What flags did you miss before you were diagnosed?

[HidinginPlainSight]

So many that it's hard to believe it went unnoticed:

- Meltdowns dismissed as being moody
- Bullied, mercilessly, for being detached (spacey)
- Many sensory sensitivities (too many to list)
- In the gifted program with poor grades (eventually got kicked out)
- Repetitive behavior to the point of annoying teachers (Their solution was to sit me in a corner, in grade 3 for nearly the entire year)
- Many difficulties socializing (see point 2 and for the teacher's solutions see point 5)
- The ability to retain an amazing amount of useless information. For example, most kids were into hockey (live in Canada), but the way I got into it was to memorize the statistics
- Inability to make eye-contact. A teacher once made me have a meltdown by forcing me look her in the eye when getting in trouble. This just caused me to be in more trouble. (I had a lot of line books)
- No shortages of obsessions then as now.
- Inability to follow many rules

Those are just the most obvious, there is plenty of other things that the doctors should have noticed. (I was in fact taken to doctors who diagnosed me with "emotional problems")

In the defense of the system and my parents, by the time I was a teenager, I had made much of this very hard to notice. I understood how to make people leave me alone and even how to make them like me. I became social and many thought it was a source of happiness, but really it was simply a source of exhaustion. I never really related with the friends or girlfriends that I made and never really held them as particularly important. I suppressed doing the things that I liked to do in an effort to be "normal" and that is a regret.

 

[Jojo_LB]

Oh my talk about kissing.. I thought it was gross too! I would look at people do it and think to myself, "Ew. I don't want another person's saliva on me. No thank you."

I didn't hit teachers, but starting in the 4th grade, I started getting a lot more sassy with them.

I did enjoy hitting boys though. I don't anymore, thank goodness.

 

[Tom]

There were very many. But it wasn't till (as an adult) I was researching because of an autistic nephew & brother-in-law that I knew what the red flags were.

One that came to mind right away was how exhausting just a short time in crowded spaces was. How all the sights and sounds were disorientating.

 

[Aspychata]

omg, kissing and repulsed by-- opened up the floodgates, lol. Truthfully, l can be repulsed by people who think they need me physically. l don't need you, so l don't get your interest in me. Thanks forum for making me feel "NORMAL" , because l am normal in a truthfully dysfunctional world

 

[Aspychata]

l defintely was to tied into people's emotions, it started with my brother. l was stalked by a pervert by 1st grade, l made the decision to call the police when l was out with my girlfriend (first grade, no lie) at playland in san francisco, l don't know how l had the smarts to ask someone to call the police, but a guy was following me and my friend around

 

[Adora]

I always been very shy even as a small child.

Always had little to no eye contact with people and it always makes me uncomfortable.

Get fixiated with special interests where it would consume my life like drawing, doll collecting,Greek Mythology,Comic books and book trilogies like Lord of the Rings where I would constantly go on about them to people and not realise they were getting bored with me.

Miss a lot of social cues like sarcasm and not knowing the difference between someone just being friendly and someone being flirtatious with me.

Would pace up and down the house while thinking and didn’t know that this can be considered a stim.

Walking on my tippy toes and my grandmother use to called me her ballerina while my aunt made fun of how I walked.

Easily startled by loud noises and hate popping sounds and use to hate the sound of the vacuum cleaner.

Extremely clumsy and didn’t know how to tie my shoelaces at the age of eight and didn’t know how to buckle a seatbelt.

Disorganised and have problems in this area even now.

There are probably were other signs but these are the ones that I can think of when I look back at my life before I was diagnosed and looking back there were a few.

 

[Tony Ramirez]

There were very many. But it wasn't till (as an adult) I was researching because of an autistic nephew & brother-in-law that I knew what the red flags were.

One that came to mind right away was how exhausting just a short time in crowded spaces was. How all the sights and sounds were disorientating.

View attachment 53704

Wearing headphones and listening to my own music helps greatly in crowds like that.

 

[Aspychata]

Problems tying my shoes also, my parents became exasperated. l suck my thumb until quite old, maybe stim behavior until l was slapped extremely hard by father. Remember being punished and my crayons were taken away from me, climbed the bookshelf to get them and of course it fell down on me.l remember not caring about having friends in high school. l thought skiing was way more fun then a boyfriend. My thinking seems off, but not to me.

 

[Jojo_LB]

Problems tying my shoes also, my parents became exasperated. l suck my thumb until quite old, maybe stim behavior until l was slapped extremely hard by father. Remember being punished and my crayons were taken away from me, climbed the bookshelf to get them and of course it fell down on me.l remember not caring about having friends in high school. l thought skiing was way more fun then a boyfriend. My thinking seems off, but not to me.

i hate seeing things like this.. like when parents, guardians, caretakers are so harsh with children who don't do typical children things. It makes me flinch. I get trying to teach a child certain things like treating others with respect, correcting them when they've harmed someone, boundaries, etc. But harmless habits and mannerisms, differences in development, reactions to things they don't understand, etc., I just don't get how anyone could punish children for such things. I empathize and sympathize deeply with this, because I was mistreated as a child too, by parents, guardians, and peers, for things I did that made them uncomfortable for irrational reasons.

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

Being uncomfortable in a group
Stimming (i thought i was childishly fidgeting, and taught myself not to)
Overstimulation
Spacing out from said overstimulation
Meltdowns... Big time
Black and white thinking

 

[Tony Ramirez]

Being uncomfortable in a group

I concord that tonight by going to a small pray group at the Church I am attending. To Heck with that Bogus AS test I scored a stupid score of 20.

 

[Nauti]

Obsessive - compulsive bookworm, as a kid.
Forever odd.
Bad at small talk.
Took to performing instead of relating.
Change and expressing myself is very hard.
Highly literate.
I just want to keep doing the same thing(s) and learning new things, new skills is very hard.
People are, mostly, very hard to be around.
People seem to abuse me and take advantage of me a lot, unless I avoid most people most of the time.
Separation between intense feeling side and logical analysing side, very pronounced.
Maturity delays, very pronounced.
I hate social surprises.
Lots of what appears to be "normal" human interaction, is lost on me.
I look, from the outside, in, in terms of social circles, even in my own family.
Absorbing information and learning is one of my foremost pleasures in life.
I only, really get on with other Aspies and even then, I don't like relating much, except with my partner (also Aspie).
I've had a lot of mental health problems, intestinal problems, processing problems, made bad social choices, had difficulty in expressing myself and overwhelming emotional pain throughout my life.
I'm exceedingly stubborn snd never one to "go along with the crowd".

 

[Lycoris]

1. Severe sensory issues: aversion to touch, strong lights, and loud noises.
2. Avoiding eye contact 95% of the time.
3. Severe stimming: Rocking back and forth, tapping my fingers in a really specific fashion 100% of the time.
4. Monotonous voice.
5. Inability to identify emotions.
6. Quite a lot of shutdowns.
7. Aversion of social occasions.
8. Getting very irritated with something in my schedule changes.
9. Not understanding any jokes ever.

These are not ranked in a specific order, but the first one is the worst, and the rest are sitting comfortably together in terms of levels of annoyance.

 

[VAW]

A lot of the "Hi, I'm new here" posts mention past signs that they should have recognized. It made me think about the flags I saw in myself but didn't recognize as signs of being on the spectrum.

The big one was when I told a friend of mine that I just watch normal people and do what they do.

Another is that fact that I've known since I was 14 that I am physically incapable of sitting still.

I didn't know what masking and stimming were, so the signs went unrecognized. After the diagnosis, a lot of other things clicked, but those two signs have been in plain view for decades.

What were your obvious-after-the-fact signs?

Reading these comments helps me so much. I missed EVERY red flag my son had. Everything people comment as far as their own red flags looking back my son had. Being a parent of a son with Asperger's is very hard because instead of seeing the flag of not connecting I thought he was shy, the flag of acting out I thought was boys will be boys and he is just being a brat, the flag of being intelligent I looked at as he is intelligent beyond his years so he cannot have a problem such as autism (Asperger's) Was so hard for me to understand what he was going through or understand when he was telling me how he felt. Like once he had a melt down and said I feel like nothing is real. I had no idea what that meant. Didn't understand his anxiety about going out. IT wasn't until the doctor's said he has very high anxiety, and then another doctor told me he thought he may have Asperger's because his two sons had it and he can recognize it in my son, then another doctor said he had one of the worst cases of anxiety he had ever seen. He was 29 when we had him diagnosed and at his testing they said he was very intelligent, but...his anxieties are high and he had avoidant personality disorder, and mild Asperger's. I think the hardest part is without connecting to people, it was even hard for him to say anything about what was going on to us. He sat in his room most days. Sometimes talking to him, he wouldn't say anything back. He still does that at times. The difference between people with Asperger's and people without Asperger's is: We don't know what it is like to have Asperger's so it is hard to understand the difference of how you's feel or why you do something when it isn't in our brain to do that or not do that. I have really learned so much on this site, I just wish I would have had a site like this when my son was growing up and could better understand his needs.