how old were you, when you realized you weren't like

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I'm not different, just disabled.

1st grade. I had a birthday party arranged by my parents with all the kids in my grade school class. I tried to be social but it was completely overwhelming. This was at least a decade before it was commonly diagnosed, so I was just seen as "shy" and continued on from there.

I don't know; but when I was a child, I didn't think that I was the "weird" one; actually, I thought everyone was "weird" and that I was the only normal one. I continued thinking this way until my mother told me about the diagnosis.

As long as i can remember back to my childhood..must be about three.i always felt different to other kids,uncomfortable being around them and sometimes clumsy and awkward...that was the start of me backing off into my own little world that to me was better and i didn't have to fit in or play their games.

when i first went to school all the kids would be looking for friends and i would wander away to amuse myself on my own doing things that interested me more..and be happy to leave them alone

It was somewhere around middle school. Up until then, I didn't think much about it, and the other kids didn't seem to either. It was around middle school that I started getting picked on and started to notice that other kids didn't spend their weekends reading and climbing trees, any more. I played with dolls until I was around 14, and I didn't really care to try to fit in. I, also, didn't have any interest in hanging out with people outside of school (though if I was invited to a birthday party my mom made me go), and I was the only one that still required my mom to pick me up from a sleep over in the middle of the night. I didn't understand jokes like the other kids did; I even came home and told my mom a couple of inappropriate ones because I didn't get them. Kids started pointing out that (and picking one me for it) I carried the same exact thing in my lunch everyday since kindergarten, It was quite obvious that I was not normal, but, aside form being picked on, I really didn't care that much. The other kids weren't that important to me.

When I was 3 in kindergarten, I thought I was making a significant discovery of reflection to other people when they played simon says... nobody cared and I wasn't included in the advanced group because of my lack of proper language/social skills. It seems at that age the other children just accepted what they were taught while I questioned everything.

When I was 10.

I felt very detached from the rest and starting crying in class due to overly obsessing about irrelevant things. It was when I realized I was different... wasn't a good time. High school was worse though, far worse.

I've known for as long as I can remember.

I'm gonna say a bit when I was 3-4 and in daycare...all the other kids thought I was a wimp or 'wussy' because I was always absolutely reluctant to do anything new or different. I felt like almost everyone at the daycare was extremely hostile towards me and I had an incredibly hard time making friends I got along with despite the fact that I was never physical or confrontational. Then in kindergarten, it really set in; I was slow to learn many things everyone else in the class seemed to innately know but I was extremely adept at learning many other things that no one else seemed to comprehend. I remember on the absolute first day of class, the prettiest girl (and person who grew up to be the most beautiful woman) asked me to play house with this toy kitchen set. After a few minutes of awkwardness she stalked off angrily saying I didn't get it, haha. The ironic part is, I grew up with two sisters so I should have been an absolute expert by then.

I don't remember having an exact moment that I knew. I just always knew I had a lot of thoughts, was anxious and seemed to find everything difficult.

I am told I was an odd baby, I was so quiet that my parents took me to the GP as they thought I might be deaf.

I self taught myself to read at age 4 (hyperlexic) and my siblings were amazed at all the long words I would come out with.

My brother bullied me and I would never learn my lesson. I always had sleep problems.

In middle school my report said my head was always in a book. I only ever had one friend through school and she was the one that initiated the friendship.

I was bullied throughout school and I never knew why. I just knew that other people seemed different to me, I didn't know that I was different. Just thought I was unpopular.

I have always people watched, it's even been commented on and I didn't know why. It's not until recent times that I found out it's common for AS girls to do this so that they can emulate acceptable social behaviours or model themselves on someone to get by socially.

I always just felt something that I couldn't put my finger on, it wasn't until I found out about AS five years ago that the penny dropped, that I wasn't just a difficult person, I was different because I had AS.

So it's just been a gradual lifelong realisation after finding so many things difficult along the way.

Probably about the same time that I figured out that I couldn't "learn" how to have a sense of smell, and I found out that none of my "friends" really liked me, which was in middle school.

Throughout high school, I tried my best to fit in with "normal" people, but always failed miserably.

A little bit starting in Grade 1 (or preschool for that matter) because I just wanted to do my own thing and couldn't see the benefit in just talking to others for the sake of talking. However, it became very obvious in Grade 7 when I was initially targeted for bullying. I don't want to repeat my story but it got to the point the whole class hated me by Grade 8 and I couldn't deny anymore something was clearly "off" about me.

I feel like an idiot saying this. But I actually didn't know I was different until recently.. There have been a million ways to cope with this in my younger years, and I did all of it, and assumed that everyone else was the different ones because they didn't use logic and intellectual thought as I did. I didn't think I was different, even though I had problems. At 19 I started understanding, intellectually, what was different with me. Recently I discovered that my way of camouflaging and hiding my quirks isn't normal. But this personal survival guide has been normal to me all my life. I don't know if this says something about culture and my unusual situation, which it probably does, or if it says that I don't have Asperger's. The psychologist has to tell me. My life started to shatter after 12, not before.