Aspergers Diagnosed Before/After Childhood

I was diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome only recently, and I am 19 years old. I seriously wish that I was diagnosed when I was in school, as maybe I could have been in a class sensitive to my symptoms; the anger, the awkwardness, the sometimes downright immaturity (it's not my way, it's not a way, basically), where the teachers were, I don't know, understanding that I found it hard to be in a classroom environment as these are social, working environments and I got stressed, tense, angry in these environments as I personally despised schoolwork. I wish I could have been in a class with a low student:teacher ratio, where the work was a little more at my own pace. Since no one understood why I had been so defiant (constant skipping, bad behavior, violence) and high-strung, like a time bomb, in school, I was kept in the social environments triggering my symptoms.

Do you identify, if you were diagnosed after finishing school? If you were diagnosed before finishing school and were in a resource or special education classroom, did it help you/was it better than a general education classroom for you?

I think it was liberating when I was diagnosed, however, because sometimes I didn't even understand why I acted this way, and knowing there was a name for my symptoms and that someone understood and anticipated my actions, and that I was not alone (I am already grateful for the non-neurotypical group, by the way...) in this. It felt good when I heard here that people were enduring the same things, and more or less actually understood where I was coming from.

I was never diagnosed with anything but Auditory Processing Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I had to discover my own relatedness to Autistic tendancies by my friendships with Autistic people and my own, personal studies on psychology.

If it wasn't for these two factors, I would be in a shite state of affairs today. I might not even have become a communist without the constant reminder of oppression that Autistic people experience in schools, and my own opposition to that oppression and alienation.

I was 14, so pretty much exactly in between.

I wasn't diagnosed until I was 19, too. I was only alerted to the possibility I could be aspergic by my interactions with another aspie.

I was diagnosed very late at 23. After being assessed often as a kid for stuff like dyspraxia it surprises me a little they missed it. But then again as my parents live in denial anything is wrong with me I'm not surprised.