You come across as quite articulate and intelligent. Your experience is very similar to my son's experiences. He didn't have any friends until about grade 3. They were short friendships, but he had a few, mostly girls. He hated school, yet he was very intelligent. They put him in an advanced science class in grade seven, so he began studying grade nine science in grade seven. But people thought he was weird. By grade seven he studied the other boys in his class and abruptly told me he wanted to completely change his wardrobe. He fashioned himself after the most popular boy in the class. I perceive him as reinventing himself in the image of the most popular boy in the class. This worked for him and he became best friends with the most popular boy in the class. Then that boy moved away and my son became the most popular boy in the class. This in and of itself is really weird to me.

He reinvented himself several times, eventually ending on a high fashioned, model like look (he's model thin), which stuck with him to this day. He got jobs where his autistic like tendencies worked in his favour. (he's not yet been diagnosed with autism). He's a stock manager, so he can keep track of things really easily, where others would struggle. It's all about stock numbers, shoe sizes, bar codes, stock quantities, tracking orders. In other words, this kind of job fits him perfectly. So he's highly valued, because everyone else would struggle with this particular job.

My son had many, many, many emotional outbursts. He even punched a hole in the wall once and kicked in the cupboard door in the bathroom. And on a vacation in Australia, he flipped over the coffee table in the hotel room. He also flipped over my kitchen table in a rage, which stopped two inches short of hitting a very large floor to ceiling window, which would have shattered. But that was then...this is now.

He no longer has violent outbursts. His emotional outbursts are now limited to one single sentence blurted out in frustration, followed by silence (and silent remorse) and then by a relatively fast return to calm. He taught himself this, through his own form of mindfulness. Mindfulness works for everyone, including autistic people. Mindfulness is about thinking about what you are thinking about "in the moment." My son changed his own life, after I pointed out to him what was holding him back from having the life I clearly knew he wanted. He wanted friends, he wanted to be able to keep a job. He wanted to be happy and he didn't understand why other people could be happy and he couldn't be. I listened to him. I heard him. Then I helped him to help himself. If this is something you'd like to learn more about, please let me know. But this post is getting very long, so I'm cutting it off here.