[@Shoryu Magami] [@Doc Doctor] Jeez, you guys too?  I was put on ritalin in first grade, although I personally think it helped me a good bit.  I've no idea what your specific issues are with the drug, and honestly I might just not know about them.  And I /still/ didn't think like the others in many ways.  I'm 28, so Shoryu, you're only a couple years my senior.  No idea about the good Doctor.  ^.^;  To this day, I am still on medication.  And I will point out that if my brain does not make the same chemicals that allow a person to function at their best, then artificially supplementing the missing chemicals is just as valid as taking a vitamin for iron or something.  Or insulin.  Yes, mental health is still a very young field, and a lot of it is uncertain and heavily influenced by the fact that our perceptions are subjective and vastly different, and thus flawed.

I was pretty lucky.  My schools did care, at least to some extent, and while perhaps I was not challenged as I should have been, I was not completely stuck in a corner either.  Back then we didn't know I had high-functioning autism; I don't know if autism was even recognized yet.  I was simply hyper and wild, and disobedient, and often inattentive (even though that never affected my grades).  I was smart enough to work my way of thinking to the same point as everyone else, and either meld the two views, or figure out how to convert one to the other.  Like...borrowing for subtraction drove me nuts the way they wanted me to do it.  I flip the numbers about slightly differently, and it works far better for me.  Or with algebra and geometry, I would work out the proofs in my room on my own because while the book did usually explain it, I needed to grasp the reasoning behind a theorem to truly remember and utilize it.  That got a lot harder with calculus.  ^.^;;

My real difficulty, unfortunately, is that I am not socially adept at all, and my lines of reasoning are often very different.  When it comes to opinion matters and drawing a line for things like what's okay to say and what's not, I do extremely poorly.  Furthermore, since I was never really pushed as a child, I never developed real study habits, or self control, or discipline, or any of the tools that one needs to succeed in the world.  I am legally disabled, and I will probably never be completely independent.  I think I do pretty well, all things considered, and I'm pretty happy.  There's lots of things I won't get to do, but that's always the case, I think, and maybe it's a matter of just not focusing on those things.  No, I don't have a job that challenges me, that thrill of solving a difficult problem and getting paid to do so.  I haven't taken any college classes because they're expensive and I worry a great deal that I won't be able to keep up with the work, that I'll fall apart and have wasted the money for no gain.  There's a few issues that have left lasting trauma, and my possibilities are limited, but I /do/ enjoy what I have.

tl;dr I've always been pretty messed up and sure I wish things had gone differently, but I tend to be happy.  Besides, the entire /world/ is messed up.  -.-