[AmateurAstronomer]

As a young boy, I always stood out as different. I used to go to music lessons while I was preschool aged. While I am quite an intelligent person (not bragging here, just stating the truth), I struggled with the lessons due to an inability to focus. However, even from that early age, the teacher of the music lessons found my behavior to be highly disruptive. While I was obviously very young, I have a surprisingly good memory of these events.

I remember my first day at school very clearly. As soon as I got into the classroom, I was already reading which impressed the teacher a bit. However, I was reading a flier that I picked up off the ground on the way in. I had been fidgeting with it, and it was a flier for one of my town's political candidates. I was just a kid so I wasn't familiar with it, just reading the stuff on the back and thinking about what it would be like to be an adult and be able to vote. However, the teacher told me to sit and I didn't. Instead, I didn't even hear her. I was so engrossed in the flier that I was standing there for a moment while the teacher told me to sit twice.

This perplexed the teacher right from the beginning, and as the day wore on..... I was completely unable to stay in the seat. I kept getting up even when the teacher told me not to. At the end of the day, my mother was called in. My mother told me that it was a very upsetting conversation.

During the time of my school years, I did not manage to make any friends to speak of. A few here and there I suppose in the very late days of my schooling. However, in elementary and middle school other kids simply labeled me as "weird" due to my stimming, inattention, and obsession with numbers (e.g. memorizing square roots, random sequences of addition and subtraction, etc.) I still find this stuff fascinating and I am actually quite skilled with mathematics. Although, I now realize that other people don't tend to be interested in these things as they feel it's nothing more than rote memorization. Currently, I have a very strong interest in astronomy and it has become a "special interest" of sorts. As a kid, I was made fun of a bit. However, that aspect wasn't that persistent in my life...... but for the wrong reason I suppose.

I have a history of outbursts as a result of being redirected from my special interests while in school (e.g. preferring to memorize mathematical formulas while in other classes). These outbursts resulted in me being placed in special education, and unfortunately I believe that some of my behaviors may have frightened other students when I was in school. However, this was never my intent.

As an adult, I am quite isolated. I still live at home with my mother, and I am 31 years old. I have not worked in any substantial manner, and I have been fired from every job that I have had within a matter of a few days. This is a source of great stress for me as I am not able to focus while on the job, and I also often have a way of irritating the people that I work with unfortunately. However, I would like to be able to work one day. Unfortunately, I am unsure if I ever will be able to.

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.