27 years old.
I guess I'm fairing ok. Until now the only time I've even heard about aspergers was an episode of southpark. Maybe going out on a limb here, but I doubt it was a good source of information.
But looking into it some, it does explain a lot of what I do.
I blamed my mother for not accepting my diversity and wanting me to fit in as everybody else... My dad on the other side was quite distant, but always understood that I was "special", and helped me a lot to cope with my diversity (probably inherited from him, which my bet is that he's in the spectrum too).
Truth is that her attempt was a miserable failure, I grew up despising most of those that surround me, for their "mediocrity" (which for me it is a synonym of normality), And never well integrating into the group. Still today I consider cattle most of humanity.
I never integrated at school, I had always one or two close friends with whom I shared passions (be it aquariums, electronics, or other) and had almost no relationship with anybody else.
Granma teach to me to read/write before I was 3, and I did like reading a lot! So by the time I got in primary school I was litteraly surrounded by ignorants, how could I consider these folks my peers. Thus I often found great hostility towards me due to my knowledge being not accepted (e.g. On my first Christmas at school the very fact that most of Santa's myth seemed illogical to me drove me into a crash course with my mates which could not accept the fact that Santa story[1] was simply logical and resisted to death their beliefs. Yes, I got beaten at 6 for denying the existence of Santa!).
High school was my break-point with society, at that point I had grown the idea that besides me, my dad and some of the professors that befriended dad, few other people were worth a more than few pennies for me. The fact that I found TV programming incredibly dull, and thus spent my time on books, drifted me away from most. Why the hell should I care about celebrities, soccer and other trivial non-trascendental things that these guys enjoy... For the most HS had no knowledge to give me, it was meant for thos mediocre ones that weren't able to be educated by themselves, they needed a teacher that said all thing that I already knew.
I left HS 2 years before graduation and got myself into programming (C and assembler). I had an income by the age of 16, I worked at home. at 18 I was out. (I finally got my HS diploma at 28 to be able to get hired at my first non-freelance job).
At work they accepted me professionally, because I was the troubleshooter and I was the one that saved the day when no one else could. Still I never really integrated.
The question that remains unanswered is: Should my mother accepted my diversity and I had gone thru special education, surrounding myself with people I may had related better... things would had been better for me? I still do not have an answer for that and trully I'm not looking for it. I'm fully agnostic so I live better with doubts than potentially wrong convictions.
Is still profoundly believe that negative thoughts have a negative impact on you... Hate and anger harm you.
"We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves." -- Buddha
[1] Dad thought that lying to a child to coerce his behaviour was simply immoral and anti-educative so he debunked my mothers attempts at inculcating Santa's myth in me, which weren't that good anyway, as she never fully convinced me.
