Emerging social awareness

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My earliest memory of feeling different would be at pre-school.

I was sitting down on the mat with the rest of the class and I felt like I didn't understand what was being said and I was confused. I was 4 years old then.

At 8 years old was when I really noticed that I was different from everyone else. I actually approached someone and asked them in these exact words..."How do you become popular". That was the talk of all of the students for sometime and I was labelled as the "wannabe"

Same here. I always thought I was fine socially... but after I wasn't in school and such (where social stuff was made to be such a big deal to the teachers, and where it was just part of routine every day) anymore, I finally had a chance to sit down and figure out some stuff that sets me apart.

I knew I was different, but really didn't think about why until I got older, and then I started thinking about all of the notes sent home with me for my mom by teachers... all of the messages left on our machines asking mom to meet with the teachers, lol, and it started to click that something wasn't quite right with me. Not in the sense that others see as right I mean.

Other people only seem to really exist to me when they are right there, for the duration of time I'm having to deal with them. After that, they are just merely something I experienced throughout the day, lol. I hate the idea sometimes, that I have probably hurt people's feelings by blowing them off or just simply not staying in touch once they are no longer in front of me, but that is just kind of how it is with me a lot of the time

I have that same issue. I've lost friends over it. One who I'd thought I'd lost contacted me recently. It's good to have her back in my life, she was always very accepting of my more annoying traits.

I think I was about 3 when I overheard a conversation between my aunt and my mother. (They were sisters and my cousin and I are only 35 days apart in age.) This conversation sticks in my mind because it was my first idea that my family thought I was weird. My mom was telling her that I was reading everything in the house and she had starting looking at the books they owned to see if they were even appropriate for me to be looking at. My aunt told her that she was being stupid. I couldn't possibly be reading any of those things and even if I was I couldn't possibly be understanding them. My mom said that she thought she heard me telling my dolls (who I dressed beautifully and lined up in a nice row on my bed) a story that I had read. My aunt dismissed her. I don't remember really hearing much else except that somewhere around that time my grandad was heard telling them that it was all fine and dandy that my cousin was pretty and could flip around like a mini gymnastic gold medalist, but I was smart and that would really count for something some day.
Well, I don't know if my smartness means anything. But I do know that this conversation seemed to just confirm to me that something was definitely not right with me. Or was at least VERY different.
In pre school I felt very different from the other kids. As if they were all doing silly things that didn't mean anything. I never really understood the games they played. "House", "Super heros", "Bad guys and cops". Seemed stupid to me. Anyway....I knew always that something about me was different.

I did the telling stories thing too! I used to talk in different voices to my well dressed, and accessorised toys who I lined up like an audience. Some of them wearing creations made from my own knitting needles. My first primary school kind of let me live in my own little world. My second had a special needs unit in the centre so there were heaps of kids that looked and acted different to the 'norm'. I was also really lucky to join the NAGC summer programmes in the UK, so I knew I wasn't alone on this strange planet. Once I started working with artists, journalists and geeks in my twenties, I kind of became the 'sane' one. Hehe.

I don't remember a specific time when I thought about being different. I might have known, mostly because my parents had me doing therapy, but I was actually quite apathetic about it. I was always quite content doing my own things. If I found someone interested in the same activities as I was we would play together. Otherwise I played by myself. I wasn't interested in being liked by other kids and I never deliberately tried to fit in.

For me fifth grade was the rude awakening... I always knew I was different, and everybody else knew I was different, but the middle of fifth grade was like a bludgeon to the head. That's when I realized everyone was laughing at me, and not with me.

I already knew how to read before I was in kindergarten, so you can imagine how irritated and utterly flabbergasted I was that I had to sit through learning the alphabet, shapes, and colors all over again. I would get so annoyed that my peers struggled with the most basic of academics. Once I exclaimed that they were all incompetent.

I was also in speech therapy for a short time, but then we moved to a different area. They felt I was doing a lot of "baby talk". I don't know what that means.

By second grade this feeling became more intense and obvious. Everyone was struggling through "A Missing Piece" while I was happily reading Ray Bradbury, on my own time no less. Once I told a kid who was pestering me that "my brain could kick his brain's ass", which in retrospect, is pretty funny. Academics aside, I was constantly being reprimanded for having tantrums, falling out of my chair, and "being disruptive"- which, I still do not know what that entails.

I had a nice visit with the school psychiatrist, which was actually a lot of fun and he told my mother that I was the most delightful child he had spoken to in years. This was the exact moment I realized that I would rather talk to adults. I still have his report, which is pretty amusing now that I know I have AS- some points of interest: "cannot touch nose with index finger, frequently misses." "Poor coordination when walking." "Exceptionally advanced vocabulary for age." Oh, and my favorite: "Passionate about interests such as dinosaurs and anatomy. Hijacks conversations." This is funny because ever since I was a kid, it is common knowledge in my family that I "steal conversations and talk about what I want to talk about."

From then on, it was very much the same. I couldn't understand why no one else wanted to discuss, *ahem* interesting topics. I couldn't understand why no one understood what I was talking about. I preferred to hang out with adults. Kids told me I was weird. Truthfully, I thought they were the weird ones. I didn't want to play their silly games. (Although if I did take a liking to someone, I displayed it in the most inappropriate and awkward ways imaginable.)

For some reason though, feeling different never became an issue until the fifth grade- when everybody turned into a snarling beast all of a sudden.

For me it was the opposite. The children didn't notice very much about me that was different, Anything they did notice was just because they picked it up from the adults. Young children really are not very socially aware, they get that as they get older. I enjoyed playing with the other children and their imaginary games, so that wasn't really an issue.
The grown-ups tended to dislike me because I didn't conform to their expectations of how I was supposed to act. I didn't understand what I was doing wrong or how I could fix it. I tried to explain that to them, but they just didn't get it. They thought I was being out of line and had "oppositional defiant disorder" some made up thing that was on the books.
As the kids got older, they got more and more in line with how they were supposed to be and conformed to adult's expectations of them. They lost their creativity and originality, and became just like everyone else, mindless drones who held up the system. Some kids lost these traits sooner than others, some retained their childish traits to a limited extent.