Long before I was diagnosed at the relatively late age of 16, I knew I was different from most other kids. Most other kids liked to play very social games like tag, jumping rope (single and double-dutch), house, and kickball, while I liked to quietly play pretend on my own. While the other kids begrudgingly went along with the concept of homework, I openly questioned it. When a teacher would make a mistake, I had no reservations about correcting them, unlike the other kids in my class. If a book I’d been assigned to read for school was not interesting to me, I would drop it without hesitation, even if that meant falling behind (Bridge to Terabithia being a notable example, with its blurb describing a mystical adventure but its pages containing a story of boring kids playing pretend in the woods…a freaking bait-and-switch that piece of trash…). While other kids kind of accepted school as forced unpaid labor with more work to do after they finally let you leave, I questioned why when the work a child does at school goes completely unpaid, it’s fine, but adults being forced to work for no pay is slavery. I was always picked on by the other kids for reasons completely unknown to me, I couldn’t even fathom why anyone would be so mean to someone who barely says two words to them and mainly keeps to themself. I couldn’t find anyone to really connect and relate to, no one who shared my interests or understood the world on my “wavelength”. Sometimes, I thought that, like Superman, I was some alien who had been sent to Earth as a baby…or maybe I was a mutant, like the X-Men (the latter isn’t so far off, if you think about it).
Society makes it abundantly clear to you from a young age that you’re different if you happen to have been born autistic in any capacity. The way both adults and other kids treat you, the difficulties you have in finding friends who share your interests, the fact that you question things other people seem to take for granted, and even the fact that you play differently than the other kids. You may not have any kind of medical diagnosis, but everyone around you makes a point to highlight how different you are…mostly in the context of what a bad thing it is for you to be different at all.
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