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

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I thought I was just a bad person.

what didn't I think I had?

depression
anxiety/generalized anxiety disorder
ocd
borderline personality
bipolar
anger issues
PTSD

My parents didn't explain it to me, so I grew up not really knowing why my peers wouldn't talk to me. I thought people who wouldn't interact with me unless I pretended to be a puppy were my friends God I'm a loser. That ended when I was ten, by the way.
I didn't know why there was a stupid screen door in between myself and everyone I tried to talk with. There were some people who tried, but they spoke to me like I was an idiot (hell, I might be) so it was probably just a pity thing.
I knew I was weird.. I was sort of afraid I was "mental" as my grade school peers might have said it. Whatever that means I stopped trying after elementary school though. I ended up making a few friends that way

the sameas now, people can be pathetic

I've been diagnosed bipolar, but I think there's more to it than that. I don't doubt the bipolar diagnosis, but it doesn't explain everything. I've also thought messed up childhood. I scored gifted on tests in school but I always felt like I was shy and socially incompetent with no common sense whatsoever. I put it down to childhood experiences.

I sure belong here. It sends shivers down the spine to read some of the
repies to this thread I think Most of my life I was just convinced I just was
not trying hard enough. Accually I really don't know what I thought.
Just thought things would get better some day. Was always on the depressed
side. Wonder how many poor souls find another answer to all the spectrum
issuses. Finally starting to feel comfortable in my skin.

I sometimes thought I was crazy some how or just one of those people that get hated on for no reason. I thought it also might have had to do with my adhd but I saw other people who had add or adhd who were outgoing and happy unlike me. So that finished off that idea.

I thought that I was mentally ret*d.

Interesting question.

Mostly, I didn't think something was wrong with me, I felt something was wrong with me. Like I was horribly defective. Not good enough for other people to accept.

For years, we thought my ex-boyfriend had OCD.

I just knew that he seemed hypersensitive and the world seemed ten times more difficult for him.

It's hard to say what I thought as a child but I remember feeling defective and that my family would be better off without me. I felt like a burden because of my bed wetting and anxiety and paralyzing shyness. When I entered the social realm at kindergarten and people didn't talk to me that further reinforced the idea that I was defective. It never for a second occurred to me that I should talk to them. I didn't take my eyes off the floor until after high school. A little later I thought maybe I had suppressed a traumatic event. Anyway, I thought a lot of things but never a different way of processing input.

That everyone else was just stupid.

I was dx'd very young, and barely remember before it.

But I remember I thought I was bad. That was in... third grade, or maybe second. I came to the conclusion that a "bad kid" would be disliked by everyone and not know they were bad. I didn't know I was bad and I wasn't fitting in, not to mention teachers getting mad at me. Therefore (false syllogism alert), I was bad. (The exact reasoning error is that just because all A are B doesn't imply the converse, that all B are A.)

I remember I knew something was different, but I couldn't say what, and what I tried to figure out just couldn't be, you know? I hated school... but so did everyone else. I was much better at reading than anyone else... but then, I was worse at math. I was terrified of talking to people outside my tiny circle, so I decided I was shy, only for my mom to say things like "oh, she's pretending to be shy." I would protest that I really was, but I had the problem of being talkative and bright sometimes.

I remember knowing I was different when we had to bring report cards home in second grade and the teacher (who usually gave us one language arts assignment and one math assignment) assigned only math homework. Everyone else was elated, feeling they'd had a real reprieve, but I still had 80-90% of the actual work and wished she'd only given us LA, because I didn't actually have it any easier.

I remember knowing I didn't fit in at about the time it started. For a long time, the other kids were oblivious to my oddities and so was I. Granted I had trouble making friends because I couldn't perceive their greetings (not to mention always having a sense of "this doesn't apply to me"), but I was always invited to events and welcome to join in group play at recess. The nadir of my social career up till that point had been when a couple of girls made a mean joke (I think they put chocolate pudding on my jacket and said it was poop) and apologized the next day.

When I got to third grade, I immediately perceived the change. I felt lonely. But my mom dismissed my feelings, telling me I had plenty of friends. Had she said it only a few months before, it would have been true. But the process of being rejected from the group had begun.

What did I think? I thought things before and after getting dx'd. (Possibly because my mom is a rabid curebie who kept insisting she could cure me, and explained to me that I had NLD, which meant half of my brain didn't work, or maybe just because some part of me was scared to be "other," I was in denial for a long time.) I thought I wasn't really human, I thought I was lonely, I thought I was bad.

The scary moment for me was when I had the dx of NLD and wondered suddenly whether I was in any way similar to the girl in the "Dumb Kids' Class" whom I'd befriended because she didn't seem to be in any way abnormal, unlike the ret*d kids (mostly boys) who didn't know how to wipe their noses and spoke with funny accents. (I have never had any patience for stupid people, of any stripe. I judge people by their intelligence.) I wonder to this day why she was in that class.

As a kid, I invented a language just to write a heavy-handed allegory where my mother became supreme dictator of the world and disagreeing with her was pathologized and outlawed. Naturally, I (I wasn't even trying with character creation) overthrew her regime and ruled benevolently with the organization called AINAP, which was an acronym I secretly came up with to describe the spectrum after being lumped in with them and deciding I may as well include them in my secret defiance. (Stood for "Autism Is Not A Problem." Even as a kid, I understood that much. Alas, there's not the same gut reaction against "you have mercury toxicity and we can fix that," so I came out believing that Autism Is Not A Problem, but that it could be cured. I was one scared little kid for a while there.)

Tangent aside, I thought I was some undefined "other" and maybe bad. I kept thinking I was bad (to the point of almost being delusional) for some time after, but I fixed my self-esteem issues a couple years ago. But this doesn't even get into how it feels to be proud of "a disability" and to want to keep something you're supposed to be curing.

I didn't think anything. I kept comparing myself to others and tried to find things in common. I tried to mimic people to be more normal. However, somehow, the idea of a difference never came to my mind. I felt normal, since I've behaved in a rational way. I thought everyone was somewhat crazy and had a huge superiority complex. I was planning to beat everyone at academics, since that's the only thing I was capable of being good at, it seemed. At the beginning of Grade 12 (year 2008), I've decided that I will study myself out to the point of exhaustion and would spend all of my time studying. And that's basically what I did for a month, until it began taking its toll on my physical health. There was one day when I came home, hurting all over, and basically crashed onto my bed, incapable of doing anything else.

After I've compared how much I've studied to how much others studied, I've realized that something was wrong. That's when I began taking AS seriously. My parents told me about AS the summer of 2008, but I didn't concern myself with it because I thought that it's just a social disability and I didn't care about being socially successful anymore (and I don't now, either). I thought that my grades would be unaffected by AS. But after I did more research, after the realization I've had, I started to take AS seriously. And that's when I've also realized that I need the diagnosis in order to move on in life.

Hypothyroid, Hypoglycemic, PTSD, bipolar...oh and OCD and brain damage from teenage drug use (maybe so!)

Turns out to be AS and hypothyroid and PTSD

Me, I USUALLY [aside from a few stressed intervals] figured all those strange critturs had something wrong with them; I am clearly right.