When did you first notice you were different from NTs?

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Different to NT's.... I never knew the term until I came on here. However, I always knew I was different from other people. I felt normal in being different as I could never be the same. I was never one of the lads if that makes sense.
The being different does mean I was often lonely and sometimes bullied. I had assumed the reason why I was different was through having a very different upbringing to nearly everyone else in my school. It came as quite a shock to find some of my character differences were autism traits which I only found out tnrough this site.
Am I on the spectrum? I just don't know!

When I first went to kindergarten at age 4. The thinking and behavior of the other kids was just so weird.

When I was younger in elementary school, I would be excluded so I kind of knew there was something different about me than others. I know some of the ways I handle anxiety went into it. I didn't know it was ASD until my mom told me when I was 12, but I had been diagnosed as a toddler.

I always knew I was different in many ways but couldn't place it. I really looked up to my brother but was bullied a lot by him, and so I developed my camouflage so he would think I was normal and leave me alone. Luckily, he was popular in school so everyone was kind to me. All the while, I kept working at my camouflage and eventually convinced myself there was nothing wrong with me and suppressed my anxieties. It was last year that I finally got so exhausted of pretending and hiding myself and decided to find out what made me different.

When I became aware of my own existence, I knew I was different from other people.

It was 13 years old. After a mess that happened between friends of mine. I was accused of being a sociopath because I was laughing inappropriately, after a meltdown, discovering me with autism

I think it was when kids in grammar school who started calling me "animal freak". I was good at mimicking animal sounds, especially birds. Nothing like being called a "freak" by agroup of kids to let you know that you are different.

I really began noticing I was different when I started struggling with selective mutism as a teenager.

There were clear signs when I was younger, but I didn’t feel all that different overall.

As I remember it I don’t think I ever had a single ‘aha!’ moment: my father was the headteacher of the primary school I went to, so this probably conferred me with untouchable status as regards bullying and exclusion...
High school however was very difficult: mostly the rush of hormones, crushes and a totally cluelessness as to what to do about it led to very erratic and eccentric behaviours. The other kids pretty much totally isolated and ostracised me with both the threat and occasional reality of violence for good measure:
in retrospect I don’t really blame them, I must have scared quite a few of the girls, and they were after all children who were as clueless about the situation as I was.
I gradually retreated into a fantasy of myself as a fundamentally monstrous being that deserved all that was occurring, and went full on goth... a very clumsy realisation.
I remember late one night at university doing an online autism questionnaire simply because I was having an obsessive phase on doing them and getting a very high score: I cried myself to sleep that night, then put it out of my mind and buried myself in the course and later work until I was made redundant (2008: building design) at which point I pretty much totally mentally disintegrated in a very nasty far-right political way. Probably the period of my life I’m most ashamed of: the shear level of toxic self-pity I was I’m still shocks me.
My late Grandfather gently persuaded me to move into his spare room almost 200 miles from where I was living: I walked out of my collapsing life without a second thought. He saved me from myself.
I met the woman who’s now my wife of five years: after I started displaying increasingly erratic behaviour she worked out that although our attraction was mutual, I was totally unaware of that and screwing myself up in knots about it.
A conversation ensued: she thought I probably have aspergers. I saw my GP, who agreed and referred me to a psychologist, who agreed and referred me to a specialist... and 7 years later I still haven’t been given an appointment with said specialist
(the government in my country had been strictly rationing mental health assessments in the hope of holding down social welfare spending)
We’ve just got on with our lives assuming that aspergers is the case... not always been easy or straightforward, but seems to be working out. And it also turns out that self employed gardening suits me better than construction design (outdoors, natural light and alone most of the time, plus I get to hibernate in my chair with a book in winter)

I first saw I was different when I was in preschool. We had "open" time and I always went off in the corner by myself because I found what the other kids did boring. When I got to Elementary school (probably around Grade 2) I could really tell something was 'off' because no other kids got their bike trashed for driving on the 'wrong' sidewalk, nobody else got shoved into the mud or slammed head first into the arena boards, and nobody else had their pants pulled down. I still to this day can't fathom why they were so cruel to me, a happy and generous child.

At age 8. I just had.
Didn't took it well.

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my parents noticed it first. They thought I was one of those "gifted kids" that white America was overrun with back in the early 2000s. I hated kindergarten with a passion because the other children did not act mature enough--

--if anyone had known about autism it would have been noticeable at once. There is no such thing as mild autism, even high-functioning, and it's been part of my world from the cradle and I shall take it to the grave.

A few months ago. Up until I disregarded all evidence. When differences were pointed out, I would rationalize it: "I'm left-handed".

Noticed that specifically when I learned that there was an NT-AS division in '05. Another big revelation was learning that IQ and EQ don't go together. I still keep overestimating what people will understand. I grew up thinking that my family, and myself, were within normal variability, and lived with various other eccentricities around.