As a kid, I was diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder--Not Otherwise Specified. PDD-NOS is sometimes called "atypical autism" and it's basically a diagnosis you give someone who seems autistic, but doesn't quite fit the diagnostic criteria. Other people who get a PDD-NOS diagnosis are people who seem too high-functioning to have autism, but too low-functioning to have Asperger's (or don't fit the Asperger's criteria for some other reason).
I went to normal schools all my life (although some of them were private schools with very small or informal classes). When I was in seventh and eighth grade (I think) I was occasionally pulled out of class for special help, but I don't really remember what I was being helped with.
Then, when I was fourteen, I was evaluated and given a diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome and Nonverbal Learning Disorder. While NLD isn't considered an autism spectrum disorder, I think it should be. I would venture to say that NLD is to Asperger's what PDD-NOS is to classic autism. The symptoms of NLD are very similar to the symptoms of Asperger's, except that NLD people are supposed to be more imaginiative than Asperger's people. Really, reading the Wikipedia pages of the two disorders, it seems like they're just two descriptions of the same disorder, emphasizing different aspects.
When I was sixteen my parents found out about a study which would test the effects of a software that was supposed to teach Asperger's people to do a better job recognizing facial expressions. I went in and they tried the software on me and I talked to their psychologist, and they concluded that I didn't have much trouble recognizing faces, and was therefore too high-functioning to take part in the study.
I had a lot of social problems in middle school, and some in high school. I'm pretty well taken care of in terms of friends now. I have problems with my friends and a lot of them are stereotypical Asperger's problems to have, but I don't think I fight with my friends more than other people do. The same thing goes for academics (except that I had a professor who was personally offended by my body language and word choice, and talked to other students about how strange I was). I've never had a serious romantic relationship and I get lost a lot and I feel better if I don't have to look at people all the time, and I'm very shy with some people, and when I'm alone I jump up and down. When I'm under a lot of stress for a long time, I get so I can't process information very fast. I hate forms and applications because it's usually hard for me to tell what the questions are asking me to do.
When I tell someone that I have Asperger's, they are often surprised or don't believe me.
I do a lot of volunteer work with people who have mental retardation, classic autism, and PDD-NOS. I'm hoping to work full-time with people who have cognitive disabilities after I graduate from college.
I am interested in disability rights. I think a lot about the nature of invisible disabilities, and the nature of developmental disabilities, and how those things are treated in society. I mostly became interested in these issues when I read essays by people involved in the Neurodiversity Movement, but I'm not comfortable saying that I ally myself with that movement.