I was in high school in Australia during the 1980s. My middle high school years were simply awkward and horrible. Most girls thought I was a creep. I was very occasionally disturbed by weird feeling for boys in a culture antithetical to queer interests. I had no one I could talk to. I was often picked last for the sporting teams.
There was no awareness of high functioning autism. I was simply another rare example of those clumsy, gifted, alienated, bullied and troubled kids of my high school. Always being hauled before the principal for an apparently confrontational stance, bizarre stunts and outbursts. I was fortunate because I generally had a willing cohort or two for some of the strange pranks. We chuckleheads often goaded each other into expressions of (mostly) harmless mischief. No one got hurt.
By grade 10 I had acquired a little social currency with my illustrations and musicianship, but I only seemed to find any sense of comfort among the other misfits. I met some of these interesting people in an experimental class thrown together by desperate educators testing out an Ivan Illyich model of learning (I suspect). They made us read The Outsider (The Stranger) by Camus ffs. We did a lot of self-motivated research. We had access to the other computer lab - the secret lab. I was often tested and not told the results. I was a constant source of consternation.
I moved to a different school for senior high. By that time I had become adept at flitting between cliques that were of particular interest - musicians, metalheads, skaters, illustrators, computer users, math / chem students (the true nerds) etc. I did sometimes feel like I was being perceived as a poseur or narc. These skills became the seeds of my adult life navigating my way through various subcultures. I'm not sure I'd have received the benefit of these experiences if I had been diagnosed at 5. In a way, I was thrown to the sharks and left to my own devices.
Despite intense difficulties at school and home, I passed all my subjects, topping the class in English, Politics and Biology.
Since high school, my music and image interests have taken me through a variety of subcultures, occasionally even allowing me to transcend social boundaries eg class. I have worked in many career paths, acquiring a resume that is described as "exceptional". I have had a few successful long term relationships. I've achieved many personal goals in my creative life.
There will always be moments when I feel intensely lonely. I can't always avoid hardships. And until my recent diagnosis, I could never understand why I just couldn't shake that feeling of being a narc and
poseur. Or worse, an alien... or perhaps an android. Something else, something other.
Anyhow, once high school is over, life does get better.