Diagnosed AS people, Question about your perspective on life

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This is very common for people on the spectrum. We often have issues discussing what its like to be autistic because we are unaware of where are differences are.

I always knew I was different from a very young age. But was in my forties when I learned of ASD and saw the obvious similarities with my own situation. The diagnosis I later had confirmed what I already knew.

Kinda sucks learning about it that late in your life. Don't feel bad. I didn't learn about it until I was in my forties.

I always knew I was different, but I did not understand how I was different or how different I was.

The first times that people told me I was not capable of taking in what they were saying. My brain did not accept it. Only later when I learned about it in other ways did the awareness gradually grow, and when I finally understood it was a profoundly shocking experience.

I think this is a former of the dunning-kruger effect--not about intelligence but social perception.

for the people who were diagnosed with AS at older ages (20+):
Did you notice your AS symptoms before your realization/diagnosis? When?

I was diagnosed about 5 years ago. I noticed Aspie things about myself long before I knew anything about autism, though I rarely let myself think I had any shortcomings and often I'd simply blame whatever it was in the environment that had triggered the problem.

I started feeling excluded at lunchtimes at school when I was about 11 years old, though I didn't have the vocabulary to express it that clearly, I'd just noticed that I sometimes couldn't find anybody to hang about with, and felt embarrassed wandering about on my own. Before that, the social thing had usually fallen into place effortlessly I had hardly noticed it. I didn't really blame anybody at that stage, just got a bad feeling when those things happened.

I took a dislike to noisy, crowded places in my early teens, when I first experienced them, though I tended to blame the places and just figured "disco-goers are scum." What I meant was that the noise does my head in and stops me communicating.

I clashed with a lot of conventions. Ceremonies, sport, dress codes, "the done thing," I just figured were stupid. What I meant was I didn't understand them, got no pleasure from them, and sometimes got a lot of criticism for not seeing the point.

I performed very well at school for a few years, then as the work and environment got less Aspie-friendly I found it harder and harder to follow their verbal teaching. I blamed the school for some of it, but I was also worried that I might have got brain damage (close!). I was getting very confused when I tried to do homework, and I was noticing I couldn't follow the plots of TV stories, but I couldn't put into words quite what was wrong. I knew it had something to do with forgetting, I knew I could forget the beginning of a sentence before I got to the end of it.

I noticed I was having trouble finding a girlfriend, but I thought I must just be ugly or something. My pathetic attempts to secure a mate kept failing, I continued to try different things, refused to give up. It was the same socially for a time, I couldn't fit in at the youth club, I was just acting weird most of the time, and often ended up wandering around the hall on my own. I became scared of any social function where I had to find my own people to talk to, I just couldn't do it. I tended to blame the event, and began to associate it with mainstream customs. I found alternative scenes with people who liked underground music, and hippies and bohemian types. They were usually more inclusive and friendly, so I just figured they were right and the mainstream was wrong.

I took a dislike to most of the people in my first workplace, who seemed way too brash, decadent and competitive. I didn't even try to get accepted emotionally, just kept myself to myself as far as I dared, and developed my social life with the oddballs instead. Once again, I thought it was just mainstream society that was sick. My friends and I referred to them as "straights" and dismissed them as plain wrong.

I remember telling my girlfriend to stop reading between the lines when I talked, I wanted to be taken literally, because the other stuff didn't exist as far as I was concerned. I hated lying and being lied to. I knew I was very perfectionist with things, but I liked it that way.

I noticed that I couldn't handle it if somebody interrupted me while I was working, and wondered if I should have a card to hand out at such times, saying something like "please wait, I'll be able to talk to you as soon as I've finished this," because I couldn't multi-task enough to just say that. I never really noticed my problem as unique to me, I thought most people probably had the same trouble but that the cleverest ones worked out how to fix it somehow.

After that I got political, left wing, which dovetailed nicely with my choice of company, and I began to feel that the reason I got on with the left better was because right-wingers, like "straights," just don't know what love is. It also explained why I always felt employers and workplaces were hurting me.

I got better at acquiring partners, but the relationships were stormy. I was concerned about my own bad behaviour, and was fairly unaware of many of my partners' "faults" until years later when I knew more about emotional things.

I knew quite early that I didn't know enough about feelings, but I didn't suspect it was anything medical, I just thought it was something everybody would do well to study. It first came up in relationship counselling, for some reason the idea of looking at emotions began to resonate very well with me.

I kept a diary for many years before my DX, and it's peppered with little self-observations that now stand out as Aspie traits, e.g. I'd realised that I had trouble starting and stopping tasks, and that my hobbies could absorb me so completely that partners could be very badly ignored.

So yes, I noticed a lot of Aspie things, but many of them were easy to put down to politics and the decadence of mainstream society. I'm still fairly critical of those things now, even though an understanding of autism has given me good alternative explanations for the pain I've had from them.

That's sort of how it was for me. That, despite my confusion when people didn't behave or respond like I did, or when they didn't understand me (when I thought I was being quite clear and intelligent). I still thought maybe they were being willfully ignorant, mean, or were just jerks.

I did go through some periods of time where I was convinced there was something wrong with me and allowed myself to be misdiagnosed and treated for conditions I didn't have. I had to convince myself I had these conditions in order to 'get well' from them, but the treatments never changed me or made me 'well' at all.

It's been very hard to come to terms with my diagnosis because of the issues around this, and because I can't access any sort of psych help here where I live that is built for autistic adults.

I sometimes think that rather than studying autism, I'd do better to study neurotypicality.

Reading some of the posts above I notice the recurrent theme of not realizing what/why/how we are so different. Even now I have been diagnosed I continually discover just how different I am, particularly in social situations. Sometimes this is quite intimidating and confidence sapping and I wonder if I will ever come to terms with it...

I gather there's often a dip in self-confidence, an identity crisis. I had to get to know myself in a completely new light. It's not completely over for me, I think I'm still understretching myself because I know about my likely impairments. I never was one for doing anything unless I was pretty sure of myself. But it's better than it was, and I feel better off for knowing. The nice thing is that as it's a spectrum disorder, there's no such thing as "can't."

When we middle age Autistics grew up when anything but "severe" Autism was not understood. Other very non-flattering words were used. We were often misdiagnosed or even committed to an institution. Others died from trying to medicate the pain away with drugs or in the streets, I saw psychs in 3rd or 4th grade, no diagnosis is remembered. After that I toughed it out and muddled through until 2013 at age 55.

That explains everything was my main reaction

All of this.

I'm really struggling with it all still. The relief has been palpable but the ramifications are now set in stone and relearning everything in light of a dx in midlife is a shocking challenge for me.

I knew there was some underlying difference about me from an early age....but didn't attatch it to autism, just went through childhood wondering why I was different and how and why I just didn't seem to 'get it' a lot of the time. Sometimes thought when I was an adult this feeling would just go away and everything would click into place....but it never did, now after getting a diagnoses that just gives me a name for what was different and a bit of explination, so in that regard its somewhat helpful.

Also the diagnoses helps with my being on SSI, which I need for income being unable to work...I still cannot make any normal eye contact, but what bothers me is its like society expects one to just overcome that and do it when I do not see why it can't just be over-looked, some people don't do eye contact just because most peoples brains are wired to make eye contact when listening to something doesn't mean its 'right' and the other is 'wrong' its just different. So yeah intolerance towards even such petty differences seems far too common in this society.

So I can say I was aware of symptoms/being different...but didn't know why or attatch it to autism, and some things of course I did not know where abnormal about me until other people pointed it out. My sister is the one who told me a couple years ago she thought I might have aspergers...so that is when I kinda started considering the idea.

What oftentimes confuses me is how others (particularly people I consider to be quite incompetent) can have such high self-confidence. While I do consider myself to have rather low self-esteem, my esteem of others is similarly low.

Best guess, they don't suffer from depressive realism, but (you and?) I do, so they're free to irrationally believe that there's something especially great about themselves, while we know there isn't. I try not to have a particularly low or high opinion of others (or myself), but it's not easy, even though I think the objective truth is that they simply are what they are, and that I'll never know enough about them to judge their overall competence as individuals. It's difficult because I was judged a lot as a child, often damned, sometimes praised, so this urge to judge people is hard to resist. I try to stay mindful that I only see tiny glimpses of other people, not enough to conclude a lot about how good they are.

I felt like I was very different all my life but didn't know why till I was told Aspergers & researched it some.

No, I knew that I was different from a very early age. Probably 2nd or 3rd grade was when I realized it for sure. I almost wish I hadn't known, because it would have saved me 20 years of wondering what was "wrong" with me and why I had so many feelings and reactions I couldn't control. It was that long before I finally relented, saw a psychologist, and was diagnosed.