Did you have theories about what was "wrong" with you

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People who weren't diagnosed until later in life (or not at all), what did you think was "wrong" with you when you were growing up?

As a kid I thought I was a dragon from an alien planet who had somehow wound up born as a human on earth (I liked dragons, it was wishful thinking). When I got older I thought maybe I was crazy, or that I had been dropped on my head as a baby

When I was a kid I thought I wasn't human.

From there I started thinking I was crazy, broken somehow, and innately lazy.

Mostly because of what I was told. The constant why can't you do this? What's wrong with you? Don't act like that. We don't do that.

Since a large portion of my family doesn't believe in illness or mental health issues I didn't even consider that it could be something like that.

In my head it had to be some defect in my personality. Something I was doing wrong.

As a child, before diagnosis, I simply thought that everyone is conspiring against me in some way or form.

That I overstayed my welcome.
That I'm not wanted here.
That I'm not meant to be here for very long that I should be elsewhere.

As a child, before diagnosis, I'm already aware of the person "character" I'm playing as and I absolutely hate it. I still hate it now.
Not because I'm a weirdo, but because I'm the wrong one.

As a child, before diagnosis, I already wished that I'm not a human. That I'm not living this life. This is not my world.


I do not know "what" I am.

Only that I do not feel that I'm 'home'.
That I'm trapped in this body, with this name, with this person's life, with this person's relationships.
I do not feel 'free'.

I still do not know what I am.
I want to be free.


Even after diagnosis... Even knowing what I truly am and everything else.
I still do.

Only that...
I don't seem to have a lot of choice but to take responsibility over 'this life'.
I don't want it. I hate being obligated to. I'm fricking bored.
I want to live MY life, not this whoever this is with all the hung ups and the ignorance.

Yet I have to see this through.

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I didn't feel any connection to my mum.
I had a fantasy that my dad had an affair with another woman.
My mother adopted me from the other woman to hide her shame.

When I got to about age five I decided I was built wrong.
I pictured God had an assembly line in the sky for making babies.
God forgot to pull a lever and add something to me.
Or, maybe he added too much of something I didn't need.
I knew I wasn't "built" right on the inside and didn't belong here.

At 13 I wanted to be a child psychologist so I could figure "it" out.

As an adult I thought it was social phobia but that didn't explain sensory.

I never believed it was what was then called ADD, started to suspect it was what was at the time called Autism. When I was 21, I correctly determined it was NLVD, which has many similarities to both. I was always reading and on my own.

Given that my childhood was half a century ago I can remember thinking I have to be from somewhere else as that would explain why I seem to be so different, but that's about all the detail I can recall at this point on the calendar other than saying, "Ya know Mr. Spock, I get where you're coming from, similar to them but clearly not one of them."

I should add that my dad and his family were autistic.
My mum and her family didn't seem autistic.
That's why I identified more with my dad, and thought I had a different mum.

I'm now seeing evidence of autism in my mum and her family.
It's just kind of opposite to my traits.
I'm much more like my dad's side's traits.

The faeries put a curse on my ancestors, the curse made them weirdos. I carry the curse.

At first I realized my world was unpleasant but gradually I realized much of the unpleasantness seemed to be directed at me and I was being treated differently than the other kids.

I did poorly athletically and I guessed that might be why I was treated differently.
(Candidate underlying reasons for this were not identified until I was in my 60's.)

I did great on standardized tests and I guessed that might be why I was treated differently.
(I eventually joined Mensa.)

But later I did reasonably well academically, professionally, and financially (got a few lucky breaks) so eventually I began thinking maybe everyone else was the problem.

At age 64 I got my diagnosis and now I do think the problem really is everyone else.

I was punished a lot, told I was bad, evil, deliberately causing trouble, making waves, being wrong about almost everything all my childhood. By the time I got to my mid teens, I began to try to live up to what their expectations of me were. I got pretty good at being bad in my late teens and early 20s. Spent most of the rest of my life learning "what not to do", a good counselor saved my life and my sanity almost 40 years before I finally discovered my autism. Finally things made sense!

Growing up I thought I was r*****d or sp****c, as my mum liked to call me.
I always had a sense of not really 'getting' anything, so it fitted that there was some kind of intellectual disability.

When I was a child I did come up with one crazy-ass theory about myself!

My parents started sending me to shrinks when I was ...eight...maybe seven. This was back in the mid Sixties.
Between the shrinks and my parents I was convinced that everything was wrong with me. But there was no label attached to what they were treating me for. I was just...a person who had everything wrong with me. I guess.

At one point, around ten, I entertained a theory. A WILD theory. A theory that it wasnt EVERY thing that was wrong with me. It was just one thing.

And that one thing was...a high functioning version of this new thing you hear about called "autism".

The radio was on and I heard a radio show panel discussion with doctors and parents talking about this thing called "autism". How its like retardation but its NOT like retardation. The kids can be quite intelligent. And they described the behaviors. And it struck me how I myself had similar behaviors when I was a few years younger though maybe not quite as extreme. It occurred to me that "maybe Im not as extreme as the kids, but....maybe there is a mild version of this autism thing, and maybe I have it". But then I dismissed the idea. And decided that mom and dad and the shrinks are all correct and that I am just ...an awful person of bad character.

So for one moment I had self diagnosed myself with what amounted to aspergers, or HFA, back in 1965.

Decades later in 1994 the medical establishment expanded their definition of autism into a broad spectrum that included more people. Then around 2017 I was officially diagnosed with aspergers.

Thank you...shrinks of the world... for waiting fifty years to tell me something that I figured out for myself when I was ten years old!

When I was an actual child, I believed that I was the kindest child to have ever existed in human history. So the reason I thought everyone---from the popular kids, to my teachers, to my own family, to my shrink---treated me like trash, is the world wasn't ready for a kind child like me. Vicious children were the norm, and were treated with utmost respect by both other kids and the adults in their lives, from what I observed. I, on the other hand, triggered hate instincts in everyone, due to them not expecting to see a kind angel in a child's body. So they abused me, hoping to make me hate my life enough to make me commit suicide. (I first learned about suicide at age 8, and became suicidal that year.) It's comparable to, although not the same, as Jesus being crucified for speaking out against the Pharisee society he found himself in.

I didn't learn about Asperger's until 2005, when I was 22. Although I did hear about autism on TV and such before then, I didn't really notice a connection between its description/symptoms and myself. I stuck to the "kindest child in human history" theory until my teens. After which point, I just thought I was weird/different.

I gaslit myself. Unknowingly I found an ASD boss with an inclusive workgroup, found ASD friends and thought I was normal. When the ASD boss left and beer-drinking BBQing golfing power-hungry folks stepped in, my fantasy world fell apart. In preparation for my ASD evaluation, I read old letters and yearbook signatures and was surprised --- I was considered very strange by 100% of folks, including my dearest cousin --- if I imagine my younger self reading them (in the 1980s), I think I suppressed my responses. Survival.

I didn't necessarily think anything was wrong with me until I was 20 or so. And what caused that was mostly executive dysfunction.... I cried when I found out ADHD was a thing and that it could explain my problems. I just wanted to know why s**t was so difficult, man.
I didn't suspect autism until very recently. I never put much thought into my social awkwardness, other than acknowledging it was there. There were other diagnoses that came with my ADHD.... social anxiety, avoidant personality disorder. But not autism. Until now.

I thought I was a weak person.