Did anyone else feel they were more mature than their class?

Post Reply New Topic

I know ever since like 6th grade i've felt and behaved more mature than the rest of my class. There was/is people who is as mature or more than me. [i'm in 9th grade and apparently my class is one of the worst my high school had in like 20 years and i believe that.]

Do/did you feel/was more mature than most of your classmates?

Yes. Even in grade school my best friends were adults -- not that I saw them often, but I knew I could always stop and talk to some of the older people in the neighborhood if they were out in their yards. I suppose some of that was that they always had interesting things to say (they'd tell me about the plants they were working on and other wise offer something informative instead of talking about pop stars or sports), and some of it was they'd carry the conversation and not worry about my various quirks.

I don't know if I really was that much more mature, necessarily. My speech was more formal and I was more reserved, which I think most people code as "adult." I think in high school I felt more adult because people's interests were so alien, and because my interests were the ones associated with adulthood -- but that may be because public school is such an artificial environment that people are weirdly socialized there, if you see what I mean. High school is all about being "cool", which often means rejecting things that interest adults. So by being interested in stuff that wasn't cool, I wasn't being so much "mature" as I was "human," while the other kids were deliberately stifling their normal human interests in order to fit in to that particular social group.

And the reserved thing, although we associate it with adults, was just how I am. Most kids are less reserved because they're trying harder to forge social bonds, I suppose. By the time most people are adults, they've forged a lot of those bonds or forged other bonds (marriage) that make it less important to have so many friends, and they have a job so they have a social group they already belong to and don't have to do dumb stuff/act immature to get attention or approval.

I think I felt the same as the rest, and often I felt stupider than the rest. Well, it was because the other girls spoke to me like I was either stupid or annoying (yes, I knew tone of voice back then). They either spoke to me like I was a baby, or snapped and yelled at me as though I was an annoying little pest.

So I never felt I was more mature than the rest. The other girls seemed more mature than me, but they were probably just mature for their age, but immature compared to a grown-up, so that made me more immature for my age back then. When I was 11, the other girls started to be into boys, whereas I was still asexual, and just wanted to run around playing and getting dirty, so I ended up playing with the boys, since they liked running around and getting dirty.

Luckily I stopped being asexual around the age of 13, and started fancying every male that moved (I think that's rather typical for a young teen).
But I always had a teacher's assistant in the classroom to help me because I was intellectually slower than the rest of the NT children (and average with the children with learning difficulties).

The only time I felt more mature was year 11, when all the girls were acting bitchy and I just wanted to be friends with everybody and sit and chat with coffee at lunchtimes instead of gathering in groups and whispering and sniggering and being horrible to children who were a little different.

Yes. In 5th grade, the other girls would sit around snickering about puberty and the way the body changed. My mother had already had "the talk" with me, so there was nothing mysterious or funny about it. I also got called snobbish and standoffish. Because of my being on the spectrum, I acted a lot older than I was. I enjoyed talking with the teachers but not other students since they generally had nothing interesting to say.

Totally. I was always an old head on young shoulders. I went to Russia on a school trip, at 15. That was complete torture. The others wouldn't eat the food, as it was 'disgusting'. It wasn't the best I've ever tasted, but we had to eat, or starve. They made fun of me for eating a variety of foods, when they could only tolerate bread and ice-cream, for a whole week. Even the ones who I thought were more mature eventually let me down.

Yes definitely. Although, looking back, while I was always quite mature for my age in some ways, I was very naive in others - I certainly lacked the "street smarts" some of my peers possessed (possibly still do to some extent).

That's the way it is now.

Never. I knew the social element was totally screwed up where I was concerned. Kind of hard to feel more mature when you can't even get anyone to listen to you.

Yes. I felt that way from 7th grade and all the way up to my senior year of high school. I didn't drink or do drugs or have sex, I did my school work, and I didn't skip school. Plus other kids seemed to act up and act goofy.

I've felt more mature than my peers from the time that I started Grade 4 until I graduated from High School.

It was this way when the 6th grade class went to museums. The other kids went around giggling at the nude sculptures, and getting the teacher so pissed off that he said we wouldn't have any more outings. My mother had given her children an appreciation for the arts, and I couldn't understand why the other students had to act to silly. Of course they picked on me because I didn't find anything funny about Michelangelo's David.

I kind of wondered if all teachers say that. I remember hearing that multiple times in school.

Yeah, I was always mature for my age. I didn't understand much of my peer group's behavior so I wasn't interested in it all too much. I was quiet, followed instructions, got along with my teachers, etc. I only started to feel immature when I entered college and my interests were still the same as they were in middle school. That and it seemed like everyone else already knew what they wanted to do with life. Concepts like networking were completely lost on me.

Amways felt it and still do, i'm 17 and i feel like a wise old man

That's logically impossible. Maturity is governed by emotional intelligence, or EQ. And all autistics have significantly lower EQs than NTs. Therefore, it is much more likely that the feeling of 'maturity' is actually an overcompensation for not understanding the emotionally more advanced processes happening before your eyes. "I'm too mature for that" is actually "I'm not mature enough for that."

Definitely. Although I didn't realize it then, the middle school/high school years were really annoying because the kids around me were not as mature as I was. I was a serious student, and often got frustrated at the loud kids joking around in class when I was trying to work...this was usually the source of my meltdowns. Fortunately, by the end of high school, most of the immature students were segregated into the college/workforce classes while I remained with the more serious students in the university level classes.