The anxiety was somewhat relieved after my brain matured. Most people's brains are not mature until age 25-35. Mine took 5 years longer than average.
Caring about what peers think in a desperate way is part of being a teenager/young adult as science shows:
This supremely human characteristic makes peer relations not a sideshow but the main show. Some brain-scan studies, in fact, suggest that our brains react to peer exclusion much as they respond to threats to physical health or food supply. At a neural level, in other words, we perceive social rejection as a threat to existence. Knowing this might make it easier to abide the hysteria of a 13-year-old deceived by a friend or the gloom of a 15-year-old not invited to a party. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/teenage-brains/dobbs-text/2
Being a late-bloomer is not always a bad thing because I never was told that I'm great or would succeed in life but either my parents, because they hated my autism because they did not know I had it; so they denigrated my behavior and feelings in order to "improve me/ motivate me", I guess. The motivational denigration was not true of my peers, most used me as the butt of jokes, right in front of me. Saying I was a "retard" from the age of 12 upto 18 this is what I heard and saw. The late-bloomer advantage is that you do not start off in life thinking you are a know-it-all, it humbles you so you can be open to learning at any age.
I started trying to figure out what was "wrong" with me [because everyone said there was something wrong with me--everyone] at an early age. I read every non-engineering book my parents had in the house [my father is an engineer a very typical profession of those in the BAP (broader autism phenotype)--he passed up big raises and/or promotions at work because he did not want to have to manage people so...] to find out my problem. They had no serious psychology books/textbooks in their house until my mother went back to college.
So, I started going to the public libraries to help find a description of myself and find a cure. This, sadly, had me coming in contact with people. I was able to handle the professionals, the librarians, but the men and boys scared me to death --I found way too many mastrubating in the library or exposing themselves to me -it made the public look like the den of monsters; it confirmed my fears. (librarians were not in my list of monsters--so there was hope for humanity-a tiny bit). The books I did find were either "motivational" books or textbooks that were way over my head as a 12+ year-old. It took a college education to help me read psychiatry textbooks.
Still, I did not find myself in those books (because aspergers was not added to the DSM until 1994). The quote from National Geographic was only something I found recently. Finding about who I was neurologically, was highly obscured by professional confusion itself, apparently. I went to at least 5 psychologists/psychiatrists over the years, but none of them recognized my aspergers[autism] until a crisis in my life where I was locked up in mental wards after being jailed for defending myself from my father's beatings of me [due to an autistic meltdown I had-- I did not touch him --he tackled me and started punching my face/head apparently to knock me out. But my bruises did not show up until ~24 hours later: therefore I was the person who assaulted him by biting his arm as it covered my mouth and nose in an arm-lock[?] I could not breath, seriously. After my diagnosis at the clinic (where finally they interviewed me and my parents about my life up to that point, then a panels of psychologists and psychiatrists DXd me) both of my parents apologized for the beating and the 40 years of abuse I got for being autistic.].
The motivational books actually hurt me deeply because I saw that I was not amenable to what I thought everyone else was. This is part of why I reacted as I did to this thread. Panaceas make me angry, because it is not "pan" for me[pan=all], I was the "odd one out" (until I met other autistics online). Being a fan of skepticism also primed me to dislike panaceas --cure-alls are an indication of pseudoscience. Telling people that "everyone can be cured" makes some people like me so discouraged that they self-harm, self-medicate, or kill themselves. "If everyone can be cure by following 'these 5 steps' why can't I ?" " I must be a hopeless case" people think. I do not think this now that I have seen the whole picture and have seen cure-alls/motivational books debunked several times. [[[BTW I thank anyone that has read all of what I have said here--I know it is long and confusing --my autisticness gives me certain tendencies especially to follow long tangents etc. .]]]