Aspergers in childhood

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Started reading the book I’m sure many of you have read "look me in the eyes"

However I have blotted out most of my childhood, so I don’t really remember what it was like growing up that well. I just have a few strong instances that are impossible to forget it would seem.

So...anyways, was wondering if those who remember their childhoods well enough can give me some examples of how they acted around others in elementary. How would you make friends? How did you talk to strangers if at all? How did you respond to teachers?
(Elementary)

From the little I remember I recall how I responded to teachers the most.

(3rd Grade)
I remember a time where there was this book I found in the classroom and it was filled with all the presidents and had a little bit about each president on each page. When I found this book the rest of the class was reading from their school book and we were going around the room basically playing "popcorn" (if you can remember that reading game) except it was the teachers choice who read. While I examined the presidential time line book I was looking at the faces and comparing them to their names- like Garfield I’d picture the cat and then see the president Garfield and think he's fat like Garfield or I'd see Washington and think about his wooden teeth, and it didn't look to me like he had wooden teeth because he didn't look uncomfortable. Then it was my time to read so of course I had no idea where we were at in the book and so the teacher started yelling at me about me not paying attention and to put that other book away. I told her I didn't want to and I don't know where we were supposed to be in her book. So I took the book and hid under the desk with it and held onto the desk while I held the book and stared at the cover. (Just a timeline with a little picture of each president with each term year) Well any ways the teacher ended up yelling at me to go wait out in the hallways. So I went outside without the book, and when I got outside I sat next to the door and spotted a door stop. If I spot an object I would typically use it as it is supposed to function, whether it was an appropriate time to do so or not. So I put the door stop in the door real good, not to block the door actually but just because that seemed like where it belonged and the only thing to do at that moment in time, 5-10 minutes later I had forgotten about the door stop and was examining the different lines in the hallway. (doors, tiles, ceiling, and a sort of shelving island in the middle of the hallway) About this time my teacher felt it was time to have a talk with me out in the hall way, so she proceeds to try and open the door out to the hallway. Naturally the door would not open and so she frantically wiggled and prodded the door, and began to yell "Open this door this instant Conrad!" While i stood there and staired at her blankly and it soon became comical though I did not laugh. So instead of using the outside door and walking around she called the principle and the principle had to come all the way from the office in the opposite side of the school to tell me to remove the door stop (which I understood alot better than open this doorr immediately) and come with her to the office.

If I remember correctly though for the most part in the classroom I never did anything, strange in regards to trying to get to know others in the classroom. (Well probably a few times but none that I can remember) I simply never really tried to get to know other people in elementary, either I knew someone or I didn't and either I began to know them coincidently through time or I didn't. Never going out of the way to get to know anybody, not because I didn't want to but because I didn't think to.

I haven't read Look me in the Eyes yet. My husband says I should stop obsessing over asperger's.

I remember my childhood clearly.
I remember my first day in kindergarten. I was almost three years old, wearing a red uniform and I was crying because I didn't want to be there. Another girl was trying to console me, saying that mommy will be back. I knew she would be back, this was not why I was crying.
The girl was not wearing a uniform. She had a T shirt with a picture of a dear (later I would discover it was Bambi).
There were no T shirts with pictures during communism, the girl's parents must have been members of the communist party. Only politically correct people were allowed abroad.
They made us nap in the afternoon and I never napped. I spent the time looking at the ceiling and around the room. Very soon I asked for a book to read because I was bored. The teacher spanked me and I told my parents.
I never went to kindergarten again, I went to work with my mom instead. I sat through the rehearsals of the orchestra and it was wonderful.
I remember my friends from the neighborhood and the games we played. I remember we used to ran a lot.
I remember my toys. Two of them were scary because they made loud sounds. My mother used to threaten me she would bring the bear if I didn't eat. It was big and fuzzy and made a roaring sound. It was horrifying, so I ate.
I liked to fold and unfold handkerchiefs, had a whole stash of them and I loved to look at the patterns. I also played train with all my toys lined up in a nice line. I got my first train set for my 6th birthday. Toy trains were hard to come by, so it really was a marvellous gift.

Then we moved. Pre-school was terrible. I ran away three times and went home. My maternal grandmother always brought me back so I gave up trying to escape. The children were mean to each other, I never played with anyone because I didn't want to. They didn't seem like real people to me. They were all illiterate and we had nothing in common. They teased me for playing the violin.

Elementary school was boring. The teacher didn't like me. Always showed the class my ugly handwriting and hopeless artwork and overlooked my numerous strengths.
I could print when I was two and I half and I was an excellent speller, of course she wouldn't care, she felt the need to be mean.

The children were not nice, but I met a girl like me the very first day. She could also read and we discussed books and played Star Wars. She is to this day my best friend.
Because I excelled in music I was enrolled in a School of Music or Conservatory as they are called in Europe.
I remember the first school day as if it were yesterday. I was in fourth grade and nobody teased me for playing an instrument. Everybody played one!
My year consisted of 24 students separated into two classes of 12 students each. They split us into two groups of 6 kids for some of the subjects like languages or music theory. It worked like this until we graduated in year 12.

Kids in our school got along well. There was no bullying from kids. It was still communism and it was the teachers' job.
For some reason adults seemed to greatly dislike me. They would tell me off for not looking them in the eye, and when I did they would tell me off for looking murderous, which I wasn't, or looking through them, which I wasn't either.
I thought they were liars and that there were out to get me. I was one angry kid all through high school. My literature teacher was great. She liked me and was impressed with me citing Antique Greek tragedies by heart. I was exposed to Greek philosophy and literature from an early age, as this was the special interest of my AS dad.

I made friends with kids from other schools I shared common interest with- heavy metal. I had great friends, we were something like a clique of 7 people, 5 boys and two girls. We did not date each other, we dated out of the "clique".
Together we watched cartoons and listened to our favourite bands.

I never spoke to strangers. I never initiated a conversation or introduced myself to a stranger with only one exception- my husband.
I highly doubt anyone would read my novel. I tried to be as concise as possible.

I don't remember a whole lot about my childhood, but I do remember I never had more than one friend at a time, and the friendship was always fairly strained.

In Kindergarten, I tried to make friends with this girl in my class named Candice. I remember she went on a family vacation to Canada and when she got back I went up to her and said "Hi, I missed you." She just looked at me so I started talking about insects. (my special interest at the time) She freaked out and made fun of me for the rest of the school year.

Also, I'm in the process of reading "Look Me In The Eye". Except for his exceptional recollection of his childhood, it all sounds very familiar.

When I was a child, adults liked me, but other children mostly didn't. I wasn't wanted, but I decided to stay anyway just to spite them. They made fun of me because I was different, ostracized me, and I ended up wanting to kill myself at the age of 13, though a friend convinced me not to. Unless anyone asks for more, this is all I'm telling, as I can remember it so well it hurts even five years since then.

I ran into a couple of guys (in separate incidents) when I was in my mid twenties, who had gone to school with me in elementary school and they reminded me of things I had done that I had entirely forgotten. I'd been a wallflower for so many years it had completely escaped me that I wasn't always like that.

Now that's not to say I was any better at making social connections as a kid, I wasn't. I had no idea how to make friends or interact with the other kids in anything resembling a 'natural' way. So when I wasn't just sitting silently, observing everyone else and wishing I knew how to be part of the group, I acted out and did outrageous, wild, inappropriate things to get attention. Fake epileptic seizures in the aisles (as George Carlin put it), loud, crazy gesticulating, aping sound effects from television cartoons, fart noises (the ol' bi-labial fricative according to Carlin), once I asked permission to go to the restroom (which should have been a red flag, as I never used a restroom outside of my own home), went inside and locked the door, only to climb out the window and re-enter the school building from the outside, so no one else could get into the empty restroom.


All this type of behavior was in kindergarten and first grade. By second grade, I had begun to realize that the other kids were laughing AT me and not WITH me, and I began to withdraw into myself, stop talking and hide inside books.

I just finished reading "Look Me in the Eyes" a month or so ago. Great book! I really enjoyed it. I can certainly relate to his story.

I remember my childhood quite well even though it happened many years ago. I remember being teased, bullied, & ridiculed. I got into trouble all the time (not paying attention, got blamed for things other kids did, day dreaming, etc). I got along ok with adults (well some adults anyway, some of them found me really annoying-probably more than just a few looking back). Teachers didn't know what to do with me. I had tons of trouble with math...I just couldn't comprehend it like I knew I should. But reading, I was well ahead of the curve with the written word. I could read college level stuff before I was out of grade school. Unfortunately, it didn't translate into writing skills. My only other talent was art. I'm sure I was a puzzle to all of my teachers. I often heard things like "could do quite well, if she'd just apply herself," etc. Kids gave me tons of trouble when it came to communicating & play. I wanted friends, but I didn't know how to make or keep them. Things got so bad that after a while, I turned to books for my entertainment (tv at home). I would go off by myself with a stack of books during recess, & read contentedly until it was time to go back to class. Sometimes other kids would follow me & torment me when I was off by myself minding my own business. Funny how none of the supervisors ever saw a group of kids attacking me (they'd hit, kick, & call me names, sometimes for the full duration of recess). Looking back at it, there'd be at least 3 or 4 kids, sometimes more. Other times, I'd see a group of 3 boys running towards me, & I'd run off...they always tried to knock me down...sliding in between my ankles to trip me up. The supervisors never saw that either. One time, I'd had enough of their games, & wore a leather belt & boots to school. I ran to the chain link fence where they cornered me. Took the belt off & hit & kicked them. Of course, one of them ran off & ratted me out to the supervisor & yes I got in trouble. All 4 of us ended up in the principle's office together at the same time. But those boys never harassed me ever again. Unfortunately, the tormenting continued pretty much all the way through high school. And it wasn't just in school, it was at home, on the way to or from school where the bullying occurred.

My Mum made my friends for me on the first day of school and I stuck with them till I moved country. I didn't really try make friends beyond them, and didn't know how they made friends with the other kids. And I used to break down and cry if I was tagged "it", like every time, which was probably pretty exhausting.

In school I didn't actually seem to understand the difference between the add/minus/divide/times symbols, and was still plussing everything and didn't understand they were wrong. I learnt how to do maths in German after I was ten. And I picked up German really fast, living in Germany. But my spelling was always great and just kept improving. And I would correct the teachers, and they didn't like that, but I didn't understand why, and just was fixated that they were wrong, and it was wrong, so should be righted and they should be impressed/pleased with me. I still did this in my year 12 year of high school, and after that could only refrain with big effort.

I was bullied in all the schools I went to, and got it especially bad in high school with a bad group of friends. They would laugh at me, and I would either let them, as I desperately wanted friends, or hit them sometimes.

In primary school I never actually managed to finish all the sheets of exercises they gave you, I would just become fixated on one and have a mounting back log of sheets, ten times the amount of others.

I could speak very well by the time I was 1, not in baby voices or anything, proper sentences. And my play involved these little tubular people toys, who I would just line up in rows, rather than have them interact. And I had no interest in Barbies etc, till my sister had one with a bath that could make bubbles. So I *started* liking them at 8, when most people stop liking them. And they never really interacted either, I would just cut their hair or make them clothes.

And I was petrified of kindergarten, where I made no friends, and wouldn't go in the wendy house even though I wanted to, I was scared and I would spend the whole outdoor time standing beside the slide but not going down it, and only when my mum came to collect me would I go down it once, then go home.

I got more strangely behaved in high school, with a maths teacher who thought I was being cheeky, so wouldn't answer my genuine questions and so I would sit under the table (age 15!) and refuse to comply. I had done well at maths before that year. I also used to sit in the media studies class during the times when we watched films, and predict (usually correctly) what would happen next and didn't understand why people didn't like that.

But yeah, general bullying, adults thinking I was lovely, kids being cruel, teachers being idiots, me being weird, potentially clever, but overall flawed because of distractions or misunderstandings and social skills were not my thing. Was just very inconsistent! And was only diagnosed last week. Don't know why I am posting... Just want to tell people all of this, not really caring who!