For adult aspies

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I definitely lucked out. Not much bullying. Probably because I hit my growth spurt before everyone else. I spent most of my school years being the tallest kid before everyone else caught up. By the time they did catch up in size, I was in high school. My high school was weird, apparently. All the cliques intermingled. The jocks couldn't pick on the chess team because there were jocks on the chess team, and so on. There was some social ostracism, but I was comfortable with just having my couple of gamer friends and no one else.

After school is what nailed me. The routine of school had been comforting. The transition to real life was upsetting, and I failed at it. Two and a half years of unemployment. Had I been diagnosed at 13 instead of 33, I would have maybe been better prepared for that, or at least had better support during it.

I also would have had fewer epic battles with my mother.

Got bullied and beaten at home, so getting bullied at school meant also just enduring the abuse silently.

Sorry to say, but for me bullying has continued into adulthood. Even now on the internet bullies find me. Only thing different is now I don't take it. I fight back with words. Maybe I'm too serious.

A friend once told me how in junior high, a couple of guys picked on him. One would block him while the other hit him. He said he laughed it off each time and maybe that's why the bullies stopped going after him. He didn't take the abuse and drama the way the bullies wanted him to. So maybe that's the answer? Instead of taking a bully's tactic seriously, just laugh it off?

Have to admit, I'd rather beat them senseless and hear them croak, Sorry.

(35) I was psychologically bullied more than anything, because I am so small I think for the most part I was too pathetic looking for people to want to physically pick on me and in spite of that was abnormally strong for my size so if I was pushed I wasn't afraid to push back and was very good at giving dirty looks or appearing crazy ... so I think anyone who would have pushed me around soon thought better of it. Popular girls generally did not like me because I was too weird and did not care about the same things they did ... I found out recently that one of the girls who I did get along with who did care about being accepted was bullied a lot by those same girls because she tried to make friends with them, whereas I did not and didn't care as I didn't like them much anyway. I only had one close friend who was a year younger than me but when she moved I went through long periods with no social interaction outside of school. Boys generally liked me but never asked me out. I often enjoyed being alone. My brother bullied me the worst till I was in my late teens, now we get along great. I used to embarrass my Mom when family/friends would try to hug me and I'd pull away and they'd be offended and ask why and I'd say something like "I don't like to be hugged, I don't like to be touched!", it hurt her that I didn't want to wear dresses or play with baby dolls.... Got my first boyfriend via the internet when I was 23, in hindsight he was also very Aspie and the two of us together did not make one functioning adult so it didn't work out but it was still worth my while because it gave me confidence.

I never knew there were social cues that I couldn't read.
I was clueless about being clueless.

People thought I was pathetically timid or stupid or weird and made fun of me or just didn't bother with me at all.

Last edited by Marybird on 11 Jul 2012, 11:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Bullied all through school. Teachers blamed me, school counsellor didn't believe me. I couldn't explain the situation well enough to my parents for them to help me.
I developed a hunched back from trying to hide myself from the bullies, it's better now but still not straight.
I stood out because I was shy, always teaching myself extra things because I was bored, and didn't understand school social stuff so people thought I was weird.

I have no Asperger's diagnosis, I have an ADHD-PI diagnosis (received at age 20), but it's probable that I'm an Aspie. I started school in 1984, so no diagnosis available. The only formal help I received in school was extra handwriting classes when I was 12, this only lasted a few weeks.

I had the usual bullying, it was pretty extreme and everyone seemed to want a go, even the good kids and sometimes even their parents contributed to this. My school had the usual "bullying is not tolerated here" bulls*** but were not much help. I did try standing up for myself a couple of times, but given my exceptionally low standing, this actually met with far worse responses.

My parents are interesting, in some ways they let me get on with and supported my interests and they also allowed me to stay home while they went shopping and to do other things. This would be tolerated today, it's not the done thing to leave a 7 year old home alone while you go out for a few hours to run errands. My parents tried really hard to deal with the bullying in the school, and they eventually let me change schools at 15.

I was generally so in my own world and passive, that I went unnoticed for most of the time.

Jason.

I wasn't bullied much in grammar school. It started in Junior High and pretty much continued through to my graduation in High School. I was DXed fairly early with learning disabilities, but my parents didn't want to tell me because they thought I would use it as an excuse and give up trying. They might have been right, but I felt I was stupid because I didn't learn things as fast as others and wound up in remedial English and Math in my early years. I didn't know that what I was had a name. Now I am not even sure I'm dyslexic. I was also told I have ADD, and I have been told I have Social Anxiety Disorder. I began wondering if I was on the Spectrum, but everybody claims that I am not just by looking at me. I've never been officially tested. The on line tests pretty much indicate I am just a weird NT.

I remember the last incident I experienced in High School. I was in Study Hall, a few days before graduation. Some guy I never got a long with asked me how I felt about graduating. I told him I was a little nervous. "You know what you should do? You should kill yourself." He went on to explain that I wasn't worth anything and nobody liked me and nobody would care if I died. I'm sure this little monologue took no more than a minute or two, but it felt like forever. I was too much of a wimp to say or do anything.

In my day (back in the 1970's), bullying was seen as a part of growing up. The teachers generally didn't intervene, and when I told my father about it, he just told me to fight back, which I was completely unable to do. I was sort of tall but not strong at all and not skilled at fighting. I also had an aversion to hurting people which I have to this day.

Me too. I mostly felt I couldn't fight back not just because I was too weak to do so but because I didn't want to be a mean horrible person like them. The few times I did try to fight back there was retaliation later and/or I got in trouble but they didn't.

I was only bullied once, in grade school, by a tall mean girl. Well, make that twice---the other time was by this huge molester-wanna-be boy.
My parents---mostly my personality disordered mom---used me as a family scapegoat. It wasn't that bad. But maybe it was because I was so blunt in my interactions with her. I was stubborn, too.
I had a 3rd grade teacher that got so fed up with my ADHD that she stood me up in fron to the class and shook me until my clothes ripped.
Mostly, what was hard to endure was that I was sooooo different than the other girls my age. Some aspies don't need to have a freindly peer group, some do. I did, as a kid.

I wasn't diagnosed until I was over 25 so before then I didn't know there was anything "wrong" with me apart from having suffered from stress. When I was at school I mostly only had to endure name-calling, which I didn't think amounted to bullying. I just brushed this off. There were only two things that actually got to me. One was when I was forced into the girls' locker area and the boys who did it blocked my way out. One of the girls in there was actually on the side of the people who did it. I couldn't believe that. The only other thing which really annoyed me was when I was lifted up and sat down on a high pillar in the changing rooms. I left school with 2 A-levels grades A-C.

Edited to improve the sentence structure.

I was at school in the 1970s and 80s.

I am not sure if I have AS or not, I am currently seeking assessment because I think I may have..

I am absolutely sure if I was at school as a child right now I'd have been sent for some kind of assessment. As a child ages 6 and 7 I completely failed in social relationships with other children. I spent most of my school recess / break times age 7 hiding away completely from other children. I was also behind in reading until age 7, and maths until age 9 compared to my obvious otherwise high vocabulary and intelligence.

I was bullied ages 5-15 and like others here just could not quite fathom why social relationships seem so frequently to go wrong; I somehow so often seemed to say the wrong thing. In many cases nothing was done about bullying. There was no anti-bullying culture in my main junior or secondary schools. Bullying generally was seen as teasing, you were expected to take it and not tell tales.

By age 14 I think my social failings were clearly noticed as I was sent on some kind of 1 week leadership course by the school, I was still never sent for any kind of assessment though.

Academically at school I did ok, and did even better in college. School work and college was a refuge for me. I generally mixed with scientists and engineers at college and this worked well for me.

My parents knew I struggled with socialising but I think just thought it was because they thought I was clever, sensitive and talked like an adult. They now regret they did not do more about the bullying at the time (it is true I did also ask them not to do anything as I thought this might make things worse).

It did not occur to them that I might have autism (and one of them was a trained special needs teacher - he retired before Aspergers became widely known about).

On the plus side I've got very good and trying to see other peoples point of view, and tend to be very tolerant and understanding these days.

I always assume it's up to me to make the effort in social interactions to make sure they don't go wrong. My early social failings meant I have tried hard not to make mistakes and not be offensive in social interactions, I also feel have learnt from my mistakes over the years. I don't always get this right and struggle to have many close friendships, but I can generally get on ok in a workplace or in a social gathering without making any serious faux pas which is actually very useful.

Yes, bullied at school until high school when i got big and started fighting back and got a reputation that i was not to be messed with. And teachers were apt to "blame the victim". Then in college, different bullies saw me as easy prey and went through that gauntlet again. This was in the 70s-80s and even autism was considered to be the more severe Kanner type, as i remember in a college course so my HFA would go undiagnosed.

I was like the kid who protected my fellow gifted class nerds.
In middle school it got worse as physical disparities between boys became more pronounced. We had two 16 year old twins who were in my class of 13 year olds that made our lives miserable.
I walked to school and back, rather than fight all the time on the bus. It was only a half mile, so it's not like I needed a sherpa.
I carrying a gun at 14 or so and started lifting weights around then too. I got REALLY aspie about bodybuilding and read everything I could get my hands on: Weider magazines, Arnold's encyclopedia, etc. I hulked out by the time I was 16.5 years from 145 or so to 177lbs.

Teen boys are like a pack of wild animals.

Anyway, it was tough for me academically. I started underachieving to fit in, since they made fun of me for being smart. By age 16, I was failing all my classes, but teachers would pass me just because they knew I was smart. Administrators stuck me in ROTC to "straighten him out" but my instructor (career Navy guy) would lose his mind when he'd be screaming commands at me and I'd obviously wander off mentally.
I remember once being yelled at in front of the whole class for reading the dictionary line by line, completely engrossed in it, when I was just supposed to flip it open and copy definitions. Or, getting the 1000 yard stare in class and having the teacher embarrass me by calling on me.

Good times.

Aspie or not, I think everyone has been bullied at one time or another. If not, then you should probably question whether or not you were the bully.

I believe people (not just kids) are bullied for being different. Aspergers is just one type of different that attracts bullying. Having said that, I believe bullying now is worse than it was when most adults today were growing up. Parents were responsible during our childhood. They held you accountable for your actions and punished you when you misbehaved. That's rare for kids in the US anymore. When I was growing up you could be spanked in school for misbehaving. Then you'd get spanked again when you got home because you did something to get spanked at school. Nowadays teachers are afraid of touching students for fear of some type of legal action and parents are too focused on their iDevice to notice or care what their children are doing.

It also wasn't out of place for a neighbor to put you in your place during the 70s. Kids were taught respect back then and somehow that lesson has been lost.

I was just diagnosed this year. That means I spent 38 years just being "different". My parents were tough, but I think I needed it. They taught me how to move about the world as a functioning member of society. That doesn't mean I'm not weird. It just means that I was taught the things that didn't come naturally to me so I could blend better. There was no excuse for me to fall back on.

I became really good at what I do and people tend to overlook your eccentricities in that situation. Since I'm in a creative field, that also helps people accept the way I am.

I think too many individuals use aspergers as an excuse for them to act out or lack discipline. I'm not saying those people don't have aspergers, I'm just saying they don't try to contribute to society in whatever way they can.

I sought a diagnoses to help me understand the challenges in my relationships so that I could work to be better at communicating and understanding... Not so I could have an excuse not to try.

So....what were we talking about again?

Back when I was in grade school, there was no such a thing as Aspergers or Attention Deficit or anything similar. Right from first grade, I was the crybaby daydreamer who never paid attention. Sometimes, when the bully was out sick, one of the girls from the neighborhood would play with me during recess, but otherwise I was on my own. This lasted through the middle of the 5th grade when we moved to another part of the country. It never got physically violent -- mostly isolation and name-calling.

Very shortly into first grade, my teacher called my parents in for a conference, she was alarmed that I seemed to have a very serious learning disorder -- during reading group, I kept turning my book upside down. Fortunately my mom quickly pinpointed the problem -- they were trying to teach me how to read. I had been reading on my own for recreation since age 4, and was bored out of my head.

My second grade teacher dumped out my desk in front of everyone because I took too long to find a pencil. I never did figure out if it was because she was trying to shame me into being more orderly or if it was just that this was her first year teaching and she lost her temper. When my dad found out about this years later, he was livid, but at the time I didn't know to tell him.

Things were a little better during the second half of 5th grade -- we had moved from the Philly area to the foothills of the Carolina mountains. I guess my strangeness was attributed to my being a northerner -- nobody expected my body language to be "normal" because they knew I was from a different culture.

During 6th grade, the boys at the school bus stop got so bad that my dad took to staying in the car, parked within clear sight until the bus came.

High School got better -- I made a few friends who were able to shield me from becoming a target. During 10th through 12th, a group of intelligent outcasts formed their own "in" group -- we saw ourselves as an eclectic intelligentsia and our meeting place was the school library.

I vaguely remember a teacher doing that to me, I think in fourth grade.

One other time a teacher took all my books out of my desk, put them on a table on the other side of the room and said to go get them when I wanted to do my schoolwork. I don't remember how many days it took her to give up and put them back.