Thoughts From My Unknowingly Autistic Younger Self

The oppressive loneliness and confusion that plagued my teenage years

Throughout my life, I have never had much in terms of friends. My early elementary school years were generally decent in this respect, though things worsened over time as more expectations of how to behave in social situations were placed upon me. The feelings of being different from my peers that I had felt for most of my life only became more and more prominent in my thinking, reinforced by how people treated me.

Looking back now, it is easy to see examples of my autistic traits that impacted the social situations (or lack thereof) I was in. However, I had no such answers at the time, leading me to view myself as a freakish anomaly who would never fit in with people. In this post, I will go through a two things I wrote years ago that relate to this feeling and explain how my life has changed since finding out about my neurodivergence.

I will begin by giving some background information to set the scene for the first one. School was generally a positive experience for me, at least, the academic side of it. But the one thing that made my stomach churn more than anything else was when my teacher announced a group project. Most of the time, students were given the freedom to choose groups themselves, something that probably all of them appreciated. Yet I dreaded this moment because nobody wanted me in their group despite my intelligence, diligence, and organizational ability. Often, I was the one leftover person who had to ask the teacher to help me find a group to work with after everyone else had already chosen one.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

An example of this that I vividly remember was the final group project of my ninth grade. The thing was, this was not just like every other group project. It was intended to incorporate all of our core classes and was evaluated by all four grade nine teachers at my school. Even worse, students could choose anyone in our grade to be in their group, as all three homeroom classes had the same assignment. In other words, it was a BIG DEAL for me.

Just after its announcement on June 4th, 2018, every student except me rushed to join their friends. When I inevitably could not find a group to join, I wrote some reflections on the sad social predicament I had found myself in.

We have to do a stemanities project. It is creating an advertisement. I don’t have a group. No one wants me to be in their group. No one. I’m all alone. Forever. I will fail. This project is stupid. Terrible. I hate it. I have no group. I have no friends. I have no life. I’m doomed forever… I don’t know what to do. I’m just not cool enough, not popular enough. Nobody wants to be my friend. No one cares. At all. And that’s just a truth that I have to live with.

As you can see, I certainly tended to be overly dramatic.¹ I managed to get a group for the project which consisted of two girls who were recent immigrants to Canada that no one else wanted to work with. They did not contribute anything to our project, leaving me struggling to do it myself. It was hard, but I did not blame them, as I knew that they were social outcasts like myself, though they had it even harder by not speaking English as a first language and having to move countries.

That advertisement was probably the worst thing I have ever created. At fourteen years old, I was extremely technologically inept (and I still am, to be honest),² so I lacked the skills and knowledge required to produce a good video. The fact that I had only gotten a phone five months before certainly did not help, as everyone else in my grade had way better tech skills than I did. I was honestly blown away by how engaging, funny, and well-edited the other groups’ videos were, which only made it so much more embarrassing when my video was shown.

An edited screenshot from that video, which I still have access to. The quality is terrible but I did put a decent amount of work into making the cardboard figures and assembling the house.

All of this is to illustrate the fact that being unknowingly autistic kind of sucks. Every other student in my class could see that there was something different about me, and in an environment where conformance to the norm is expected, I was pushed to the side. My autistic traits were enough to mark me as the person nobody wanted to be friends with, but not enough to grant me a diagnosis to explain why such was the case.

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The second example of writing from my teenage self was not one that I wrote in my diary but actually published on the internet. On March 19, 2019, I wrote a post entitled “The girl who has no friends” on a since-deleted social media account of mine. This was in my second semester of grade ten when I was fifteen years old, around two years before I had any idea what autism was. Looking back at it now, I wish that I had added punctuation and done some of the line breaks differently, but I have kept it mostly as is. It says:

My life is great, I'm smart and athletic

I have a place to live and a loving family

Food to eat and a really nice school

But there's an emptiness inside me

That only friends can fill

Every day I sit alone at lunch

The last one picked as a team member

There are times when I feel that nobody cares

Like I simply should just disappear

Everyone's always chatting

While I'm left alone

Not even caring

That I feel really down

I hear [people]³ talking as if there's

Something wrong with me like being shy

Is almost like having leprosy tears fall

From my eyes and I want to run and hide

With nothing else to do

I pull out my computer

Find my favourite song

And begin to sing along

The pain isn't gone

The hurt still is there

But for the moment I feel

As though someone really cares

This pretty much sums up what it was like for me in high school. I knew that I had so much to be thankful for, and I was, but being a loner was hard. Aside from the natural consequences of not having any friends, I was constantly told by other people that I was too quiet, rude, apathetic, and so on. The one main thing that kept me going during this time was my faith and relationship with God. I worked hard at school and tried to be optimistic, but I was so tired of people telling me I had to do better at social interactions. After hearing these things for years, I began to think that I was hopeless and would never be able to make friends.

Photo by Carolina on Unsplash

Then, one random day during my final year of high school, YouTube recommended a video about autism to me. Intrigued, I clicked it and soon found myself watching lots of content from autistic YouTubers. So many of the things they talked about strongly resonated with me, propelling me into full research mode, eager to discover if I could be autistic.

Deciding to apply this label to myself was life-changing. Suddenly, I had an answer for why I was this way. In the three years since then, I have learned a lot of tips to take better care of myself and accommodate my needs and I have never felt more confident. It has often made me wish to travel back in time and tell these things to my younger self so I would not have had to feel so isolated and confused for this long.

The sad truth is that being unknowingly autistic is not an easy way to live. We learn to “mask” by imitating other people and hiding our autistic traits, something that is excessively draining and leaves us feeling fake. Even then, people still pick up on our social oddities despite our efforts. This is why autism advocacy is crucial — it helps people find out if they are autistic and teaches them that there is nothing wrong with being this way. It was such a relief for me to discover that there are other people like me out there, and it is my sincere hope that more unknowingly autistic people will discover this too.

1. This reminds me of Anxiety from Inside Out 2. You can probably see why she is my favourite character in that movie…

2. I know this sounds ironic coming from a blogger who spends a lot of time online, but making and editing videos is so much more difficult to do than just typing! Plus, Substack is super easy to use.

3. This word replaces two words that were in the original post because the “people” mentioned here do not like it when I write about them publicly.