Your first memories of being "different"?

Post Reply New Topic

Geez, that was really mean of them.

I guess I remeber being 1 1/2 and starting to being obssesed with things like the pacifiers, yellow platisc made back then, I needed to carry them everywhere, not on the mouth but two or three on my hands
Them, at age of 3, carried to the kindergarten, and not playing with any child on the playground time, so I had a phichologyst for children who tend to grab to me trying to make me speak, I was unusual 'mute' back then, or selective mute who knows.
I didn't start to speak very soon, and when I did it was not clearly.
On the school yet, I did fine on my grades. But as other members on here, I failed while learning to read clock-time, tie my shoes, remembering telephone numbers, i tend to drawing isolate figures on the paper(not relationate, not needed them to be like I wasn't) as my teacher reported in my grades . And so on, and on ....

I've always known I was different. I never had friends in school, tended to like to withdraw by myself. But I didn't really start to think there was something wrong with me until my Dad died about 10 years ago. Two things I just couldn't understand... One, why wasn't I upset at his death? Why didn't I care? Why didn't I want to cry? To me it was like some stranger I had never known had died. And secondly, why after 20 years of divorce was my mom so emotional about his death? He's been out of her life for 20 years, why does she care? It was then that I started to search for some answers, or as someone else here said, self exploration.

-Craig

Me too, i always knew i was different, from whenever i began to think, but it seemed completely normal to me that this be the case. Of course i was different; i thought everyone was different. What would have been weird is if people had NOT been different, if i had been the same as anyone else. THAT would have been freaky!!
Things changed when i went to girls grammar school in the suburbs of london aged 11,( after a progressive primary school in a little village in the countryside) ; almost overnight i began to think that being different was somehow a problem. Up till then all the ways i had behaved and that people had reacted to me i had thought were "normal" differences. Suddenly i began to think i might be abnormal. That i was not ok.

I think i was rather "out of it" all the time tho. Most of my childhood; when i look back on it i seem to have floated through it in a stoned sort of confused way. Not understanding a lot of stuff. But very clever at reading and writing and things.

Last edited by ouinon on 29 Jan 2008, 1:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I remember on a train around age 4 when an adult asked my grandmother if I was reading the paper or just pretending... so I started reading it out loud. He left pretty quickly after that.

Then I started school at age 5 in Kindegarten... I realized I was different when no one else flapper their arms and ran in circles about the play ground or read encylopedia's and dictionaries for fun... hell no one else could even read. Or that I wouldn't particpate in any of the inane exercises they did like sit in a circle and count to 10 type stuff...

Or only got worse from there.

One of my first memories is of pre-school, aged 3, when we went to visit the local primary school for a story. On the way back I ended up inexplicably without the partner I had come with. The teacher asked me who had been my partner and I remember looking round at all the faces and not recognising anyone (I have mild face blindness anyway) and not knowing who I had walked down with. At the time this didnt seem strange to me, but looking back on it obviously I had made no connections with anyone at pre-school and obviously the other children prefered not to be partners with me.

My mother says that at 18 months I was reciting the alphabet, but I dont remember this - I dont remember not being able to read or count, so I must have found it pretty easy. She also says I went through a period of not speaking at all and almost took me to the doctors but didnt - being the first child I think she accepted my differences as quite normal and didnt realise that I wasnt the same as most children.

As a child I used to love walking round and round in circles to music. I still do this occasionally and find it very relaxing. Apparently I had my younger sisters and our younger friends doing this aswell, to the extent that their parents started worrying about them! It was great having younger sisters though - I could devise all the games and rules myself and inflict them on my sisters (and they generally followed me).

I was also obsessed by fairness and refused to do things I thought werent fair (such as tidy up my sister's toys), which often got me in trouble.

Im not sure when I really started to feel different - I know by the age of 11 I certainly did, but not sure how long before that. I used to imagine being an alien or an angel with special powers, or perhaps adopted by my family, because I felt different from them and from other children. Later I thought it was because of my intelligence that I was different, but it was always more than that. I went to a really small primary school, so I dont remember having problems with friends there - there was just one girl in my year, so she automatically became my best friend. But in every situation before and since, where I am in contact with more than one or a handful of people I have a problem to find and keep friends. Secondary school was the worst - I refused to listen to the same music, or watch the same tv programmes as the other children - partly because I am very stubborn and I didnt see why I had to do what everyone else did. This made me very unpopular and the unpopularity stayed even when people started diverging from one another (age 16 or so) and appreciating their differences.

This is an excellent thread.

I remember, at school at the age of about six or seven, we used to spend Monday morning doing practical maths. I hated maths with a passion - I know now I have dyscalculia, but at the time I just knew that humbers were horrible scary things that went out of their way to trip me up - so I used to go and get a book out of the school library. It was always a red book; you were supposed to read the simple books first and work your way up to the red ones by the time you finished at primary school, but I couldn't be doing with those boring, childish books. It was usually "Lad, a Dog" by Albert Payson Terhune, and I used to put the lid of my desk up, hide behind it and sit there reading quite happily. I think the teacher let me get on with it because I was behaving...

I also remember, at about the same time, coming back from a family trip in the car and my Mum trying to get me to recite my times tables. I couldn't do it; my mind kept wandering off task to think about much more enjoyable things. And I remember her turning to my Dad, who was driving, and saying, "Why can't she do it?", and the feeling of creeping unease that my Mum thought there was something odd about me too.

And there was the eraser. I had a simple white eraser with a hole through the middle, which I broke up so that people who needed an eraser could have one. Then, quite suddenly, it became the most important thing in the world that my parents saw what this eraser had looked like before it got dismantled, and for a while I became totally obsessed, to the extent of going through other kids' desks looking for bits of eraser so I could take them home and rebuild it to show Mum and Dad.

My dad was a charge nurse for the mentally subnormal. I've just realised he must have worried about me at times.

no offence but i think that would make you the more normal one out of you and your sisters.

Actually, normal is doing as the more powerful in the group say. So it doesn't make me more normal, it makes me more logical, natural, wise, whatever.

That sounds like me untill year 7. I managed to make friends, but I thought the whole grade were my friends, but in retrospect, maybe not.

Even today I have alot of friends just by being around lots of people and letting my personality eventually sink in. THe thing is, I never really seem to know how they feel. Alot of them are friends of virtue of the fact we are all heavily political people. I ran for president at my uni and lost by 47 votes (the university had 30,000 people) but this was a very abstract social excerise and I know how to put on a quirky face. Probably why I am so good at job interviews.

except when i laugh at myself, that is real.

right on! aspie rebellion!

I remember when I was about 5 or 6 and a bunch of kids I knew fairly well were telling jokes, and they were all finding it really funny, but I thought it was stupid, and I couldn't understand why you could find those things so hilarious. Another thing was when we were all doing this group outing and went to a museum, and everyone was really excited, and liked it and all, but I kept going back to this one exhibit and staring at it over and over again and I thought it was the most fascinating thing in the world. I can also remember when September 11 happened, and I was at school, everyone was in a terrible fuss and people cried, but I didn't get worked up at all, and I couldn't understand why a bunch of people being killed was deserving of such a fuss, even thought I knew what was going on.

I was in daycare when I was five, and one day we were supposed to draw what we wanted for Christmas. All the kids started drawing KISS dolls (this was '78 ) I had no idea at the time who KISS was and I was terrified that everyone was drawing skulls with blood coming out of the mouths. I said nothing, but realized at that point that there was something I just wasn't "getting".

Last edited by medicinewoman on 30 Jan 2008, 11:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

When I attended Berkman elementary and in 4th grade was put in special ed class and while at lunch the boy next to me sat rocking back and forth. I was later taken out and put in some advanced at my own pace classes and I finished all work a few weeks later and they couldn't figure out what to do with me next.

It is hard to remember the exact point I realized that I was different from other kids. Part of the difference was my obliviousness. On some level I knew that it wasn't "normal" for a 9 year old kid to read "Readers Digest" religiously, but I also had enough sense to know that none of my friends would find it interesting for me recite the salient details of a Readers Digest article like "I am Joe's liver".

It was almost like a case of multiple personality disorder. At home I was obsessed with my arrowhead collection, my coin collection, my books on dinos, stars etc., but at school I debated topics like, "Who is better, the Beatles, or the Monkeys?", just to fit in, and be one of the guys. (of course, even then I knew the Beatles were better!)

i noticed in the third grade after i broke my arms and become more introverted. all the other kids had friends and would shout out in class constantly without thinking to raise their hand. i recieved special extra time to finish tests but i don't think i realized why this was...it just never hit me. i noticed that i had a more dynamic vocabulary when compared with my peers on the part that i read more than my peers. i really hated myself intensely in school and the self hate increase in 7th grade when i had absolutely no friends in school. my happiest moment in 7th grade was when a girl was placing a skittle on each person's desk and she put a yellow skittle on my desk! i wasn't so invisible that she just went skipping past my desk! i stared at the skittle and a warm feeling came over me. i held that skittle in my hand for about five minutes before i placed it in my mouth and slowly chewed on that beautiful yellow skittle.