What age did you realize you weren't like everyone else?

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My first bully was a special needs kid. There is even a video of me giving him a good hard shove at the Christmas concert after repeated warnings to back off. He then proceeded to destroy my favorite hat because he believed (according to the principal) that was the best way to be friends with me.


I have had countless people tell me there is no way I am accurately remembering things. Believe me, I would MUCH rather learn I was schizophrenic or making it up instead of remembering all the horrific details of my childhood bullying. People love to deny my experiences because it doesn't jive with how they see bullying (I was then and am now exceedingly tall and my bullies were short and fat).

My memory is terrible in the early years. I've even tried hypnosis to bring it back. The memory I posted from age 4/5 is just a quick flashback. Mostly everything else from prior to age 10-12 is just sensory memories without people or plot. They aren't episodic at all.

Nothing creepy about it. It was a reply to the poster before who discussed his poor attempt at french kissing in 7th grade and seemed to imply Aspergers had something to do with it.

13 or so

Did not fit in

Although not "everyone" is neurotypical

At 3, still wanting to believe there are not any difference but past recollections just do not support that ,ever since.

I was no older than 5 when I began hearing "oh he's the different one" out of my three siblings. Comments came mainly from those siblings.

...The Kinks, " I'm Not Like Everybody Else " !

I was 5 when I realized that I wasn't like the other kids. I would be sitting in the classroom bench alongside the teachers watching the kids play in case I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up. I started playing with the other kids in preschool two months later.

I have a very good spatial memory that goes way back into very early childhood, but I don't have nearly as good memory of what people looked like from back then. I think my visual brain just keys into places more than people in general. I remember as a kid I was really good at drawing maps of places just from looking out of the car window. Even the settings of my dreams tend to be exquisitely detailed.


... but I digress.

I always knew. It just became more apparent as I got older, and impossible to ignore when I was in middle school.

I would say probably fourth grade. I was different from the start, but that is when I really began to notice it.

I am not sure. I felt to some degree different or unconnected to people always but I thought I was simply inferior and that was what set me apart from people. When younger when I had to go to school and sit in a class with bullies all day and then go home to a hateful mother I just felt I am an ugly, walking awkward corpse, by nature more repelling than a disgusting insect or vomit, not even worth being called a person. I couldn't reflect on my differences very much because there was too much hate and self-hatred. Until I was a student and the people didn't behave really hatefully to me anymore and I lived far from the parents too. I knew something wasn't right with me and even though social anxiety was unacceptably high at that time I couldn't ascribe my problems to it alone. I realised something with me was inherently different.
It was after a year of an unhealthy obsession that one day my eyes were opened as to the cause of my problems and inadequacies.

It was never a specific moment, or even a full-on realization. I had a vague impression from a pre-teen age that some of my preferences and situations weren't always the same as some of the other kids I knew, but given that I didn't know them all that well (for SOME reason), there was also always the impression that, oh well, maybe it's just that some people are like this and some people are like that, and there are a lot of external factors that shape kids' lives, so maybe it'll be different later on. I got bullied now and then, but lots of kids got that, right? I didn't have any close friends, but that was random, right?

Even decades later, those were pretty much the assumptions floating around in the back of my head, and I honestly didn't really think about it. I 'passed' fairly easily, in that I'd completed school with reasonably good grades, gone to university, gotten a boring whitecollar job and slowly gained promotions over the years, and all those 'normal' things, so if the thought occurred to me at all, it was more along the lines of "Oh well, I guess I'm pretty introverted, and I have hobbies that aren't common locally but there are plenty of people on the internet with the same ones, and my life might not be Hollywood-dramatic but I don't really hate it."

It was only after hitting middle age, and being accidentally prodded into looking into autism one day, that I ever had the thought that all this stuff in my life which I had thought was just... stuff, random rolls of the dice that could happen to anyone, might actually be a single thing - and the thing had a name.

And so I looked into it more, and made some preliminary enquiries to doctors, and got formally diagnosed. And it was only then that I really thought "Well frickity frick-frack, this might be an actual thing I have to think about now."

Seems like most people here felt different because they couldn’t connect or “join in”.

For me, it was because people kept telling me I walk funny and fall too much. Between ages 3 and 5, I gradually realised other kids were not like that. Later kids kept telling me I was weird or “crazy”.

Probably around about 12-13 when I went to secondary school. Primary school was fine cause it was fairly small, kids seemed to be more friendly and I managed to make friends with a special-needs kid there, I don't know/remember how but I did. Anyways, que secondary school and the realization hit me like a ton of bricks, I was bullied and felt completely isolated from everyone until I ended up having a breakdown, left education for 2-years while we fought to get me into a special-needs school that was much, much better.