how did you deal with recess at school?

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I didn't hate it because I hated class but I tried to keep to myself when I wasn't bullied.

I did I had a blast when I was a little kid, running, playing, interacting with other kids - yelling and screaming, causing trouble. Playing tag, kickball, throwing a football over the electric lines in hail Mary's. We used to run races/sprints to see who was the fastest. It was me and this other kid named Mike Flood - still remember his name.


It wasn't until I got older in which I shut down completely due to extreme and chronic anxiety/ self esteem issues, and it wasn't until I got older when kids started to become mean to me - for reasons to this day, I still cannot figure out.

I've learned to be permanently wary of people, and not my normal happy excited self. You never know when somebody will be mean and snap at you, when you're just trying to approach them to be happy. People have so many stupid little rules they expect you to know about them and what they're thinking/feeling. Impossible.

i was loling at the above.
it just struck me as humorous
no harm intended

Same for me.

For me:

This.

I lost track of how many theories I came up with for why the other kids were mean to me, rejected me, started to be my friend and then turned against me without warning.

I was smaller.

I was younger.

I was smarter.

I had crooked teeth and glasses starting in grade two, age seven.

I did/said something dumb in class, everybody howled with laughter and nobody ever forgot that moment, and told everybody else about it so I was permanently the laughing stock of the entire school.

The MeanGirls [TM] were turning everybody against me for their own malicious purposes.

It was the braces.

It was the acne.

It was the really bad permanent.

It was my lamentable lack of awareness of clothing fashions and reluctance to even ask my parents to spend money on what the cool kids were wearing after they'd already bought me enough dork clothes to last an entire schoolyear.

It was because I was teachers' pet.

etc.etc.etc.

Now, looking back, after reading Tony Attwood's Complete Guide to Asperger's I recognize that that was probably it. I was an autistic child who didn't understand the social conventions; nobody took the time to explain them to me; my mom might also be autistic, she is at the very least socially awkward so she couldn't train me in how to impress the popular girls so I would be included; I was one of the "funny-looking kids," the awkward, the bully-magnet. Of course they didn't like me. My mirror-neurons and things didn't function like theirs to give me an intuitive understanding of how to relate and fit in.

And being a painfully shy introvert, I was more inclined to shut down, do my own thing and lose myself in my own special interests, the worlds of animals and nature and books, and imaginary worlds that I created in my head where the things that I liked were cool, and nobody cared about sports and fashion and pop music and celebrity gossip.

I still don't care about sports and fashion and pop music and celebrity gossip. Seems like that is all people at work talk about, though; either that, or they're talking about their dogs.

I don't like dogs. Too many experiences of having them bark at me (a barking dog always seems like a threat to me, even when dog-people tell me they can tell the difference between a happy-greeting bark and a stay-off-my-territory-or-I'll-bit-you bark; they all sound like "I'll bite you" to me), jump on me, sniff my butt and/or bite me without warning.

At least there were no dogs on the playground at my elementary school. If ever there were, it became the janitor's priority 1 to get the dog away from the children and off the playground a.s.a.p.

Now people with "disabilities," even if it's just general anxiety, can get Disability Helper Animal for their smelly little terriers and chihuahuas and take them indoors anywhere they want to. Even in libraries, grocery stores, churches, doctors' offices--no-where is safe from other peoples' dogs. I work in a pediatric allergy clinic where many of the patients are there every week to get their shots for, among other allergens, dog allergies. But people can bring their dogs right in to the same treatment room where the kids who are allergic to dogs get their shots, while their own kids get their allergy shots for whatever they happen to be allergic to.

It's a service dog. You can't ask the person who brought it to leave it outside the door.

What I want to know is, who decided that somebody's general anxiety, for which the presence of their dog is the only thing that comforts them, is a more significant health factor than a doggie-dander allergy or a phobia. People can get anaphylaxis from dog allergies, and phobias are a greater mental health risk than anxiety.

I get needing your dog with you if you're blind, deaf, or prone to seizures that only your dog can detect.

But "I just can't feel calm and happy unless I have my service dog with me. . ." Please. I can't feel calm and happy with your dog in my church, store, library and doctors' office. I can't breathe right with your dog ten feet away from me. I don't think you need your dog in this building as much as I need it to stay outside until you're done in here.

But I have no rights. Allergies and phobias don't count for anything.

Yeah, I've moved off topic a bit from recess to dogs. But dogs have tormented me as much as bullies on the playground in my life, and far more recently as I'm not an elementary school kid anymore. Somebody post a link to where people with autism discuss how they feel about dogs, and I'll go rant there instead.

Very much like me. We didn´t have an open library, so I just hung out in the corridors or classrooms, that were left unlocked.

^ i did that too. mostly in the classrooms, we had one teacher who was this diver/marine biology junkie and his room was filled with the most intriguing things. i did come in there during class periods a few times bit during lunch/recess it would sometimes be unlocked and i would look at everything in there myself. and got yelled at a few times.