Did any of you had a relatively normal childhood?

I'm in my mid 30s, self-diagnosed and working on getting some help. My parents were/are unstable, divorced when I was 6 and as a result I moved and changed schools a lot (I went to 9 different elementary schools, 1 middle school and 2 high schools). I was always able to make friends with someone, usually the geeky kids, but never really kept in touch if I moved.

I was hyperlexic and spent a lot of time with books. My grandfather was an engineer and would give his old computer stuff to my mom, so I had access to Commodore 64 computers from the age of 5. I was ok at BASIC programming by the age of 9, but mostly I liked to go through the hundreds of floppy disks (my grandad was an OG software pirate) looking for games and other interesting stuff.

I was a class clown all throughout my grade school career, acting out on almost a daily basis and getting bad attention from teachers. Looking back, I did these things because I thought they would impress my friends but it just made me a target for bullies, including some teachers. I kept it up anyway because it got some chuckles.

I rarely did any homework (too many books, games, diversions at home) but could ace tests. Because of this I would get middling-but-passing grades until my junior year in high school when I started thinking about getting into colleges and decided to force myself to put the effort in.

Also, every year we had to take state standardized exams from K-10. The highest score was the 99th percentile which I scored every year, except my Sophomore year when I made a 98. During elementary and middle school, scoring high on these tests qualified you for extra curricular activities and groups which I participated in. My teachers mostly were in disbelief that I was part of the "talented and gifted" group, based on my poor grades and shenanigans in class. I actually had one teacher try to send me to the office for "lying" about it, humiliating me in front of my 7th grade history class.

Issues with looking people in the eye, appropriate emotional responses to every day, low-level bullshit that other people lay on you... I'm struggling more with that stuff now than I did as a kid. When I was a kid, I stared everyone straight in the eye (uncomfortably) and was completely oblivious about my social interactions. Ignorance was bliss, of a sort. As a young professional those issues became more apparent and troublesome. Looking back on my long history of weirdness, it is only recently that I realized it was all part of my disease.

/r/aspergers Thread