What a great question!!! AspieGirl's giving good advice--if you can, follow your interests, as that will attract more like-minded people to you and give you good possibilities for constructive interaction with people. Granting the usual caveats that everyone's experience is different, I would say, based on my experience, that the short answer to your question is that it will get a lot better eventually but could get worse in certain respects before it gets better.
Just so you'll know where I'm coming from, I'm over 50 and have just now gotten around to thinking about what it means for me to reconceive my life experiences on the assumption that I'm autistically neurodifferent. (Whether you all are better off knowing this as a teenager or whether instead ignorance is bliss would be material for a different discussion.) When I was growing up, kids did not get diagnosed with autism unless their behavior was extremely aberrant so I had no conceptual framework for interpreting the ways in which I was "not normal" and there were many of them.)
Over time, it will get better for the following reasons:
1. You will come more into yourself. By this I mean that you'll develop depth in your talents and strengths, and come to appreciate that your weaknesses and limitations may serve necessary purposes in your life. You'll have more leeway regarding your environment and the people in it, so you can find life contexts that play to your strengths. You can make choices about the extent to which you want to adapt to, or fake it in, a neurotypical-dominated world. Hopefully you will become financially self-sufficient, which would give you more power than you have now.
2. Neurotypicals in your life are likely to become more tolerant. As people get older, they differentiate into uniqueness. The opportunity to overcome adversity is given to everyone, whether they want it or not, and as people are forced to confront their own foibles, struggles, failures, etc. they often become more forgiving of other peoples' foibles. Thus, you may be surrounded by more people who enjoy and appreciate you as you get older.
This having been said, it's still going to be hard, because unless you're planning to be an independently wealthy hermit, you get to figure out how to structure your relationships and employment in a way that works for you. And this'll probably involve a fair bit of trial and error that you will find difficult and painful. By the time you get to be mid-thirties or so, you'll have learned a lot more about how to productively live in the world and you'll have experienced more of the benefits. So hang in there!
Sorry if this sounds really platitudinous. Every generation growing up has its good points and not good--I wish we'd had the internet like you all have now, but then again, we had MUCH better music! :wink:
I'm 16 and a sophomore in high school.
The academic part of school can be very easy... minus the homework and projects. I almost always get As on tests with little or no study beforehand. Usually all the studying I do is a quick browse of stuff that I know is going to be on the test during the few minute break we get in between periods to go to our next class, and that is often all I need to prepare. I learn the stuff as I go, and don't mind the pace at which we're going when we learn the stuff.
Like other people, however, I can make mistakes when I take tests, whether it's misreading a word in the instructions or misremembering the instructions of a section of the test, writing down the wrong choice to a multiple choice question on accident (which I usually spot and correct), or simply forgetting to add on the negative sign to a negative integer while doing math (my most common mistake, actually). Usually, though, when I make very trivial mistakes that make me get questions wrong, I feel ashamed of my mistakes.
I'm usually one of the last people to turn in a test, though, because I take so long and get distracted by the smallest things, and sometimes I'll read a question continually, but my mind doesn't connect a meaning to what I'm reading, until I consciously make an effort to attach a meaning to it. Sometimes I'll even have thinking sessions during the taking of a test, which can cause me to take even longer.
In my biology class last year I had a pattern of having no wrong answers on a test, then getting 1 to 3 wrong answers on the next, but occasionally the pattern would be broken but it'd rebuild itself. In that class, though, if you 'aced' a test, you didn't have to do the study guide for the next part, which may be why I had developed this pattern. I still visit the teacher sometimes before first period starts.
People have told me I'm smart, often times because of how good I do on my tests, although I've had people say it for other reasons as well.
Now that my test rant (or would that be a brag?) is over... on to homework and projects, the dark side of academics. I procrastinate a lot, especially recently, and so much of my homework doesn't get done, as well as projects. This is the prime reason I have below As in most of my classes. And this fog of apathy that I've been covered in recently doesn't help, either.
As for the social aspect of school, not so hot, but not necessarily bad, either. But fortunately, I'm past my freshman year, so I don't have to deal with gym anymore. The locker room is the place where you're going to be pressured a lot to do stupid things and people are also going to try to get you into fights there. I have almost no peer friends currently, but I don't get sad about it. Don't worry about trying to fit in with everybody else, because if you succeed at it, all it's going to cause is sadness when you fall out, as I have experienced before after moving (which happened during the middle of third grade, but I still went to the same school until the end of that grade, but at that point I never saw my friends again).
It appears I have talked a bit too much. Sorry for that. Ok, to end this now, I'll just say that you shouldn't have too much trouble in school if you don't try to get a lot of friends. If you try to become really popular, I can speculate that there would be a lot of trouble involved. Also, unless you're good at it and can draw fast without worrying about your picture not looking good, stay away from art classes. From my experience, you'll flunk every art class you take. This concludes my discussion of school.
Talrathis, no, you haven't said too much, that was really well said, and echoes my experiences as a teenager (I'm now in my mid-30s), except I didn't know I was Aspie (only now in my 30s am I trying to get referred to get an official diagnosis).
Because I didn't know I was Aspie, my teenage years were confusing and problematic. I did have some behavioural problems, reacted badly to certain things. I think it's lucky if you're quite academically inclined, because you tend to get forgiven a lot of 'challenging' behaviours that might be punished in those who don't do so well in exams, teachers tend to equate it with boredom and frustration as opposed to intrinsic 'badness'.
I, too, changed school halfway through, and at both schools I'd had comments and teasing from my peers about being 'posh' (because of my spoken English, which wasn't monotone, but I did speak more correctly, and didn't have as strong a local accent as my peers), and I was also called a 'swot' (don't know if that translates into American, it's a derogatory term for someone who's very studious - which actually couldn't have been further from the truth, because I didn't study, I just attended class, and my almost photographic memory enabled me to pass exams).
My experiences were also the same regarding tests and homework. I didn't used to bother very much with homework (I didn't feel I needed to do it if I'd already mastered the concept, plus I procrastinated a lot) and I too could do that thing where you don't bother revising, you just flick through the text book or notes in recess before you go in for the test, and that seemed to get me through the test also.
I think it would be good to try and get some assistance from a support worker in that respect, help with study skills, time management, exam revision skills and so on. Because while I got away with not doing homework etc., it would have made for a smoother time at high school if I wasn't perceived by some of the teachers as just disobedient and disruptive.
In hindsight, I think I've learned that there are times when it would be better to just conform instead of making a 'pointless' point. Also, those study skills, time management skills, revision skills would have been very useful a few years later in terms of college and university. The workload is greater, you're expected to be more self-sufficient and organised. It would have been very useful if those skills I'd neglected to pick up in high school had been ingrained me in my teens.
And those kinds of skills come in handy in later life in the workplace too, because those skills are the kinds of things, which if lacking and not consciously developed, lead to 'executive dysfunction' and that can cause problems in terms of your working life and personal life. I'm okay in a professional setting where there is a framework, which I can just 'plug into', I can process the payment of invoices, order stocks and supplies, arrange travel, make appointments... but at home, I really struggle with those things, I'm useless at balancing my cheque book, paying bills on time, making and keeping appointments.
For years I couldn't figure out why I could function so efficiently in a workplace, yet my own personal administration was so chaotic. I think it's because there's always been a framework, whether at school with respect to class timetables, rules and regulations, work is similar, there's a framework, there's organisation, whereas me, I can't set those sytems in place at home, or even if I try to, I can't adhere to them :oops: It's only now that I realise it's actually 'executive dysfunction', and I wished I'd had coping skills ingrained into me years ago.
For me I found that it got a lot better once I left school and started work. Teenagers generally all like to look, act and dress the same, or you get groups of people who all do the same thing. People who don't fit in with a particular group stand out. When I started work I found that everyone was so different, from different backgrounds, different circumstances, that my differences became less obvious.
I became very depressed as a teenager because I could never get things right in a social sense. Maybe if I had know about AS I would have understood things a bit more.
Teenage years are very difficult for all people, not just those who are neurodivergent. It's a time of turbulence, uncertainty, emotions, struggling to understand other people (even NTs have a hard time with things like this during the teenage years). Everyone's searching for who they are and how they fit in. In the end, it just takes time.
For social interaction, I used the scientific method (testing different actions to see what the reactions were) and carefully studied (stared at...) people who had more expressive faces. As time went on, people were more willing to open up and tell me why they acted certain ways under certain circumstances, and I was able to tailor my actions for the best result. From then on, interacting with people became all about studying the person and learning what worked best for them.
For academics, all areas are important to being well rounded and knowledgeable. Many areas of study are interrelated. And as for intelligence, history, and the other students, I would like to point out that those people who don't know about Mahmud of Ghazni are not necessarily stupid, but just ignorant. Everyone chooses what topics to remain ignorant about, and it's never possible to know everything about a topic, so even experts can be "stumped" in such a way.
Unfortunately, NTs seem to focus their "areas of interest" on sports, dating, movies, music, and pop culture in general. They are experts to the Nth degree on those types of things. In that regard, you will remain "different", but pursue understanding and you'll find everything much easier to tolerate.
If you like history and do not want to study other subjects much you could try to think how other disciplines have something to do with history. For example, you could study the history of technology: how modern automobiles were based on horse carriage designs. Most technological developments are based on previous knowledge or assumptions. Throwing out old ideas or revamping old ones that are not commonly known sometimes makes huge breakthroughs in new technologies. People should not be so willing to through out history.
I think history is just more than dates, battles, names of people. You can learn about personalities, political and social thoughts of the times, customs, dress, homelife, food etc. So then whenever you meet someone, you could learn to ask them about how the history or whatever their career is influencing their present and future.
If you can get into a context such as work that uses your talents, then people in that microenvironment will probably be more tolerant even if most outside that environment are not. Also, as you gain self-assurance, people respect that and are more apt to leave you alone or find you interesting in a positive sense.
If you can get into a context such as work that uses your talents, then people in that microenvironment will probably be more tolerant even if most outside that environment are not. Also, as you gain self-assurance, people respect that and are more apt to leave you alone or find you interesting in a positive sense.
If it's possible to find a group of "arty" or bohemian people, it's often a bit easier to get accepted. Artistic and creative people are expected to be quirky and perhaps even a little temperamental.