'When did you first realise that you were 'different'?'

(...There is no "random topics" thread, just now... and I am certainly not here much and so I miss a lot, here... but I just noticed that Martian Tom is 'away', now.)

(I would like to write more than just saying "Thank You so very much for sharing your time with us, and Best Wishes"... but do not know what else to write apart from that...)

Ugh what a horrible woman! I swear a lot of teachers don't even like kids, they just go into teaching to feel superior to everyone else.

...It would be interesting to start a "PE" Thread. For myself however, see my UserName most of all. I was picked last, and laughed at, and bullied, even by Teachers who could never quite give a logical excuse to exclude me. But I still liked PE and Team Sports, I was a good swimmer, athletic, long-legged (!), and I often trounced, dodged, and weaved my way to winning a lot... until at the end they said for no reason "...that doesn't count!" just as I say...

...But when it came to Parent's Days or "Open Days", I was often the first to be thought of and called to represent the entire School. Go figure...!

I should hope that Adults were watching and that this led to some effective discipline...? Apart from that, the two boys were genuinly afraid of catching the very virulant disease of "Respect and Common Decency"...! I should also prefer that in the end that they caught that, and then went on to infect as many other persons as possible...?  

Not the first time that I realised that I was different.

But it really emphasised it.

I was in my 'special' school that was in the hospital grounds.  When two 'normal' boys from the hospital joined the school for a day.  

The really reacted negatively.  They openly called us a bunch of freaks and weirdos.  And refused to have anything to do with us, as if they were afraid that they would catch something from 'us'.

As a child two sports were pushed in our house.  Hockey and cricket.  My parents both played hockey competitively and cricket was the summer game for kids.

At school I had some skill for athletics, but I wasn't a thin child, my physique was tank level, so i excelled at rugby and any other activity that a kid who was heavy, could do to mangle a bunch of people while trying to grab a ball.  At the time I thought to myself what sport is my body suited to?  The answer was any sport where i could charge down a person and tackle them.  I did well at rugby (also a lot of the people who bullied me did it, so payback was rewarded on the field).  Eventually we moved to hockey, but i could already hold my own at that, having been given a stick aged 3 or 4.

i think my main embarassment came when having a shower and getting changed.  i never liked doing that in front of other people.  Also the school showers were either freezing cold or melt your skin off hot. 

Sorry about the special schools bit.  I kind of assumed from your inferrence that the school was of the hospital variety but didn't want to push on the subject in case it had been a far from good experience.  I know the term special runs the whole spectrum from gifted to borstal, or did back then.  Nowadays it seems from an educational context to describe the place that you send people with learning and attention disorders.

After reading through those I obviously had to read school books at school, but also the usual stuff, ie, Peter and Jane.  The schools problem was that I finished them all very quickly, also finished all Famous Five and Secret Seven books not long after. 

Beyond that I dont remember what i read.  I know my parents had three bookshelves rammed with books ranging from interesting to mundane (my father had a degree in economics so you can imagine what some of those books contained).   I remember reading through most of them.  Never had much of an interest in the economic ones though. ;) 

I read a book on knitting at some point and had my gran show me the practical side.  That was what I did when I went to her house.  Knitted line after line with no real interest in actually doing anything besides that.  She used to use the patches I made to make blankets for us.  They also had a set of Encyclopedias, lots of religious manuals and always magazines like Nat Geo, on their shelves. 

My main friend is an Aspie.  I never knew he was until he was formally diagnosed.  I was just drawn to him because we could sit down and have pretty heavy conversations.  We met on a college course, maybe 16 years ago, but our friendship can be quite hard, since we can have such crazily opposite views.  Also he thinks I have PDA (and I think he's very correct on that assumption).  He also has other issues.  He is very driven in his life.  I seem to be the opposite.

A new word.  I had a look at that and their are some correllations between my experience and that syndrome. :)

I still have this particular compulsion.  Nowadays its very useful having a compulsion to read anything and everything, especially when food related and you have severe allergies.  I have also read random items in toilets over the years and am apparently annoying when i go to new places due to always studying important information that everyone else ignores (fire plans, evacuation plans, any other safety information).

I just used to try running with it all the way.  I never understood why the others were always shouting at me.

Or I'd charge at goal, thinking it a bit odd that the defenders weren't challenging me, having no idea that the ref had blown for offside yet again!

changing rooms

Eeek! The ribbing about my physique, sexual innuendos that went over my head, echoey tiled acoustics, and wet-towel whippings for having cost the other lads the game, were horrible experiences.  It still puts me off going swimming or joining yoga/pilates classes to this day. 

Like many of us here I was also useless at most competitive sports especially anything that required co-ordination, hitting balls with bats etc was and still is very hard for me. Plus I could never see the point, I'm one of the least competitive people you could meet. There was one other horror associated with P.E. which I hated as much as the sports themselves... the changing rooms! So much of the bullying I experienced in school was in those wretched places where mob rules and there was barely a teacher to be seen.

Oops... the comment above yours was meant to go here, Moggsy!

I used to push the dining chairs under the table and lie on my back under there. I got hold of some chalk and drew a screen (with stars and planets on it) and a control panel, and hid out in my "spaceship" for hours

strange, cos I am actually pretty claustrophobic, but I always felt safe under there!

Yup, me too .... I used to sit and read the Encyclopedia Brittanica at the weekend. When at my father's house I was often found with my head buried in his dictionary of the origins of words, reading it like a novel.

I could read a short paperback novel by the time I started school (aged 5) and was an avid devourer of factual books on whatever my special interest happened to be at the time. I always supposed that my precocious reading abilities were simply the result of having an English teacher dad who took the trouble to  teach me, but maybe not!

Thanks, Yttrium

Before I started school, mum took a morning job at the shop on the corner of our road in Putney, and my widowed gran - who lived downstairs - used to look after me.  She'd be downstairs doing her washing or something, and I'd be upstairs alone in our sitting room.  One of my favourite places was the bay window in that  room.  It had a curtain that could be drawn across it, so I could get into that small space and not be seen.  There, I would spend hours looking out of the windows into the street - at the people walking along, and the cars passing by on the Lower Richmond Road.  I watched planes fly over.  We were on the flight path between Heathrow and Europe,  so they were often quite large and loud as they passed overhead.  I used to pretend that I was a pilot, and that window was my cockpit.  The glass had some small kinks or bubbles in it, and if I lined one up with someone in the street, they would suddenly look very fat, which always amused me.  Many years later, I read Jane Eyre, and had a spark of memory early on with the scene where Jane does the same thing - hiding behind a curtain in a window seat, to read a book.

I remember that I decided I wanted to do joined up writing when I was 4 or 5, so I decided to teach myself and started doing it. I got told off and was told I wasn't allowed to do it yet. At 7 or so, we were all taught how to do joined up writing, but by then I refused to have anything to do with it. I could write very nicely by then, and wasn't going to spoil that by following a bunch of arbitrary rules which just made it look untidy. Happily, thwacking the kids wasn't the done thing by then, so my punishment was only the withholding of the "berol handwriting pen" that was handed to each of my classmates when their joined up writing reached a certain standard :-)

I've always been a stubborn little so-and-so, and the stand-off between me and the teacher lasted until 2 weeks before the end of the term, when they gave me the pen anyway, despite my refusal to play the game. I still print to this day, and am often complimented on my lovely handwriting ;-)

Going back to school days, I think the one thing that really stands out after the fact is the sheer number of times I got told to "look at me when I'm talking to you". My eye contact is pretty "normal" now (whatever that means) but I guess it wasn't back then.

I also never had any natural respect for authority, thinking it illogical to respect someone just because they are a teacher. I suspect I spoke to everyone as an equal. I remember often getting told off for being "rude" when I thought I was just asking a question, and soon discovered that any attempt to explain that I was only asking a question just made matters worse (that is "talking back", and is rude and disrespectful, apparently). I guess I was missing something in tone or body language to cause these problems.

Hated any team sports.  First because I was hopeless at them.  Second, because I could never understand the rules as others instinctively seemed to.  I thought the principle purpose of football was to score goals.  So, whenever I (somehow) got the ball, I just used to try running with it all the way.  I never understood why the others were always shouting at me.  I didn't realise you were supposed to pass.

I always did cross-country on sports day, because you were just left to it - as long as you were back in time to shower and get the bus back.  I spent many lonely hours happily running around Wimbledon Common.  Later, in my 20s, distance running became my only sport.

Trainspotter said:

and being left handed was also subject to punishment.

Due to a Biblical miss-transliteration (with translations involving words) people were given the impression that being left-handed was evil rather than good, so ruler impressions across the back of the left hand were among other tortures used to convert children to using the right hand to write. The incorrect transliteration comes from Matthew 6:3~4; involving, "Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men," as follows:

3. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4. so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret , will reward you.

When the correct form driven 'word/s for word' transliteration from the Greek texts, as are without numerations, is as follows:

Of  you  then,  when  doing  kind  deeds,  do  not  let  to  know  the  left  of  you  what  doings  are  the right  of  you,  so   that  may  be  of  you  this  way  kind  deeds  in  as  such  private;  and  the  Father you  the  seer  in  as  much  private  will  reward  so  you.