What did you think Autism was...

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.....before you have learnt and understood it??

I had been through a unpleasant high-school stage of my life mainly due to the inabiltity to keep friends faster than i losed them.I turned even more recluse when my friends whom i considered best friend back-stabbed me,My mon used to jokingly say that she suspected me to have Autism and might take me to see a shrink.(should have)


For a long time,i thought im just recluse and shy,not autistic.The reason i dont try to make friends is because i havent found anyone interesting enough to befriend with.I did try learn more about Autism(i suspected myself to have),but only with little effort becuase they are hard to find and most of them i found only concerns Autistic Children and brain structure i cant comprehend (what??Im not kid nor metal!!)


I came to truely understand Autism by chance of a story from a Novel featuring a Character suffering from OCD.I search for OCD on the internet exhaustively becuase that is a unsual behavourial habits im sure i have.It ultimately led me this site.



I feel much better for finally knowing what is wrong with me and found confidence.Now at the same time i think im not thriving as hard anymore and begin use Austism as an excuse.

I was diagnosed at a very early age, before I can even recall, so I'm not sure if I could really give a good answer as to what I thought it was. I knew that I had autism, but I barely knew what that meant except that I had to go for therapy. After that I felt I lived a relatively "normal" lifestyle. Later on I did some small research just to see what it really was, but coming here and reading about others experiences has been far more helpful in understanding.

I was diagnosed as having AS in 5th grade, the year prior to that, we had a student in our class with autism. He was articulate, had dreams and interests, and usually kept himself composed. However, he was not capable of doing further than grade 1 or 2 math, he could hardly read even three-letter words, and he was socially incapable - nice, but socially incapable. To a bunch of elementary school kids, in our eyes he was either to be viewed with absolute pity or as "stupid". So when my mother informed me that I had a form of autism, my initial reaction was that she was calling me stupid, it was sort of funny when I look back on it.

I first came across the word "autistic" in a comic book, which described a character as autistic as a consequence of caught in a war zone (just to point out how inaccurate it was). Said character also had multiple personalities, each of which had a psychic power. That was when I asked my mother what autistic meant, and she said "shy."

I saw Rainman several years later when it was in theaters, and I do not think I fully connected the idea of "autistic" to Raymond Babbitt until several years later, as I didn't really pick up everything in movies unless the movie was very familiar to me.

Anyway, I never really had a clear idea of what autism is, and I'm kind of amazed at the fully formed ideas people carry around with them when many of those ideas aren't even historically accurate. At this point, I think that autism is a processing disorder that impacts all kinds of processing. Sometimes to a benefit, sometimes to a deficit, creating uneven skill scatter. I also think it's a valid way of thinking and it's not as if we could stop, right?

Prior to the past few years, though, as I said above, I really didn't know what it is. Every piece I came across didn't connect to other pieces.

A friend from school. He was always extremely happy and everybody was really nice to him, he ended up being prom king. But something was obviously off with him, Intellectually he didn't really seem all there.

So last year when I thought I might have AS (i will be getting tested soon but am sure I am) I panicked a little. now I realize its fine

The nanoscopic knowledge that I had about autism made me think that autism was normal and makesensical, but it did not occur to me that I was autistic, oops.

Extremely asocial, but also with poor/funny speech.

Kinda right.

I don't really remember I think the first time I heard of it was when some teacher was expressing concern about it to my parents, most teachers noticed there seemed to be something off about me so ADHD, ADD and Autism where thrown around more than once. Don't think I was supposed to hear those discussions. I never was diagnosed as most here probably already know, but I did more or less figure It was a possibility. So basically when my sister mentioned I might have Aspergers I looked it up and was not that surprised it was a form of autism.

Thing is I never really thought about it too much before, I figure I kinda avoided thinking about it...as I was quite a bit more self conscious as a child so I probably felt insulted that people would say they thought there was something wrong with me.

I used to think the only form of autism was the kind where people rock back and forth all the time and can't speak.

I remember that even in the years before my diagnosis, my mom would sometimes speculate that I may be autistic. I thought, "How can that be true? I don't rock back and forth and I'm good with language."

After I was diagnosed with AS at age 15, I learned about autism being a spectrum disorder.

I thought autism was where someone never talks nor communicate. They scream and never want to be touched. I thought they were all like Simon from Mercury Rising. I had no idea Asperger's was a form of autism back then. I was 15 when I learned it was a form of it.

When I was younger I thought it referred to people who were smart but rarely spoke, rocked backwards and forwards a lot, hated to be touched and had super sensitive hearing because those were the only traits I'd heard of. I never considered social skills coming into it because I had only a vague concept that social skills even existed, which is probably why I was so surprised when people started telling me I had none. I was 14 when I started reading more about it and learnt just how wide the variety of traits are. I never considered I could have it until I was 15 because I'd never heard of a girl with autism before, so even though my pre-existing but not quite so accurate idea of autism described me well it never occured to me that I had it.

Before I started learning about autism , I had this strange idea of it, where classic autism meant "rocking in a corner, never will be able to speak, will bite if you touch their head; goofy smile and freaky tantrums" and asperger's , in my head, was someone who was a genius in one specific field, not through any work or research, just natural genius, (god knows how I came up with "natural genius", I think it's the popular view of asperger's I gathered from the media) but otherwise mentally ret*d. I seriously thought someone could become a math genius without working at maths at all while having a learning disability. I think this is how NTs view us, since that's all I "knew" when I thought I was NT......

I have a cousin who is LFA, so I just thought she was what autism was. She was very cute, quiet, but would suddenly start banging her head into the sofa behind her. Haven't seen her since she was three either. I didn't learn anything about aspergers untill I was 16, even then it was from the book "The Curious Incident with the Dog in the Nighttime", which portrays him quite extreme in contrast to what I've learned in recent years.

The typical pop culture depiction, i.e., "autism = retardation." When I first read a book about ADD that mentioned a link with autism, I just immediately dismissed the A word as something that I couldn't possibly be, because hey, I wasn't ret*d, right? Only years later did I learn that the common (mis)conception about autism is complete crap.

After watching a documentary at 9 my thoughts were that it was a disorder for nerds and losers and I'm glad I'm not one of those...


siiiiiiiigh