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

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what a great question. i'm glad someone dug this one up.

i had thirty-something years to come up with wrong answers before coming up with the right one.

so .. lots of different things.

- when i was a kid i was from another planet, and told everyone so.
- later, emotional meltdowns must be from low blood sugar.
- as a teenager i was too smart to engage in the ubiquitous idiotic and superficial socializing (i.e. no one understood me because i was so brilliant)
- then i was convinced i was bipolar.
- then i had a number of rationalizations as i became more aware of my strange sensory wiring: acid flashbacks; temporal lobe epilepsy; accidentally drugged (did somebody lace this joint with angel dust? did someone put something in my drink?); and the very literal "fluorescent lights sometimes do strange things to me"
- then it was pernicious anemia, until my blood testing came back normal
- then i must be gay, but very very deeply closeted .. a half-baked theory that fell apart quickly upon recognition that i had never had any sexual interest in a woman, nor any lack of sexual interest in men
- so then i went with "a rare creative temperament"
- (let's not forget, in between all these: dyslexia, ADD, and some kind of auditory language processing difficulty)
- then celiac disease (which was correct, as far as i know, but when addressed succeeded in making me feel better physically but failed to make me any less autistic)
- oh .. let's not forget these. i only relate to: feminists; artists; the homeless; or feral people
- then a very last ditch effort at explaining everything away as a product of some family issues when i was younger (which did muddle things, i'll admit)

.. and now i'm going to read everyone else's answers and see if there are any i forgot. this ought to be interesting.

Speaking as an NT with celiac disease, you could (and I did) get held up with that problem for a decade.

Feral people?

I thought that i was OCD, which I believed for the longest time was what made me apprehensive around others. I figured that since I had many of the symptoms of OCD that I was merely upset by the lack of precision and order in everday social interactions.

My ex-husband has Borderline Personality Disorder and a pretty nasty form of it. Not all Borderlines are as devious and hurtful as he is. When I took my eldest son to be tested I was terrified that he was developing BPD like his dad. He was too young, but I didn't know that at the time.

When the psychologist told me it was ADHD and Asperger's (which I didn't know anything about at the time) I cried in relief. She tried to comfort me saying he was the same child I'd always loved but now we have a new tool to use to help him. I was barely able to stop sobbing long enough to let her know they were tears of joy. Whatever AS was I knew it wasn't BPD and my son would be OK. He was 9.

My younger two got the same workup this year. I'd never realized that Middle Son has AS as well. He's so different from his brother, but DUH, it was actually blatantly obvious. I can spot an Aspie from a hundred miles...usually, but my own son I didn't notice. I guess to me he's just himself.

i figured it out myself and never took it to a doctor. but i read some real diagnostic horror stories.



guess i should've explained this one. i'm using this term somewhat metaphorically here to refer to people who left home very young or are otherwise permanently and deliberately living outside of society in some fashion. i can elaborate if it's still unclear.

but i also mean i've found it interesting to read about feral children who literally in some cases were raised by animals.

I was convinced I was losing my mind, and one day, I would just...be insane.