When did you realise your life was going to be different?

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I was also getting £30 a week from EMA *high five* lol

Some of these responses really make me think how many people would not realise they were autistic if them came from a better home? How much does a bad home environment exacerbate the difficulties of autism? For me had my family been more supportive I think I would have a decent semi normal life, relationships and a job etc.

How many would have realized sooner that they were autistic if they had been raised in a better home environment?

"Stop that rocking! I said STOP IT! Look at me when I'm talking to you! Look at me! LOOK! AT! ME!! Now that's the last time you ... STOP IT, I SAID!! ..."

I think that most of us could say that.

I think I began to recognize that I was different towards the end of Junior High School. But I began to realize my life was going to be different around 4 years later. Opportunities began to occur as if by magic and I held my hand out and grasped them. I didn't even think about going to college until the last few months before graduation. No body in my family or extended family ever went to college before. My family wasn't wealthy enough to send me to college. You should have seen the look on the high school advisors face when I showed up one morning and asked if there might be any scholarships available. She said your late or maybe she said you are very, very, very late. But there was still one scholarship available. Paperwork needs to be turned in by the next morning. I filled it out, turned it in and the scholarship helped to pay for my tuition and books for the first year of college. A year later we moved to California and I applied to UCLA. They turned me down. I asked for them to reconsider about a half a dozen times. They finally accepted me on probationary status. It was just my stubbornness, and my shear energy, and my willingness to go outside the box, which opened the world before me.

I realized that my life was going to be different when I had my first mental breakdown in the Spring of 1998. I was working 8 hour days in a factory doing a job that didn't take much brains. The next thing I knew was that I could only hold down part-time jobs after that. I would have to be on social assistance to be able to make up the rest of the money. I'm between jobs at the moment, but being an unemployed hippie artist can be fun.

Always been different.

I do have some future concerns which could mean change and I am a little... Well I am concerned about it. I am on the list to be assessed. It is quite a wait. I have two concerns.
First is if I am found not to be on the spectrum, then the energy loss and the inability to cope these days with dealing with things in a work enviroment or signing on the benefits system to look for work... Things I can't face... What happens next?
Secondly is if I find I am on the spectrum, then what happens after that? I mean. What do I need to do? I fear I will be in a situation worse then the stress of going to sign on.. The very thing I am avoiding as I don't want to face it. I fear being back in square one but worse. I mean, at the moment I just ignore the official things I am expected to do in life if I don't feel up to dealing with it. It is not that I can't deal with them. I am intelligent... I can communicate... Is just these days inside I am a bit of a bundle of nurves!

Age 20 buzz cut

Idiots thought I was a man

And I wanted to look like a man

But they were homophobic

I knew my life was going to be different when I was classified as highly/extremely gifted in grade school (about third grade or so). Teachers did not treat me the same after that, as they did not know what to do with me. My reading comprehension was at or above high school level by that point in time, so I was free to roam the high school library as I wished. I used to do linear algebra matrices when I was bored in class, just to keep my mind thinking. I occasionally tutored some of the high school students on science concepts because it just came naturally to me.

I did not notice any change coming from my classmates, but I should have. I was being constantly asked by others for help with their homework, which I usually did not mind doing. I loved helping others with math/science concepts. That I think was the real start of my teaching career. If I could have stayed at that school, my life would have been different than today at least in the social sense. I was well liked by my classmates and was “popular”.

Unfortunately, we moved out of state when I turned 11. It was hell. At that point in time, due to extreme bullying, I lost part of myself. I fell by the wayside socially and have never caught up since. At my age, I am so far behind that I could live a thousand lifetimes and still not be where I should be per society’s standards.

I was a "special child" almost from the outset of my life. I was even picked on by children in my "brain-injured" nursery school. I was picked on by a nonverbal child in first grade. I just KNEW that my life would be different from other peoples'

I thought I was normal and that my childhood was normal until it was over. I thought that I wasn’t trying hard enough and that others were doing better than me in certain areas because they were better people.

I think that getting more understanding and help when I was younger would’ve been better for my self esteem. It’s lousy to be blamed for stuff you can’t help and then internalizing that blame.

When I was in gr 11, we had one class a week where no teacher showed up. We, of course, had not reported this, we just kept the noise down. Before the final exams, most of us were busy studying, and the kid behind me asked for help on physics. The kid across the aisle started listening in, and then another. So, I got up and used the blackboard to review the year's work for 11 students. Several of them said that they had never understood large chunks before.
I still didn't see much difference - I thought the smart kids were the ones with social lives.

They really thought you were smart---and a good future teacher.

I did have great success with a few classes, but could never jump the hoops for a regular gig. I was amazed and appalled that Robert Persig used to barf from anxiety before teaching classes, but still kept his job.

OTOH, I have had zero success at trying to teach experts how to do their jobs better, even with working models. I can only teach beginners.

It's because the "experts" have too much ego.....

I came from a “better” home environment. My parents suspected something was wrong with me socially, but weren’t exactly certain what. The warning signs were there as early as nursery school.

My parents genuinely wanted to “fix” me. When I was in 3rd grade, they sent me to a Psychologist. That was in the early 1970s, more than 20 years before Asperger’s was added to the DSM. In any event, I do believe this "better" home environment made me believe that I would become normal, eventually.

Well, I was a very idealistic kid and had high hopes and dreams. I basically thought life was like Hollywood movies. I used to daydream a lot about being a famous singer, actor and so on.

I didn't really feel that I was different other than in certain situations. Like when I had sleepovers with friends and I always had to use earplugs because I couldn't stand snoring, clocks ticking etc. when I was trying to sleep and no one else ever did that, so I did all I could to try to hide it. One time I forgot my earplugs at home so I took toilet paper from the bathroom and put in my ears when the light turned off, but then when I woke up they asked me what I had in my ears and I felt so embarrassed. I also cried myself to sleep many times when my earplugs wouldn't cancel out all the noise and I felt like I was going crazy.

I also always knew that I was stimming (well, I didn't know it was called stimming back then and I thought I was the only one in the world to do it) and I felt that it wasn't normal, so I didn't do it in front of people and if I did it was very discrete.

Then there were other small things like in elementary school, I sometimes had problems figuring out how things worked. I don't know if this has to do with ASD, but it could be how to use those desktop pencil sharpeners with handles, how to open a binder with those metal hooks, how to thread a sewing machine and so on. I tried watching other kids do it, but I still couldn't really figure it out. This made me feel quite stupid at times. Another thing I noticed back then was every year first day of school when teachers would say the landline numbers of all the kids out loud and we would say if the number was correct or not. My family and I used to say the number one digit at a time, so for example "one, two, three, four", but teachers would sometimes say it differently like "twelve, thirty four". This made me really confused and I had a hard time understanding when it was said in a different way. I read somewhere that this is an autistic trait.

Sometimes I could have a hard time understanding the rules of games that kids used to play, but when that was the case I just followed my friends around and tried to copy what they were doing.

Something else I remember is that I sometimes copied how people did things. For example how people ate sandwiches (I used to eat them a certain way and noticed that others didn't eat it like that, so I started eating like they did), how to put on a shirt (I remember watching a friend put on a shirt and I didn't used to put it on like that, but after that I started doing that) and I noticed when I rode the school bus that other people seemed to be so still in their seats. This made me feel weird because my body swung from side to side and front to back a bit, especially in sharp turns (which is totally normal of course, but I didn't think so). I didn't want to seem weird, so I started tensing my body everytime I rode the bus. I tried to sit as still as I could.

Though, at the time I didn't think much about things like these and I was generally a happy kid.

Then everything changed when I turned 12 and started 6th grade. I was bullied by my former friends and a few other people in the class. Obviously this made me feel like crap, but I went to school as normal and hung out with two other girls in my class (didn't actually enjoy haning out with them, but I didn't want to be alone in school). Started getting anxiety and in 8th grade my depression started creeping up on me, until it got waaaaay worse in 9th grade and I had suicidal thoughts everyday.

So I'd say I realised I was different and that life was going to be different around age 12. When they stopped bully me one and a half year later I became "friends" with two of the worst bullies and that's when I started meeting a bunch of new people and I noticed that I sucked at being social with people I didn't know well.

It's very clear to me why I got depressed and anxious, when I felt wrong all the time and that I didn't fit in. It was also extremely exhausting pretending to be someone I'm not, so that made it worse.

Sorry for the long rambly post.