What age did you realize you weren't like everyone else?

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I did when I was 4. I remember the other kids waking their friends up from naptime. And I woke up to the noise I was the last one sleeping. That's when I first realized I was an outsider. I've been on the outside ever since. What about you guys?

When I realized that certain relatives were never challenged when they referred to me as a "bastard".

This was about the same time that l learned to count to 9...

When I was about 3 years old when I wasn't connecting to other kids.

I can't remember ever not knowing that I wasn't like everyone else.

At age 8. There was grief, there was denial and blaming...

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I never felt different to my peers until I was 8, when I was first labelled with this Asperger's thing. Before that, I felt like just another normal child. OK I was shy and sometimes found it hard to be heard in groups, so I sometimes felt a bit isolated, and yes I needed extra help with my schoolwork, and I had an unusually short attention span, but I still didn't feel different from the other kids. Maybe it was because I was a sociable child and loved being around people.

Probably through my schooling years onwards. I started school at 4 years old. I never knew why though.

From the time I first knew I was a "person." About 5 1/2 years old.

5 or 6 (about the time I started kindergarten). I remember wondering why it seemed like other kids had an easier time fitting in, communicating with the teacher, and following directions than I did. Also around that time, a couple of my brother's friends were over at our house, and they laughed at me when they saw me stimming with my fingers. I remember how I got really fixated on my school yearbook and would just sit on the floor and look through it for a long time and memorize people's names. I realized that other kids didn't seem to do stuff like that so I knew it was probably "weird" to do.

Kindergarten.

I still think of myself as like everyone else --- it's confusing Every Time when I don't "fit".

I sensed I wasn't like everyone else before I was able to put the thought into words. Since the first grade, all the other kids just seemed stronger and quicker, and able to do everything more easily than me. In the second grade they started asking me questions I didn't know the answer to, such as "why do you walk on your tiptoes", and "why are you echoing us". By the third grade, I had the sense that there was some kind of communication going on between everyone else that I could not perceive (I had no idea what, so I imagined things like invisible marks on people that told them how to treat each other). Around that time things started getting really bad, so the feeling that I was somehow very different from everyone else became absolute certainty.

Probably somewhere around 40.

No idea, I can't even remember ever feeling I was like the rest, I've always felt different, I think.