What is weird/strange?

Question

I grew up as a single child with my mum for 12 years in Wales where I had been bullied all my life. I always found it difficult to make friends in most places including school. 
For the past two years it was extremely difficult because my mum drinks wine every night and she'd get really bitter & sour towards everything in life. She hated all her jobs and I had to bite my tongue a lot from saying 'I told you so' when she took it on even though I just knew the excitement would die down and she'd hate it after a while and it got me down knowing that it was difficult to keep her happy, even when she was I could just see it in her face something was bothering her. 
We'd watch TV for hours every night, most times ignoring each other, and most nights we'd just argue. 
I always felt responsible for her unhappiness because I had a bad eating disorder from the age of 2-3 for years and years and it really affected my self esteem and motivation to make friends. I always felt lonely after my parents divorced and we moved 276 miles from England to move in with my grandparents. And when I did make a friend it either didn't last long or they'd move away, so that just made me more paranoid about meeting peers in my age group. 
I don't mind talking to strangers, mainly a few years younger or way older but not around 17-18 year olds. I just have nothing in common with most of them, I have different tastes in music and clothes etc and they seem to be able to think for themselves more than I can because mum always made me feel bad if I disagreed with her. 
I have no interest in getting drunk or rushing into having sex like they make out they are so I have nothing to contribute to their conversation so I just blank out, even though I don't want to. 
People have always made me out to be the odd one out, or one too many in a group and no one has every taken my feelings into consideration like I do for them. 
So after I finished school, I packed up and left to live with dad because I couldn't bare these miserable nights with mum's drinking and dreading what she'd say, she seemed to just remember the bad things in life rather than the good. 
But we speak a lot on the phone and I send her postcards but it's like as though we never argued which hurts because it makes me feel like I've made this all up. 
She was always trying to diagnose me with a problem as to why I'm so antisocial like Aspergers which then I started to believe until later on when I started to see what rubbish she talks. (This is coming from a woman who thought Omega 3 oil came from vegetables)
I met a woman the other day at the gym, we was talking about sports activities we enjoyed then some how I got on to sharing my problems like now and she agrees, I've been through a lot from eating disorders to bullying. It was niec to know someone understood me. 
Out of curiosity, I typed into Google 'what makes people strange?' to see if anything biased or relevant came up about me and this link came up http://www.succeedsocially.com/weird and some- if not most of these points- applied to me. 
Despite all these points, this girl who was my age at 17-18 randomly gave me conkers then started throwing dead leaves at me and I was just sitting there. She knew my name, but nothing about me and it just makes me wonder why I'm the weird one when she does that. It's the sort of thing my seven year old cousin does. 
But I'm not as quiet as people think, when I'm at a party or with people who are used to me I'm quite loud and I enjoy myself. 
I've gotten to the point where I don't care much for people's opinions of me, I just don't understand what makes people feel they can treat me this way. 
I work hard and I have interests. I cycle to college everyday and teach myself Japanese because my goal is to go to Japan after college and I take my course seriously in order to pursue my dream and future. I also want to volunteer in a Buddy program to befriend a disabled child for six months. I'm also class rep because no one else could be bothered to step up. 
Sometimes I feel I'm the only one who takes things seriously.

David · Accepted Answer

I was born, bred, and battered in Wales, and am so weird / strange that the Headmaster of the Junior School that I attended nicknamed me Witchcraft in morning assembly on my first day, and reminded the rest of the school that the Bible says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live", so they kept trying to kill me for the rest of that week but I kept coming back to life, so I ended up believing him and tried to kill myself four times on the Friday evening and ended up in a 48 hour coma, locked in a cold store at 30 degrees below zero, in a Coop Dairy near where I lived. The local police refused to join the search parties my parents sent out to look for me and the local doctors refused to treat me when I was found because their kids were my peers and had told them all about what was going on at school, so they were accessories after the facts.

I have aspergers, which is why I found your post. I always start my session in Yahoo! Answers off by putting the word asperger in the search engine and then refining the search to (a) the last 24 hours; which picks up all questions containing that word posted in the previous 24 hours on the UK and Eire website; and then (b) all English questions which picks up all English speaking countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.

As your mother suggested your weirdness / strangeness might be caused by aspergers syndrome, I suggest you try a couple of the online tests for autism/aspergers. The two with the best reputations for reliability and credibility are the RDOS and RAADS-R tests (see URL hyperlinks in blue below). I only say this because I believe that it is better to know than not know, for then you can start finding out about it and natural ways of reducing the severity of the symptoms by neuroplasticity. Buddhist monks and nuns have been exploiting neuroplasticity for the best part of 2000 years without having a name for it.

I spent the first 49 years of my life with the labels Idiot Savant (Nursery and Infants School), Witchcraft (Junior School), and Autistic Psychopath (Grammar School but Official Secret because of Articled Pupillage work experience I engaged in, but all my subsequent employers were aware as they were 'in on the secret' I was engaged in my entire working career), before being diagnosed by a private consultant clinical psychiatrist as having the Autism Spectrum Disorder, Asperger's Syndrome, after a nervous breakdown at work. I have severe but subtle problems with my Obsessive Compulsive Traits and my Attention Deficit Traits. I have attempted suicide six times and ended up in a 48 hour coma locked in a cold room at 30 degrees below zero at a Coop Dairy once. Ive had severe retrograde, anterograde, psychogenic, and dissociative amnesias twice. Click the avatar of me up there to the left when I was a child to see more details about me.

There are positive psychology techniques that can erase depression and replace it with happiness and meditation techniques that can get you flying without wings in states of ecstasy on psychedelic rocket powered Harley Davisons across the cosmos without the aid of drink and drugs.

Jon · Answer

I have had a similar experience, so don't worry this is all normal.

I also always take things seriously, which allows me to succeed when others do not.

Follow your dream and good luck :)

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What is weird/strange?

2 Answers