I was "normal" before?

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I've been from one extreme to the other and back again.

As I grew up I gradually understood I was different somehow. This got more and more pronounced until my teenage years when I was suicidal, self-harming and absolutely literally saw myself as some kind of not-quite-human monster. Bad times. I had no diagnosis though so I couldn't really ever understand what the difference was or how to handle it.

Then, by the time I went to uni at 18 I sorta told myself to stop trying to find answers to impossible questions and just focus on mimicking the normal people. I gradually got sorta ok at it - enough to get by short-term with folks. I gradually rewrote the story of my youth into one of overactive imagination combined with standard teenage angst. A coping mechanism maybe. I still had moments of self-reflection and at 25 or so I thought maybe I was a phycopath and had a very private minor breakdown while I struggled to figure out if I should seek help or keep my conclusion to myself.

Then at 30 I read a book that described growing up into adulthood with HFA and my world imploded as I came to terms with how much this explained, and a year later had a pretty solid clear-cut diagnosis of ASD.

I always knew, at some level, just didn't have a name for it.