What did you think was wrong before you heard about AS?

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For years, I was convinced that I was mentally ret*d. I convinced myself that everybody knew it but me, and that they were keeping it a secret from me. That they all knew what was wrong with me but they weren't telling. Of course, this would have required that they talked to everybody at my school, at stores, etc. before I went there, so that nobody would let the secret slip. But hey, with such devastating news, of course they would go to such trouble to keep me in the dark, right?

Did anybody else have crazy theories about what was wrong/different about you before you learned about AS?

I thought I was just a freak.

I didn't have any best friends and as I grew older, I began to have violent emotional outbursts.

Most of my life I just thought I was shy. Then, as an adult, I started reading all kinds of self help books about how to overcome shyness. I finally came out of my shell, only to find that no one wanted to hear what I had to say! I seemed to have more social problems, the more I put myself out there. People thought I was fake, weird, and maybe crazy -- I don't know. Every time I thought I was doing a good job of being social, I got negative feedback from people. I avoided social situations like the plague, until I started having to do more of it for my kids' after-school activities. This past year, I was so distraught about not fitting in, that I started really wondering what might be wrong with me. The morning before I found this website, I was sitting on the couch, and it occurred to me that I'm like a person from another planet. Seriously! Then, when I went on the Internet, later in the day, I found a list of symptoms for Asperger's. I got chills! The next website I found was WRONG PLANET! I was completely shocked that my thought from earlier in the day was actually a reality! I knew it was where I belonged!

You

I figured I was shy and smart. This actually explained, in some ways, the interests, different thinking strategy, strengths, weaknesses, lack of friends/social skills, mental development, etc.... Lack of change was just due to my

Of course, it didn't explain WHY I was as I was, or the sensory problems I often never thought of, etc...

BTW I even thought that I was an alien of some sort. I imagined how my development compared against others, and it was STRIKING! Of course, have way through school, I started to taper off, and others went up, but the average person was lucky to learn what was presented in class, and I learned much of that, interests, etc... Today, my deficiencies aren't apparent, but my strengths certainly are.

Still, I am enough like my father that I guess I am human. 8-(

Steve

I was arrogant enough to think I was just too intelligent to fit in.

Oh holy Ned!

AS is big. I seem to have a fair dose of it. There is so much that Nearly everything in the book seemed to fit: I am shy, I'm introverted, I'm too intelligent for my own good, I'm divorced from reality and therefore schizophrenic, I have OCD, I have bipolar, I am delusional, I am paranoid, I am a geek, I am a loner, I am depressive, I am clumsy, I am thoughtless, I am a ($%$#@) moron, I am heartless, I am unemotional, I am. . . .

And it is not that a great deal of these didn't fit. All if them fit. But an I a Chinese menu of mental illneses? What of Occam's Razor? All of it was too much go explain too little. And none of the stuff above gave me any clear ideas of what to do with me.

AS wraps it all up. It wraps up all that I am, and all that I have lived. My working hypothesis was far worse than AS!

i thought i would never know.

I thought I was anxious, depressed, and lacked self-esteem.

The power of suggestion is powerful, indeed.

Now I realize that my eye contact is poor and I don't like parties... because that's the way my brain works, not because I think badly of myself. For some reason, I now feel ok just being the way I am, even though I'm no different than I was before.

I just recently became aware of AS, but I've wondered if I had some sort of "autism lite" since I saw Rainman. I was a little disturbed by the number of similarities between myself and the character Dustin Hoffman portrayed, but enough differences that I thought that couldn't be me. I had never found any other satisfactory explanation for the way I was, AS is the only thing that makes sense.

I thought I was crazy.
I had a breakdown last August and when my mum tried to help me I told her I didn't want to go to the doctor's because I thought they'd lock me up somewhere.

I jut thought I was a terrible freak and I hated myself
still do really

Social anxiety disorder. But I had constant fantasies of being homeless, in a mental institution, or strap to some machine that would drill a hole in my head and find out what was truly wrong with me.


very shy ---> agoraphobia---> social phobia---->social anxiety disorder----> ASD + ADHD-I

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Reading others I remember I thought I had avoidant personality disorder. Also I though
that hypothyroidism and lead posioning played a role in my degree of general impairment.

I've thought that I was too good for my NT peers and too good to be in Special ED.