If I was still young

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Sometimes I wish this site had existed when I was, like, seven and I had been posting here since then. I imagine that the confused phases and humiliating moments I went through as an early to mid teenager might have not happened or might not have been as bad. Also, he bullying might have not hurt so much. Oh WP, where were you when I needed you? If I had been in this place since I was young I might have more innocence and confidence today.

Also, I kinda wish you folks here could have seen me back when I was a little boy. My mother say I was an adorable sweetheart back then. I don't miss my environment back then but I miss my old personality sometimes.

Can anyone else relate?

I would have killed and danced for joy [the first is more in character] to know in my teens AND twenties AND most of my thirties that I was NOT the only specimen.

I did meet ANOTHER when I was mid-30s, and that was a revelation and a marvel.

It is a great thing to kno that one can speak and be heard and even understood.

If my current behavior is any indicator, I'm probably better off that WP didn't exist when I was a teenager.

If it had, I would never have made a single friend, dated, driven, gotten laid, started a career, voted, married, had kids, or developed a useful skill of any kind, as I would have spent my life posting "Me, toos!" and "Eff Yous!" and never left my room.

Whilst Wrongplanet can be a great support/time killer, I am very glad I was in my 20s when I discovered it. Like Willard, I would probably have wasted my teens on here otherwise (this profile's new: in my old one, I had close to 2000 posts).

Also, I was quite impressionable as a teen and there is a prevailing attitude here (not by all members) that aspies are some alternative society that is entitled to equal respect to 'NT' society etc etc...

Don't get me wrong, people deserve respect simply as human beings, regardless of any difference, and havins aspergers is no more shameful than say, dyslexia or ADD (i.e. not shameful at all). But it is not a lifestyle choice nor an evolutionary step and I do not believe in any equal-but-different aspie vs NT society... the whole supremecy attitude is so... tweenager-ish.

Yeah, but I understand that everybody needs to feel they belong somewhere, and a lot of us literally do feel like aliens every time we have to go out and interact with the 'normal' world. So there is some comfort in the whole 'us and them' mentality, even if it gets a bit silly and extreme sometimes.

I know for me, after wandering around on this planet for more than four decades unable to clearly communicate, even with those who were supposedly my own family, and feeling like I'd been marooned here by accident, finding Wrong Planet was like stumbling onto a deserted military base and finding a whole colony of my own kind having a 12-step meeting in an empty hangar.

Good word. It's tough for me to not have an "us and them" mentality. What I do know is that I'm more accepted here than anywhere else and the people who treated me best in the past tended to be the most eccentric. It's quite tempting to draw an "us and them" conclusion from that. I'm consiously aware that autism is a gradiant, not an all-or-nothing thing.