Hi everyone,
I know there are lots of posts on here like this but I wanted to share my story to see who can relate...
I have felt different my whole life. My earliest memories of childhood are feelings of awkwardness, social isolation, and quietness. I was an obsessive child (keeping snakes, Giant African Land Snails, reading and reading and reading into bats & frogs, Ancient Egypt, historical events, etc), and I was far more interested in playing with ants and worms in the garden than playing with children my own age.
As I got a little older I became more social, but never comfortable with socialising. I preferred to be alone but would spend time with neighbourhood kids, but be more able to converse with their parents than with them. The same applied to school, where I would stand at the teachers' desks and chat with them rather than sit with the kids. Teachers often told my parents how much they loved having me in class, and that I was "wise beyond my years" or "very special."
There were difficulties in my childhood which did not add up to people's perception of me. My handwriting was illegible and I found great distress in my teachers' disappointment with this. I could not ride a bike, and would fall into bushes while my family would laugh and say things like "we thought you were clever!" My capabilities clearly did not extend to good bodily coordination.
On the other hand, I was always beyond my years in reading, spelling, and writing (though not handwriting). Given a creative writing task at age nine, I wrote a story from the perspective of a survivor in the Rwandan genocide. My teacher asked me how I knew about this event, and I thought it was obvious that kids would know about such events in detail. Of course now I realise it was a traumatic story not appropriate for children of my age to understand, but I was always a voracious reader with a strong imagination. In my first year of secondary school I wrote several poems for English class. My teacher pulled me out of class the following day and asked where I had got them from. She did not believe that I had written them, and even informed my parents that I had "copied the poems." Fortunately, they were about my grandfather's passing and unique to my perspective. I was then treated like some kind of genius, but was hopeless at maths and chemistry which my parents could not ever fathom.
The beginning of high school was extremely difficult for me, as was the start of college and university. I had friends in each of these places before, but was incapable of making new ones each time I entered the new environment. My friends from the past felt more and more circumstantial, and I wondered what I could actually contribute to any friends circle. I am now 30 and have a few close friends, but I find it impossible to make new ones. I am not generally socially *anxious*, I am socially awkward. If a stranger came to me with one of my special interests I would easily talk to them for hours, but if a stranger came with small talk I would crumble and mull over every detail of the conversation after it happened.
Now, the biggest obstacle I have as an adult is my special interests. People tell me I change my mind a lot. I can wake up one day and say I want to be a candlemaker, then learn every single detail and method of working with wax and spend a lot of money in preparing for it. Then, a month later, I will say I want to be a therapist, and apply for schools and read for hours a day on therapeutic methods and theory. I never lose interest in these obsessions, but they do get put on the shelf for new ones every few months. This is a problem because they are not just interests but something I want to create a whole universe with at the point of interest. I am often willing to give everything up in order to centre the special interest, which causes huge disruptions and often distress in my life. I often feel lost, worthless, depressed and stupid because of it.
There's a short insight to my story. I would like to pursue a diagnosis perhaps to help assuage some of the guilt and blame I put on myself, and give myself and those around me a greater understanding of how intense and hopeless life can feel. I would love to hear from others who have experienced something similar. 
