did u think u were normal when younger

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I always felt different than the other kids. And, I always had issues adjusting to new social situations. The first time I recognized this difficulty was when I was in kindergarten (though, my parents told me a story about having difficulties when I was in nursery school).

What’s interesting is that I convinced myself that the situation was a "kid thing". And, that once I was an adult, everything would be OK. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen as I struggled both at college (socially, not academically) and in the working world (again, socially).

I slowly started to realise I wasn't normal, and my diagnosis at 12 or 13 (I forget which exactly) didn't surprise me very much.

I always (and in a way, still do) thought I was "normal". Everybody else just treated me like I wasn't.

Like some of the other posters said, I didn't feel weird or look weird. But apparently I acted weird, and everyone seemed to know it but me. I didn't get why I didn't have many friends, why I got picked on at school, why my family and friends always felt the need to protect me, why I couldn't figure out the whole boy/girl dating thing. I was just diagnosed 7 weeks ago, but had Asperger's/ASD been a diagnosable condition in the 70s, I would have understood it all a lot sooner. The therapy I was in at 17 would have picked it up then, instead of having to wait until I was 53.

Sounds similar to me. My parents sent me to therapy in the early 70s, when I was 8. I was refusing to go to school. I was back at the Psychologist ~ 4 years later after again having issues in middle school.

As I think about it, I feel really bad for Little Rocket (yeah, I am referring to myself, when I was younger). He wasn't a very happy person. He knew he had problems developing and maintaining friendships. But, he never understood why.

Since I had a cousin my age i was around all the time to compare myself to, i knew i had problems. That and being taken to clinics and hearing what was being said about me.

When I was very little I did not know I was different. When I was in my preteen and teen years and after that I always felt different. I did not ever feel "normal" then.

I don't think that anyone ever thought that I was normal, but I was born a little more than ten years too early for "Asperger's Syndrome" to be considered as a diagnosis. Adults considered me "gifted". It seemed that regardless of the group, other children could always identify that I was not like them. In elementary school over a period of a few years I was in a mostly unchanging class of less than ten other children who were considered "gifted", and they hated me.

What I would say is that I didn't ever meet anyone like me, but I had no concept of exactly how fundamentally different I was compared to the other students. I thought that the concept that I had of what "normal" was was significantly more accurate than I later found out.

I thought, I had a micro brain damage, perhaps from my difficult birth.

Kindergarten, being around other kids, and clearly not being one of them.
Yeah, I pretty much figured out I didn't belong the first day.

I didn't THINK it so much as insist on it because I refused to accept that I wasn't. My mother knew something was different about me since I was a toddler and kept pressing teachers and doctors to look deeper but because we were poor and in a rural area no one would listen to her, they just thought I was a bad kid and she didn't discipline me enough or something, so my early life was pretty rough for our whole family. On top of that I had a teacher who would resort to physical punishment for things that were autism-related though no one knew it yet, like my meltdowns or the times I would go unfocused, labeled "daydreaming" and slacking off. Other kids saw me as a weird kid who couldn't control myself or fit in and they hated me and bullied me mercilessly - the nice ones just ignored me. So by the time I finally got my diagnosis in middle school, I was pretty scarred and I was unwilling to embrace the fact that there was really no way I was ever going to be a regular kid. I had clung to these daydreams that somehow, magically, the popularity politics would change in my favor and I would become a kid who had friends and didn't hide in the bathroom to eat lunch. Instead, the diagnosis cemented me to IEPs and Special Ed classes, which carried their own stigma. I remember screaming at my mother "I am NORMAL!" during a meltdown/fight, which is sort of ridiculous looking back, but I just believed for so long that if I could only insist on it hard enough, it would be true. Of course the irony is that now I have accepted and embraced it, ASDs have become more common, understood, and accepted and also more overdiagnosed/self-diagnosed etc. like ADHD and Tourette's were in the 90s when I was a kid and almost no one I knew had heard of Asperger's/ASD/HFA or knew much of anything about it, and I have learned a lot of adaptive skills, so now I have *some* people get skeptical about my diagnosis and try to tell me I'm not autistic. I only get to be "normal" now that I've accepted I never will be and don't want to!

^^^This^^^

My family raised me telling me people were all different, so I am normal in that regards. Or so they said.

I never really understood why I was so singled out, not until my 40's. Its hard for me to see that self reflection that other people see, esp since I am not social and have no friends or peers to help me reflect and realize such things.



I definitely knew that feeling, and it never ends.

Ha! I thought I was normal and that everyone else was stupid LOL

I thought my problems stemmed from the way I looked and never had any idea that the way I acted was what caused many of my difficulties. It's only been the past couple of years that I've come to realize my behavior probably caused a lot of my troubles.

No. I've never felt normal, but it wasn't as intense until I started school. At 3 I noticed I behaved differently than my siblings, and my parents treated me different. When they'd get in trouble they got yelled at, they got spankings; when I did, only one of my parents would talk to me, ask me what was I attempting to do, why it's wrong/dangerous. When I got to school, I noticed I was more sensitive to things, at naptime I would just crawl under my mat to shake and cry. One of my teachers used to take me to the bathroom to wash my face and try to calm me down. I wouldn't protest because I couldn't talk. After a few weeks she finally asked what I would like to do, so I grabbed my big heavy coat I always went to school with and slept under that. I still couldn't sleep but it helped. I used to punch other kids too for touching me and not getting off when I asked. I never played with other kids on the playground, I'd just sift through the pebbles there looking to increase my rock collection, which was all limestone. (ticked my dad off I wouldn't put anything else in it.)

I was never seen as a trouble kid, though. I came into prekindergarden already reading, I may just doodle or sleep in class, but I never failed any assignment. (I would teach myself at home) The school kept trying to get me to skip grades, but my parents felt I was bullied enough without jumping up to kids 2 yrs older than me.

And no matter how hard I tried to act like everyone else, they always bullied me. I didn't have any friends. I don't know exactly when it happened, but in middle school my feeling of different switched to completely alien. I'd open my mouth and no one would understand me (not even my parents), my needs were completely different from those around me, I just couldn't feel any connection to humanity at all. I still have problems with this.

Goodness, it's pretty obvious I'm on the spectrum. But I grew up in the nineties in a very poor town. Got the being missed trifecta: minority, female, early nineties. Didn't get a diagnosis until March of this year.

Oh well.

I heard this as well. For me, I think it was a combination of things. My family wanted me to be normal. They hoped that I would snap out of whatever what impacting me. They tried to get me involved in social activities. They encouraged me to do things that I was uncomfortable with (even though I failed often). They didn’t want to acknowledge that I was possibly different.

As I like to say, I grew up, trying to live a neurotypical lifestyle with neurotypical aspirations.

This approach had both positives and negatives.

On the negative side, it led to a series of disappointments. And near constant anxiety/depression. Beginning when I was quite young.

On the positive side, it forced me to stretch beyond my abilities. I don’t believe I would be functioning so well as an adult, if they had simply “packed it in”.

This (particularly the bolded part). Even I knew I was different when I was 5, but it wasn't until many years later at the age of 24 that I actually found that it was AS all the time. But...I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s when ASDs were not nearly as understood as they are today. My parents chalked it up to me being a weird kid.

I can remember when I was in sixth grade, around the time the James Cameron Titanic movie came out, and being absolutely engrossed in everything about the Titanic. To the point where the kids around me didn't want me around because that's all I talked about and was interested in. My friends were more interested in getting their first kisses, but I wasn't even anywhere remotely interested in that.

I'm 27, going on 28 now, it's not any easier. And you're right, it really never does end. You just become more self-aware.

That's pretty much what happened to me. I started getting picked on and mocked from practically the 1st day of school. I was told that I had "Cindy germs." I spent YEARS trying to understand what I had done to a whole class full of kids I had never laid eyes on to make them make fun of me. I think I finally nailed it. They were picking up on my Aspie traits, but they weren't sophisticated enough to know that. So they just said I had germs.