What did you think it was before aspergers

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Didn't think any of the ASD symptoms were attributed to anything (just saw myself as a loner who followed the beat of his own).

I didn't think it was anything with a name. Just a grab bag of emotional difficulties, anxieties (most kinds of crowd situations, touch, social), some OCDishness, and a few other oddities.

I knew I was weird, I just didn't think it was a thing, much less a thing that other people had their own version of.

homeschooling

My first girlfriend said that being locked up in a house all day could cause sensory issues too, including my awful driving. lol

I took my daughter in for ADD because she actually reminded me of myself when I was young and I likely had ADD (I don't have ASD). You are supposed to check things out early where I live because all early interventions end after kindergarten. So I took my daughter in to a child psychologist and she came back with ASD which came as a big surprise I was not expecting that.

Well I went through all the personality disorders.

I labeled myself with everything from psychopathy to being an alien. At this time I had no idea what autism actually was, once I found out it made so much sense.
The name of this website made me laugh the first time I read it because it described how I felt my entire life. I always wondered why I was different, and now I think I'm close to the answer. FEELS GOOD

I use to think I was just lazy.

This of course lead to endless guilt and it help created this deep rooted obsession with perfection.

I assumed any of my short comings was a result of laziness which if you can imagine created a very distorted view of the world.

It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I realized how lazy most nts are.

On top of that I threw in Social anxiety when I was 17 or so, and ocd around 20.

When i was a kid i thought i was Autistic. My dad waved it off and said it was B.S. Then when i grew up i realised it had to be something like that, i read the diagnosis criterias in DSM/ICD and then i were 100% sure even before the diagnosis.

Avoidant PD, Anti Social PD and social phobia.

my folks didn't have a clue. Aspergers was something that nobody had even heard of when I was diagnosed in 2000, when i was nearly into my 30s. And that only came about because mom thought it might have been a brain injury.

I was told I was a secretive schizoid at age 11. I would basically try to avoid human interaction, understanding how different other people are and how exhausting trying to exchange information with them can be. I also hid a lot of my stimming and when asked about it if caught I would make an on the spot explanation relating to my dyslexia and general clumsiness (explaining something you don't completely understand to ignorant people who don't understand themselves tends to be pointless), though I'm certain some better educated adults in my family had an inkling of my extensive "otherness". At age 16 I decided to completely change my life and emigrated from Europe to Canada, hoping a new environment would make me a different person. Bollocks, I had a major crisis at the beginning of my 20's due to my inability to connect with people and the society at large. That landed me in a mental health institution where I was properly diagnosed. I've been living with the realization of what I am for 12 years now and am glad I can understand and work on my strengths and weaknesses.

I didn't think anything of it. I just thought I was fairly normal.

I was diagnosed aged 7 so I couldn't really contemplate having a personality disorder or something pre-diagnosis.

Since then, I have contemplated pretty much everything elese as possible co-morbids. The only one that might have substance is ADD. Oh, and I have an anxiety disorder.

Rejection.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and even believed I had it although I didn't have all the symptoms. It wasn't until a therapist asked me if I had been diagnosed with Asperger's and I saw a documentary called "Today's Man" about a guy with Asperger's that I began to wonder if maybe that was my real problem. The more I learned about it, the more it fit.

I've always knew I was different. Spent much of my childhood in school going to a speech therapist and a counselor assigned to me at school to help me understand my interactions with other people because apparently that I was noticeably lacking in those areas. But no one ever told me I was autistic, and back in the 80's aspergers wasn't even heard of yet.

During school I knew I was different, but didn't have an explanation for it. After school, I had many problems holding down a job, and my differences in the workplace environment for 5-8 years made my start looking for an explanation. I started thinking because I didn't fit in, maybe it was a personality difference, so I started doing research on personality types as an explanation and started learning about Carl Jung, and the MBTI test. It was then that I tested as an INTJ. And actually the description for INTJ personality has quite a lot in common with AS, but a few things still didnt fit.

It wasn't until a commercial for a local Autistic school showed on TV that was describing Autism and Aspergers that took my attention and started my investigation into Autism and prompted me to go see a clinic that specialized among other things Autism and AS. Had I known anything about it earlier I would have likely investigated it a long time ago.

Many things, really. I've been labelled as gifted/ a prodigy many times before and people also claim I have OCD, even though I haven't been diagnosed with it. Unofficial-diagnosis wise, I've been called "eccentric", "weird", "antisocial", "a perfectionist", "shy" and "bipolar". They all seem fairly accurate, except for the bipolar part - my meltdowns and shutdowns do have reasons behind them.