For me, it’s actually a lot more complex than “I’m different from other people.” For a long time growing up, my “differences” weren’t actually seen as differences; rather, they were seen as failures. I was always taught that everything I struggled with, everything I did “wrong,” and every problem I’ve ever had to suffer through were either flaws in who I was, or things brought about by those flaws; no matter what it was, it was always seen as somehow my fault.
Even after learning about autism in 3rd grade, and even after being diagnosed as autistic in high school (junior or senior year, I can’t remember which), it was still pretty difficult for me to see the differences between me being autistic and me being a failure, both because of what was forced on me growing up, and because the people who forced those things on me were people I would unfortunately be stuck with for a few more years, until I left them physically in 2016, and had to get a protection order from in 2018.
Hell, it wasn’t until the summer of 2018 (26 years after this body’s birth) that I finally started to see myself as a person, someone who is allowed to have wants, needs, and feelings. Before that, I saw myself as just a robot in human flesh, a living tool whose only purpose was to serve and obey other people - it wasn’t healthy at all, and the fact that this mindset was ultimately unsustainable led to some pretty bad struggles with identity, even before I started to finally see myself as a person. In any case, I’d say it was about that time that I began to realize that autistic was something I could be in and of itself, rather than autism being just a failure of neurotypicality; by extension, this also meant that I’m not a failed or inferior neurotypical person, but rather, that I am an entirely different type of person altogether.
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