The Childhood Moments That Suddenly Made Sense When I Learned I Was Autistic
A Reflection On Late Diagnosis
There’s a strange, quiet moment that many Autistic adults describe after discovering they’re Autistic.
It isn’t loud. It isn’t dramatic.
It’s the sound of memory rearranging itself.
Scenes from childhood, once filed under “I was difficult”, “I was broken”, “I was just bad at being human”, start clicking into place. Not because the past changes, but because the story we were told about it finally falls apart.
Across Autistic spaces online, blogs, comment threads, group chats, late-night posts written with shaking hands and relief, the same childhood experiences come up again and again. Different lives. Different countries. Same patterns.
Here are five of the most common childhood experiences Autistic people say finally made sense once they understood themselves.
1. Feeling Out Of Sync With Everyone Else
Many of us remember childhood as standing slightly to the side of things.
Not necessarily lonely, just… misaligned.
Other children seemed to know how to enter games, how to shift roles, how to talk without thinking. We didn’t know the rules, and no one had given us the manual. Group play felt like watching a dance where everyone else heard the music.
Later, with an Autistic lens, that sense of being a spectator stops being a personal failure and starts looking like a difference in social processing; one that was never explained, only punished or pathologised.
2. Big Reactions That Were Called “Overreactions”
Crying over socks.
Refusing certain clothes.
Melting down over noise, crowds, lights, smells, transitions.
These moments are often remembered with shame because they were framed as too much.
As adults, many Autistic people look back and realise those weren’t tantrums or drama. They were nervous systems overloaded beyond capacity; with no language, no accommodations, and no protection.
The child wasn’t misbehaving.
The environment was injuring them.
3. Takin Things Literally; And Getting In Trouble For It
Autistic adults often remember being confused by jokes, sarcasm, metaphors, or vague instructions.
“Do it in a minute.”
“Behave yourself.”
“Use your common sense.”
None of these mean what they appear to mean. And when you take words seriously, as many Autistic children do, the world feels unreliable, even dishonest.
What was once framed as “not paying attention” or “being awkward” often turns out to be a mind that processes language with precision rather than performance.
4. Repetition, Rituals, And Doing Things The Same Way
Lining up toys.
Sorting objects.
Watching the same thing again and again.
Needing routines to stay intact.
These behaviours were often treated as quirks to be trained out of, or early warning signs to be “corrected”.
Later, many Autistic adults recognise them for what they were; regulation. Safety. Predictability in a world that felt loud, fast, and confusing.
Not pathology.
Self-preservation.
5. A Constant Sense Of Being “Different”; Without Knowing Why
Perhaps the most common reflection is this:
“I always knew I was different. I just didn’t know how.”
Too intense. Too quiet. Too sensitive. Too blunt. Too weird. Too much. Not enough.
Without a framework, difference turns inward and becomes self-blame. With an Autistic understanding, that same difference becomes contextual; shaped by environments that were never built with us in mind.
The quiet grief, and the relief
What runs through these reflections isn’t just insight. It’s grief.
Grief for a child who was misunderstood.
Grief for needs that were never named.
Grief for the support that could have changed everything.
But alongside that grief, there’s something powerful: relief.
Relief that you were never broken.
Relief that your responses made sense.
Relief that there are others who recognise themselves in your memories.
Understanding you’re Autistic doesn’t rewrite childhood; but it finally tells the truth about it.
And sometimes, that truth is the beginning of self-compassion.
So true! I was not diagnosed until age 16. I write autism too, check out my page and subscribe!
Knowledge/education is so key. ...
I cannot recall much of my half-century-plus life, and almost nothing positive, probably because I spend my ‘present’ anxious about my future and depressed over my past. For me, that includes a fear of how badly I will emotionally deal with the negative or horrible event — which usually doesn’t occur — and especially if I’ll also conclude that I'm at fault. It would therefore be great if there could be some valuable academic or clinical use from it all — to create or extract from it some practical positivity and purpose — so that all of the suffering will not have been in vain.
My autism spectrum disorder is an obvious condition with which I greatly struggle(d) while unaware until I was a half-century old that its component dysfunctions had formal names. Then, again, had I been aware back in the 1970s and ’80s I likely would’ve kept it a secret nevertheless, especially at school, lest the A-word [autism] gets immediately followed by the F-word [freak].
Realistically, while children with ‘low-functioning’ ASD seem to be more recognizable thus treated in school systems, high-er (as opposed to high) functioning ASD students — who tend to not exhibit the more overt, debilitating symptoms of autism — are more likely to be left to fend for themselves, except if their parents can finance specialized education.
Nevertheless, if it is feasible, parents should seriously consider not enrolling their high-er functioning ASD child in regular, ‘neurotypical’ grade school.
As a boy with an undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, my public-school Grade 2 teacher was the first and most formidably abusive authority figure with whom I was terrifyingly trapped. Though there were other terrible teachers, for me she was uniquely traumatizing, especially when she wore her large, dark sunglasses when dealing with me.
Rather than tell anyone about my ordeal with her and consciously feel victimized, I instead felt some misplaced shame: I was a ‘difficult’ boy, therefore she likely perceived me as somehow ‘deserving it’. But not being mentally, let alone physically, abused within or by an educational system is definitely a moral right; I was simply unable to see this.
Perhaps schoolteachers should receive training in high-er functioning ASD, especially if the rate of autism diagnoses is increasing. There could also be an inclusion in standard high school curriculum of child-development science that would also teach students about the often-debilitating condition.
Neurodiversity lessons, while not overly complicated or extensive, might help reduce the incidence of chronic bullying against such vulnerable students. It would explain to students how, among other aspects of the condition, people with high-er functioning ASD are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent, when in fact such behavior is really not a ‘choice’.
It would also elucidate how “camouflaging” or “masking,” terms used to describe higher-functioning ASD people pretending to naturally fit into a socially ‘normal’ environment, causes their already high anxiety and depression levels to further increase. And that this exacerbation is reflected in the disproportionately elevated rate of suicide among them.