Thank you, it’s going to be a few months, waiting lists are crazy long here. I’m from Germany, and awareness for autism here lacks heavily behind the english speaking world. It’s getting better, see for example how my nephew thankfully got a diagnosis as a child now, but not too long ago, if you were able to mask in any way and not easily identifiable as disabled along a stereotype, people never thought to consider it.

I wouldn’t rule out completely that some teachers at school could have known or suspected, but they at least never said as much, and I wasn’t in any special programs or got special counseling at school. Especially back then, the idea of autism in the general public and even non-specialised psychologists and psychiatrists over here was still “mutism and barely able to function” - which is probably why the psychologists and psychiatrists I saw as a child and teenager also never considered it.

I talked a lot with my mother since my nephew was diagnosed and I and my sister started to research what the current understanding of it is, and she at least just outright ruled it out back then. She actually had been trying to find some sort of pathology for me for my “otherness” as a kid, but because she had a mismatched idea of what autism is (ironically from learning a lot about it in, like, the 60s or 70s), she never properly considered that as a possibility. Both her and my (dead by now) father show(ed) at least some signs for autism, too, but neither ever got any diagnosis or help. My mother is too old by now, and doesn’t want to bother with anything like a diagnosis, but she has acknowledged a lot of the signs from the new understanding of ASD fit into her own childhood, youth and overall life too.

Most of the support by the teachers that liked me was basically behind the scenes, putting a word in for me in conferences and stuff like that. I barely scraped by 10th grade without repeating, by having just enough excelling courses to counteract the ones I was failing (latin and physical education in my case). The system for advancing there is a bit complicated here in Germany, especially because it’s different from state to state, but there ended up being a conference that decided if I was allowed to advance into 11th grade, where the teachers that supported me came in clutch. Similar stuff happened with my massive amount of sick days and days where I simply did not show up without an excuse and how that was handled and how it was not sanctioned as harshly as it could have been. All the while, I acted nonchalant, even a bit arrogant, around teachers, which some of them seemingly found endearing, because I was also clever enough to do well in the subjects I didn’t openly boycott. I also got really good at stuff people probably would not expect, like public speaking and holding presentations as well as acting in the theatre group - which all followed very clear rules about how to act and present yourself that I learned to emulate (but also still was pretty exhausting). But especially back then, I’d expect people taking that as a clear sign that “that kid can’t be autistic”.

So, long story short, while I wouldn’t rule it out, the lack of awareness for the condition over here - especially back then in the 90s/early 2000s - makes me think that there probably was no one who really suspected autism, and while I was seeing psychologists a lot and was in a psychiatric clinic as a teenager for a while, I never got any special programs suited for autistic people, which over here and back then were extremely rare to begin with.

Thanks again, and good luck to you too with your future and present! It’s good you got help in recontextualising those parts of your past as well, that is worth a lot.

I wish you all the best in your own path in life. I know realising in hindsight what the context of it all was helped me a lot, and I hope for you that the same holds true.