when did you "wake up"?

Post Reply New Topic

Sorry but I don't understand. I never had anything to wake up from. I realized I was different by 6th grade. I did not "wake up."

I think I started becoming semi-conscious of it when I was between the ages of 8-10....It just seemed to me that I got told things like "You're not paying attention!" "You're not trying hard enough!" "Look at me!" "Stop repeating yourself!" "Stop doing that over and over!" "Stop asking me that!" "Look what you did!" You're always by yourself!" etc etc a lot more than everyone else did. I just thought of myself as "weird" and different from everybody else, and I was okay with it. It wasn't until my mom took me to a school of medicine and I got an official AS dx that it really started getting hammered into me how "bad" it was to be "weird" and "different" in any way, and how I was "bad" by extension. I know now that these things aren't true, but that's what it felt like back then.

When I was in high school, a guidance counselor talked to me and asked why I was always by myself and didn't talk to other kids.
I replied that I was different than other girls. When he asked me how I was different I couldn't tell him, but I felt that other kids knew things I didn't know. I had no idea about what to talk about or how to act or how to make friends. I didn't even try. I was alone in my own world.

As soon as I hit kindergarden where I had to deal with other kids, I felt different. Not being able to do basic things that other kids can do easily is what put me aside. Being making fun of for acomplishing task in a weird way such as holding my pen or fork, how to wipe water of me with a towel after taking a bath how to sit down ect... I was also different mentally, the way I was thinking or how easy it was for me to remember everything. Beeing aware of my difference early on and not getting any treatement what so ever got me to build my own little world very early in life to protect myself from the outside world. That little world still exsist at 34 years old and throught my life i've been in and out of it with help from others or by choice.

I'd say just recently, as in becoming more aware of the world around me.

I already knew that I was different, but I had just been oblivious to most other things in my life growing up.

I think I first started noticing that I was different around fourth grade.

I had transferred to a new school and someone I had never met before came up and introduced herself to me. She knew my name and I was really confused about that because I couldn't fathom how she knew it. I asked her about it and she said that someone else had told her. But then I didn't hear that conversation, so I couldn't accept that it had happened that way... It was the first time I had noticed myself becoming frustrated with an interaction and I didn't know why I didn't get it...

It took about 20 more years before I realized it was ASD.

Always the outsider, I always knew I was "different," but as nobody knew of AS back then and experts told my parents I was "normal," I never really had an "ah ha" moment until I was 40 and the incident that lead me to learn about AS confirmed why I kept failing to fit in.

I had known about Autism for a while before I "woke up", but it wasn't until my K-8 school had a health fair and the autism table had a few pamphlets about autism. I didn't know too much about autism, I only knew that it existed and it was a condition. I asked my mom on the way back home and she was like "Yeah I think you have a touch of autism". I "woke up" a little bit then and my knowledge of autism started to grow from there a little bit and so on.

I noticed it when I was first learning to read and do basic math. I couldn't specifically identify what I was missing, but I knew I wasn't getting something very important. I saw children, without words, getting invited to games of patty cake. I would approach and ask permission, in what I now realize is a fairly dead pan tone, and be refused. For years I though god didn't want me to have friends, but then when I matured I stopped being so hateful and just became depressed. God didn't want me to be alone, I was just born corrupted/too intelligent/"special" because I was unlucky. I'm a bit less bitter with time, but i am still very alone much of the time, and I still am far too aware of it.