When was a time you realized you were "different"

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When I was about 4, I was in a game of Cowboys and Indians, and put my differences down to family. Someone had given me a toy gun over mother's objections, so I had the equipment, but I had not watched the TV shows, so when we had to "Stick 'em up!" I put my arms straight up, instead of 2/3 like the cool guys.
Then, we were all calling out our ages to register for grade 9, and all the others were teenagers.
Around age 60 I started to figure out that people were having a hard time following me intellectually. I'd always assumed that having a higher EQ than mine would enable rational thought as well.

My parents made me go to a church camp when I was about nine. We drove for days to get there because we stopped at several locations and visited family members along the journey. I had no idea where I was when we arrived, because the drive was so long.

The group of girls sat in a circle and we had to answer "Where are you from?" I was the first girl asked. I didn't have a frame of reference on my location, or a way to learn from the other girls' replies. I didn't know if the question meant "which church?" , "which parish?", "which town?", "which school?", "which county?" I sat there terrified to speak and finally named the country that I lived in. I assumed this camp was in a different country because it seemed so far from home.

Everyone laughed and teased me mercilessly for being "clued out" and not understanding the question.

It turns out the camp was only about 100 miles from my house and I hadn't left my country at all. Everyone else named their hometown.

When I was 3 or 4 my mother took me to a preschool playgroup in the next village. I had never really been around other children outside of my family before. It was noisy, scary, unpredictable, I had no clue what on earth the other kids were doing or why. I was shocked when they disagreed about toys or moved around quickly. I sat under a table with my hands over my ears for the whole session and waited for my mother to pick me up. When the woman in charge asked if I’d enjoyed it and wanted to come again I just hid behind my mother. I remember her saying “don’t you want to give your mother a break?”. I’m not sure what she meant by this or what my mother had said to her. I did not go again.

I think that was the first time I realised there was a world out there full of humans that I didn’t understand and seemed to operate to a whole different set of rules to me.

I knew that I was different when I started preschool. I sat on the bench while I watched the other kids play for the first two weeks. I joined in on the fun after those two weeks.

When I was about 3. I noticed how other kids could play well together and I didn't know how. They would also chat and I couldn't do that.

Same here. I was the kid who walked around the playground by herself or had her nose in a book. I got along with either the older or the younger kids better than I did with the ones in my class, and I always got along better with animals than I did with people.

I also always felt like I had at least two things going on in my mind at any given time. It wasn’t so much dissociation as it was my mind being like a computer with a lot of browser tabs open.

I didn’t have any problems with language growing up, but I found myself repeating phrases either out loud or (more often) to myself. I still do this sometimes today.

I have no memories of feeling different because of being aspie.

Other differences - gender at 7, heritage at 12, class at 15, class again at about 21 (I can't go with being poncy but I'm not a chav who hates culture), never going to get a job at 25.

Different to society maybe but I get stick on here for calling my stepdad aspie - he's more stereotypically aspie than I am anyway. I fit into my family. I was just always searching for people just like me and the thing is, they rarely exist for anyone unless that person is one dimensional.

My family were always weirdos and I like it.

Kindergarten. Specifically when the class played duck duck goose. Being tagged as the goose triggered a meltdown for me, but the other kids seemed to enjoy the game.

We had a saying in my family, "The Hodders are strange and the Reed are odd." The Reed side of my family takes great pride in being different than the rest, so being called 'normal' was an insult. The first I really got how different I was was in kindergarten when I witnessed an older kid bullying a classmate, I went straight up to him and told him to stop it, The bully just walked away laughing at me.

As early I can remember I was aware of an oddness to how I perceived the world. A bit later I became aware that I had a vision impairment. I suppose at that point I just assumed any oddness in my perceptions had something to do with that.

That changed more and more once I started going to school. As differences became clearer I never thought that I was just different though. But I knew enough to hide anything I felt or was inclined to do that I did not observe in the others.

In highschool someone posed to me that I might be an empath. I think that was the first time I actually thought I might just be different and not innately wrong and "less"

After confirming I had Aspergers in adulthood the acceptance of different was gradual. There are still times and there will be more yet of accepting I'm different and its okay.

first time when i was hospitalized . saw the eyes of an italian boy patient mate. same meaningless concentrated stare as mine when thinking back. realized we were same species but neither was diagnosed as aspergers. so there are lots of misdiagnoses going on everydays in psych wards. you wonder therr are some boys or girls who were kind of "socially awkward" who knows if they had aspergers no one thought of screening in schools or whatsoever. it sounds so latent comparing to some crazier stuff. the psych docs they either tried their best or dont care. or both. some hate their jobs hate the patients and hate themselves coz all they see everyday are defectives like us when they chose their major in med schools they didnt know they were goig to be dealing with us on a daily basis ! docs hate us professors hate us bankers hate us politicians hate us anyone not of our own race or of our own race hate us stream billie eilish on spotify.

I was so busy with coping that I didn't actually think it out until I was about 9yo.

I don't think that's unusual ...

I think I was around 9 or 10 years old. That's when I realized that I was the strange one, not everybody else.

Age seven. I knew something was different about me compared to my peers in school. I knew something was different when I compared myself to my siblings. But being so young and naive, I couldn't find out why. I remember at the age of nine when my father and I were sat in the living room watching tv, and I asked him why I had to go to these classes my friends didn't have to go to. I asked him why I had to have an adult look after me in my normal classes. He told me candidly that I had autism. I can't recall the whole response verbatim, but I can recall him telling me that. I didn't know what autism was, but now I knew there was a word for it. I had this idea in my head as to why I had to go to special ed. for the first four hours of each school day in grade school, why I behaved the way I did, and why I had frequent meltdowns over little things. And from that day of knowing a true piece of me, I tried really hard to mask and lie to my friends about where I was during the first part of school. I didn't want to be different. There are days where I don't want to be different.

I felt different for a long time, but I only grasped that I was neurologically different after my diagnosis age 46 - and quite a long time after, because I went through a period of denial.

I had to go back through my history to assimilate the truth - it was just like a jigsaw coming together

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