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

Don't know if it was an indication of ASD, but finishing an entire set of Encyclopedia's aged 5 and asking my parents about covalent bonds might have been an early one.  I read anything back then.  Fiction, fact, everything in between.  I never had dyspraxia.   In fact I was the kid they couldnt keep in nursery.  I went out of childproof gates, over 9ft walls, over a couple of wooden gates.  i was the nightmare kid that could manipulate a situation and then spring free from confinement.  If I didnt manage to escape i'd just hide out somewhere in the playground.  im sure they were all close to a nervous breakdown for the year I spent there. ;)

Special schools didn't really exist back then (70's) and my parents even to this day have a view that their is nothing wrong with me, so going to a school for gifted children was never going to be on the books.  What they did do was ensure my life was rich with experiences, like holidays abroad for a month, speaking languages abroad, trips to museums, etc.  So I cant really complain.  But in school it wasn't good.  Outside school I made do.

Don't know if it was an indication of ASD, but finishing an entire set of Encyclopedia's aged 5 and asking my parents about covalent bonds might have been an early one.  I read anything back then.  Fiction, fact, everything in between.  I never had dyspraxia.   In fact I was the kid they couldnt keep in nursery.  I went out of childproof gates, over 9ft walls, over a couple of wooden gates.  i was the nightmare kid that could manipulate a situation and then spring free from confinement.  If I didnt manage to escape i'd just hide out somewhere in the playground.  im sure they were all close to a nervous breakdown for the year I spent there. ;)

Special schools didn't really exist back then (70's) and my parents even to this day have a view that their is nothing wrong with me, so going to a school for gifted children was never going to be on the books.  What they did do was ensure my life was rich with experiences, like holidays abroad for a month, speaking languages abroad, trips to museums, etc.  So I cant really complain.  But in school it wasn't good.  Outside school I made do.

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!

I've just been reading your autobiography in the other section.  

We have a few things in common.

I also went to Sheffield Hallam.  Although it was still known by its old name of Sheffield city polytechnic.  I messed up my final year, partly by being emotionally unstable and the only female I could get along with was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic.  Living with her took its toll.

I find it difficult to communicate with normal stable people.  It's the unusual personalities that I feel relaxed with.

__Pathfinder__ said:

finishing an entire set of Encyclopedia's aged 5

It sounds as if you may have been hyperlexic.  I had the same kind of precocious reading ability too, and it fits with other things which I discovered from my Mum's contribution to my autism assessment. In adulthood, I still have a very strong compulsion to read any and all words that I see, to the point of it being an annoying distraction sometimes. Even when I already know what the words will say, I'm still inexorably drawn to them (e.g. back of toiletry bottles when I'm sat on the loo, all the details on bus tickets, beer-mats on a pub wall...)

I will have to disagree about special schools not existing in the 70s.

I was sent to a 'special' school in 1972.  It was special in the sense that we were all emotionally damaged.  The head of the school was a psychiatrist ( he had his certificate behind glass in his office).  The school had no academic curriculum.