when did you first realize you were different?

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I was never conscious of being different until my actual diagnosis at age 12.

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I remember going out to play durring kindergarden. The other kids were playing in a big mass and I was always on the outside of the mass looking at trees, squirels, and the cars in the parking lot never looking at the other kids. The teacher would catch me wondering off and was always grabbing me by the arm to pull me back to the mass. The teacher was always asking my parents if I did this at home. She tied a thick piece of twine around my waist and to another child to keep me from wondering off. This really made me popular. Kids would sometimes try to pull me closer with the twine. It was a nightmare.

A weird fact about my kindergarden class is four people from the class were with me in special education and two were in gifted class. I wonder if they gave my teacher all the weird kids.

Daycare....I was treated differently and separated from the other kids by one particularly abusive warden....so it seems as though maybe she wanted to teach me that I was different. I even have an odd memory that just popped up that she might have even once placed me into a crib in the infant room because I remember the bars of the crib and one of those activity boards they put in cribs for babies...but that might be a false memory...It could also be that she was racist and I was the only Caucasian kid at that daycare (which was predominantly Hispanic at the time)..so maybe she took her feelings out on me... dunnow...I probably should not read too much into my vague memories of that experience.
Howyousay....
I noticed i was different from other girls at an early age, but it was first grade where it became glaringly obvious that I was actually different from all the kids...that is when the bullying from peers began, and also I had an insane and abusive teacher who also bullied me by singling me out and calling me names and punishing me and such...

Very early. I was in the Daycare and they told me I should play with children. But I didn't know how to. I didn't know children rules. I didn't know why they did something. All was fake, stinky and highlighted. I didn't want to sleep, eat and play.
Adults always told I was horrible kid and nobody liked me.

I was raised as an only child, so until I went to Kindergarten I had no idea what other children were like because I just played in my room and had no meaningful exposure to other children, only my insular mother and grandmother.

The children seemed loud, moved chaotically, and were prone to outbursts of random behavior whenever teachers weren't around.

They seemed to know thousands of games, songs, and odd little rituals I couldn't imagine existing,. They could never sit quietly without being ordered to first or work on their own independently without being reminded.

They seemed like impulsive little savages to me. And left to their own accord, they never seemed to sit still or crave time alone.

I was about three. I noticed I wasn't like the other kids and I was never sure why. Then I figured it was because I get treated different so it made me be different so at age ten I started to try and be normal and trying to get everyone to treat me normally. I didn't like being singled out so I fought for my rights. I also used to think I was bad luck and couldn't understand why. It was also hard for me to control my actions and it be lot of work to try and not act up and be hyper. I never understood then why I was different and I thought I could change it if everyone treated me like everyone else and accepted me. Plus I also started to change myself.

I've always known my OCD-esque behaviour is abnormal. I always felt somewhat different, perhaps because considered very intelligent since I can remember myself. I couldn't touch people as a kid, I guess that's the things that really proved me I'm weird.

But next to my overall boredom and uninterest, I always had this unusual talent for acquiring languages, the teachers themselves never understood it, people always told their friends of how genious I am because I just never made any errors, despite not studying too much, and finishing tests within 5 minutes. I was shocked and embarrassed when I visited other people's houses, and they told their parents about me. It felt like a weird kind of a freak show, and helped my confidence I guess, but also made me sure that I'm not normal.
(I always say it's the most useless talent in the world, and last thing you want to be a savant of)

I also got feedback about writing and about my ideas, for many years now, and it always made me feel both happy and sad. When everyone praises you, as much as I sound like a jerk right now, you feel really far away. Right now people consider me a wasted potential, and also weird for my eccentricity - actually at times I was told I'm an example of what they say, that geniouses have to be crazy... Now I let me be myself, so appreciate comments for eccentricity and uniqueness, and found some people that I feel are as smart as I am (how bad does it sound?). Still, I feel I'm alone in this world. Just plain different.

It especially doesn't help when everyone tells you that you're different because you care too much, and too friendly, yet you're alone.

When I was in Daycare, I only had one friend, and she had Down's Syndrome. I wasn't able to make friends. I really rejected at that time.

I just had two interesting memories:

1. My mother used to be friends with some woman named Jackie; Jackie had these two kids named Jimmy and Johnny who I was supposed to play with when my Mom and Jackie met up; they were more interested in playing with each other than with me. This, btw, was when I was really, really young.

2. For whatever reason, my Mom brought me to this children's book reading at the local library, and she went off to be in the section of the library for teens and adults. I didn't care to hear the librarian read the story, so I got up, and left the room. My mom yelled at me, and sent me right back in.

I'm sure I noticed the differences between the other kids and me when I first started school. They played with each other, I played with myself. And so on. But I never really thought about it. I wasn't aware enough of my classmates - or the rest of the outside world, for that matter - to actually realize and contemplate these differences.

Then around second grade I started paying more attention to other people and understanding that they had different thoughts, feelings, and interests. Gradually I also started seeing how I was unlike them. When I was eight I liked to stand on the far edge of the play area at recess, and one day I was just people-watching when it hit me that I was fundamentally very different.

After that I tried to correct every behavior that I perceived as unusual and therefore unaccpetable. And then at the beginning of third grade I pulled out my hair at my temples during class. This phase didn't last long and went away on its own, but that was the start of my struggle with anxiety.