Imagining why you felt different as a kid

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Did you make up stories or explanations as to why you felt out of place/did things differently as a kid? I know that most of you are familiar with the feeling that you were born on a different planet, hence the logo of WP. Any of you have similar feelings of being nonhuman or "rare?"

For example, around the age of 9 I felt like I was part animal because of my sensitive hearing and deeper connection to animals than to people. Eventually I dropped the idea because I was physically too human and kids started giving me a hard time about it.

I had this other thought where I wondered if there was a special book that everyone else had read but somehow I just hadn't heard of it. People referenced or quoted this book constantly in conversation but never mentioned the book specifically, so I was left confused from lack of knowledge. If I read the book I would finally fit in and "get it." I had this thought quite a bit, and at the time it seemed so silly and unreasonable to me---why would so much of society revolve around a book, and why hadn't I heard about it if it was so important? Now it makes sense.

I've had other thoughts that weren't so far from reality. What were your experiences?

I didn't. I didn't know any different. I just ended up believing the names I was called.

I felt like I was an android; I sometimes got in trouble for interpreting everything literally. I wasn't interested in the same sorts of things other kids were, so I thought maybe something was missing or that I was just a human imitation made with different parts inside. So thought I must be an android.

I'm kind of disappointed that wasn't the case.

I didn't make up stories. I just always figured I was broken some how.

My mother was also AS, so I didn't feel too weird within my family. I thought that everyone was struggling to handle living in an agrarian society, still being evolved for tribal life.

I've always felt like I'm somehow not human, although the specifics about what I thought I might actually be have varied. I also feel kind of like there's some sort of communal mind or something that everyone but me is a part of, so they can get a better feel for each other, so to speak - for example, in a fast-paced conversation, it seems like everyone else can somehow tell the very millisecond someone is going to finish speaking so they can start talking, leaving exactly zero space for me to try to chime in.

I feel like I don't even fit in among other people on the autism spectrum, like there's something else fundamentally different about me. A few years ago I realized that I probably have the soul of a dragon. There are some things that I don't think can be explained solely by my autism.

Wow. I feel as you did! And still do for me sometimes. When I was a kid I always used to make up stories for the purposes of appearing normal to others but I knew that I was incredibly different from the other kids.

But I didn't want anyone to know, especially NTs, because then they might figure out my Autistic secret. But of course, at the time I didn't know what my Autistic secret was until only a few months ago. I'm 42 now.

It's what I like to call "creating a normal social shield" to protect me from NTs.

You see for guys, we have this hideously unpredictable thing called testosterone which creates a great deal of extreme aggression for Autistic guys. In many ways I envy Autistic women because they lack testosterone because it's such a destabilizing factor in any situation especially a social one. Being Autistic and the testosterone factor has been the greatest source of my reason for getting fired 9 times and quitting my jobs more than 30 times to avoid getting fired.

My favourite story to make up and tell people to explain my aggressive and unusual behavior was that my parents were divorced and they didn't want me, etc etc. also my dad was abusive and mother was an alcoholic. Now all of that is only partially true but it seemed to convince NTs that I had a reason for my Autistic-like behaviour.

Sigh, the things we do to appear normal but nowadays I've simply given that up and I will let out my normal Autistic responses show and damn the world and what they think.

I can relate so much to what you're saying. I really like your book description. I always felt that everyone seemed to know things that I didn't, and I wished that I knew what they knew, like, how to approach people, when to approach people, to make friends, what to say at first, etc, etc. I hoped that if I read enough eventually I could figure out what I didn't know, but I felt like the questions I were asking were different than the questions that everyone else was asking. What I needed to know was so instinctive to everyone else that no one had bothered to answer any of those questions that I wanted answers for.

I didn't create any elaborate stories, but I thought being fat and gay is why I always felt outside of the group, but after getting older I realized fat gay people aren't always in the outgroup and thin straight people aren't always in the ingroup and that a lot of the assumptions I had were wrong.

I felt similarly, like I was much slower at dealing with certain things than others were. When I was 9, I remember realizing that I didn't feel relaxation the way they did. I didn't know this was due to sensory issues (I didn't understand why, at all). I figured if I worked hard then things would change as I got older. Instead, I got really anxious

As a teenager I sometimes imagined I have a soul of a cat. Or a black night butterfly.
Not that I believed it, it was just my self-description.

The best way I could describe it was that I felt like I was an adult reincarnated into a child's body while the other children were..... well children. I just could not relate to their immaturity and obsession with superficial things. For example, in Grade 2 I was reading books on trans-Neptunian asteroid fields and tried to talk about it on the school grounds. Needless to say nobody understood what the heck I was talking about.

I do remember in Grade 3 music class we were allowed to work on the 6 music books at our own pace. When I finished book 6, one kid was finishing book 4 and everybody else was still on book 2. When the teacher showed everyone their progress charts, the other kids were blown away at how quickly I did it. Me? I still found the pace too slow and the teacher had to find some advanced manuals for me to work with 'off the record'.

Very true. In my case the fat kids mercilessly teased me for being thin and lanky. Took a long time to realize not everyone who is overweight is an a-hole.

I went through a huge chunk of primary and secondary school willingly ensnared in this constant daydream state. I suppose it was the ultimate imagination-based solution for my frequent loneliness and isolation from the other children: I was an entirely different person/being/character throughout the vast majority of my time stuck in the fixed environment of school. In a way, this meant I never needed to provide myself a logical explanation of why things were 'as they were'... more a total denial of needing any such explanation at all, because I wasn't there! I only really dealt with my reality once a class was in session, and aside for the times when bullies would track me down during the long lunch hours spent in another dimension, that's where I remember the unpleasantness happening.

Yes this is a pretty good description of how I felt too.

And I. Even in kindergarten, I couldn't believe they were really like that. And now... not much has changed.

No imagining. I thought it was because I was a weak person.