took me a really long time to figure out that I was the only weird one. I always thought that the other kids were just better at stuff than me. I guess I thought that I would just get it one day.

I always had this vague idea that I was different. It just took me until I was in high school for it to really hit. I went through a lot of my adult life trying to figure it out, too. When I had my son, it finally hit me that I wasn't the only one. In the last year, I've started to realise that there are lots more of us out there. All of us half drifting through the world and time. All still looking for that connection that would make us feel real.

I knew at age 4.

Kindergarten for me too.

That first morning waiting outside for the school to open, with pandemonium all around me - kids shouting, pushing, teasing, running around - i hid in a corner of the schools walls watching them & i think that was the first time I felt like i was on the wrong planet.

Fifty-five years later, the feeling hasn't gone away.

AC

Until I was 5, I was very confident. I knew who I was, I was proud of it, and I didn't compare myself to anyone else. Then my parents chose to make me painfully aware that there was something wrong with me, that I was not the child they wanted. I thought they were going to kill me or put me in an institution for the rest of my life. Instead, they kept me alive and tried to change me in so many ways that it gave me a lot of problems that took decades to sort out. They made it extremely clear that I was different and that I had better change that, or else.

Probably first or second grade. I had no empathy for others, didn't feel bad when I should, or guilty or ashamed when I should.

And there was that time that my great aunt was holding me as a toddler and I had a rock in my hand (always put rocks in my pockets)...

"You're not going to hit me with that, are you?"

wham.

lack of remorse there, as well.

Also, a lot of making light of macabre situations, laughing about death. they really didn't like that.

in third grade, i found $20 on the playground with a note stapled to it suggesting it was for some kind of book drive. shoved the $20 in my pocket and off I went. when my mother questioned me as to where I'd gotten it, I lied. probably not very well, though, which is why she called the principal. i had everybody out searching the playground for phantom papers that I said I'd set free, when in actuality they were stuffed in my classroom desk. I never did get to keep the $20

lots of crap like that. i was an opportunist.

Book It! Pizza party at the age of eleven ( nearly twelve). I just couldn't fit in, no matter how hard I tried. I had known the kids in the group for several years.

I think I've known I was different since my earliest memories, around 2ish. I recall very vividly feeling completely different than others treated me. Everyone expected me to be one thing, and I knew inside that I was so much more than they could ever imagine. I don't mean to boast, but that's exactly how I felt. I was no genius or anything I just developed intellectually very, very early. I recall many early memories, strings of thought that involved analyzing and over analyzing. Things the other kids weren't doing. I just always felt like people were talking to me like I was ret*d and I always remember thinking that adults were really stupid because they always seemed to misunderstand me, or misinterpret the things I was saying. So I'd say that when I began realizing that adults had expectations of me and that I was somewhere completely different (not necessarily better) was when I realized I was pretty much on my own.

It was always sort of a vague undefined feeling, but the first time I really got upset and frustrated about it was when I was eleven. I remember crying at my Dad about why the other kids weren't into anything I was, like Doctor Who, and why I was so different than the other kids. It was really distressing at that time. Before that I hadn't worried about it much, I just did my own thing.

Most of my life I thought I was just smarter. Only recently I began to ponder what else is making me profoundly different be it AS or not.

I felt different when I wasn't popular in kindergarden but I can recall things prior to kindergarden which could be interpreted in terms of AS or ADHD and whatnot. . .

In preschool, we made kites out of construction paper. I made the tail of mine two strips long instead of one.

I remember not wanting to have my birthday party at the age of 5 because I didn't have any friends to invite. I had no idea who most of the 8 or so kids who where there were.
I couldn't really tell my mom that because it was some sort of tradition that kids got a party on their 5th birthday.

I realised the world was different from me (not the other way around) when I was about 4 years old.

I was sitting in my room, drawing and my mom came in, doing whatever. I thought that the other moms were different from her, but that she was even better than any of them. And then I thought that all the other children who had mommys too, like I had my mom, were very much not like me.

I didn't realise that I was different from the world until I was between 11 and 12 years old though.

I'm loving everyone's posts! Please keep them coming...

Lets see, hmm. I have several memories from 5th and 6th grade. I used to read novels during class, and got in trouble for it. When I was younger I used to wrap my coat around my head to keep the dust particles out when you could see them through the sunlight. One time I brought a Star Trek toy phaser to school in 5th grade and got in trouble because it kept going off.

Peace,

Windlord.

hard to say...

i was an ugly kid, so no one liked me from the get-go...

i did however start to grow out of it sometime in highschool... and knowing what i do know now about AS, ect... I distinctly remember some friends always telling me to lower my voice, or to move cause i was standing too close... and i remember all the scrunged up faces my various boyfriends would make whenever i said something "silly"... bfs were the only people i really ever talked to (candidly) and i never understand why they made those faces... and i guess it took me a lot longer to make the proper associations as to why they did this, because they still accepted me and cared for me even if they didn't quite know how to critique me on things...

patterns became more clear in college as i found fewer people to hang out with and spent more time alone... and even now in gradschool, i am grappling with the fact that things will most likely never change for me... and not knowing whether i really care about it or not.

and im still JUST NOW realizing all the stupid things i do that stick out like a sore thumb and wonder at how i ever thought of myself as a (super smart/depressed) normal person.