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A question I often ask is 'Why am I so lucky?'

 

Now I'm not trying to sound like arrogant person who looks down on those who've had a hard life (although I prefer not to hear such stories from people as it overload me with being upset) but all things considered compared to the stories that I have heard on this and other sites plus in real life and in books (about Autism) on the whole I've had an easy life.

 

Consider this...

 

When I was nine years old I was diagnosed with HFA, and then later AS after the condition became better known among professionals and teachers.

 

This was I may add due to my (back then) violent outbursts towards other kids in school when I felt that they had cheesed me off or had broken the school rules, like some kind of superhero would with criminals.

 

When I was ten I went to an Autistic school which at the time I hated due to the abundance of LFA kids there, however I do have fund memories of the trips my class (I was in when became the AS class) would make to museums, stately homes, the library, the cafes, nature trails and best of all Summer Camp.

 

All things considered I was a lot better off there in my early teenage years than in a so called 'normal' school as I (and others) weren't picked on and would learn in a relatively stress free environment.

 

Later I went to a school for kids who had been in hospital for a long time, were in Special Ed or quite a few other reason that I can't think of right now.

 

There we did mainstream school work and exams.

 

However the school was quite small so we only attended half of the day, and so many of us would (with the consent of our parents) study subjects of interest rather than the whole curriculum, all spread out over the week, while some of the rest was done as part of our homework.

 

Later when I was sixteen I left home (of my own choice) and went to a group home down south for a number of years, before moving on.

 

I would have left earlier if I could but the sad truth was that was all lacked the kind of opportunities such as supported living and outreach support (rather than care) at that time, so I told myself that it was 'better than nothing'.

 

When I left I went to a rest-bite unit for a while until they could find somewhere more permanent, which they did.

 

As it stands I was an only child, come from a loving home where my dad earned quite a large wage before retiring and you could say I had the perfect childhood.

 

I have known other people who's home situations were very much the same (ie loving family and lots of money) but they had been sent to mainstream schools (in some cases even after being diagnosed) where they got bullied or when they became adults had no support, barring family.

 

I also read that it is a lot harder to get diagnosed with ASD or AS when you are an adult (or sometimes with children) nowadays, partly I think this is due to some people cheating the benefit system and so they had to make it harder for them to get 'free money' (which is what benefits are when you boil it down) or other kinds of special treatment.

 

So why am I so lucky, while others in the exact same situation as me aren't

.

 

 

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I often wonder if I'm in the right place when I read the problems that a lot of the people who post here have. I've had a pretty "normal" life in most ways for decades, with some depression, stress and anxiety, so I suppose the Autistic Spectrum is so wide that it goes right from people with major problems who can barely function, to those who can get by but whose life could have been a bit better without it. Those of us who get to our 50s before even having the slightest clue we may have it, are obviously at the milder end, or we'd have fallen apart long ago. In my case, I think I have one significant problem I was aware of in a way, but that I've never understood the reason for, and I'm starting to think there may be issues I've never been aware of that others may have noticed, but never told me about.

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Same here Confused Traveller... normal life, college, marriage, jobs... but something not quite in tune with the people around me. I reached my conclusion of Asperger's through researching some of the odd behaviours of my parents, and problems my siblings and I had... the result was enlightening, and everything fitted into place when I received my diagnosis.

 

Only then I could see the differences in me that people had occasionally commented on through out my life... the lack of eye contact, the super-memory, and the attention to detail. These were not just chance observations but part of the way I was made.

Edited by Nell

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