Anyone else feel they are in the same boat as me?

It's not how I feel right now, but that doesn't mean I can't relate as I've felt much of that. I felt very misunderstood from a young age. The seven year old me thought people were misunderstanding me on purpose. I later came to think I was perhaps using the wrong words and that by using words with very precise meanings (and little scope for misunderstanding) I would resolve the problem.

It made the problem worse. People were still misunderstanding me and, worse, they didn't know what the words meant. I was a very naughty kid and I carried on being a naughty teenager. If I wasn't getting up to devilment (for my own amusement), I was playing pranks on people. Or I was making jokes or doing impressions or doing anything I could to make people laugh. When people were laughing, at least we were on the same page.

The way I see the world, the way I think people should be treated, the way I think things work was within me from a very young age but, whenever I said it, people thought it was a trick or that I was lying or that I was setting them up for something. Or, I suppose, that I was stupid. I made two comments on IIN this year. Almost everyone who read them tried to make me feel stupid and that they couldn't possibly be true. Yet both were absolutely true (although they don't feel as if they should be true). People went off their feelings to decide fact. That's one of the things I struggle to understand about people.

At 18, I crashed badly at university. I couldn't deal with people because I couldn't understand them and they most certainly couldn't understand me. Ashamed to admit it, but I think I thought people were stupid. After a year of isolation, I took to watching people. I reasoned that I was going to have to spend my life with them in some fashion, I may as well understand them and what drives them.

I still think differently than most but I learned to translate (to an extent). And because it's translation, I still fail at times and people still misunderstand me. Some of this may come across as arrogance but I'm just trying to be honest.

What upsets me at times is that nobody is speaking my language and the only way I can deal with them is speaking theirs. It makes what I say (and particularly what I write) look dull and mistranslated to me. Same as if I wrote this in French. I do speak some French but I'd make mistakes all over the place. That's how I feel with this.

I'm not sure this is exactly what you meant, but this is how it is with me. If it helps in the slightest, great!

Dappled and Flutterhigh are fucking amazing.

You basically just described my life most of the time, except when I do the freezing thing in class, teachers get really angry because they just think I'm ignoring them, when judging by my grades, I should be able to do it instantly.

I also say really irrelevant things in conversations, when I'm bored. Or I lecture people on my interests: My friends and others really don't appreciate me explaining Kepler's second law of planetary motion at every random interval, nor banging on about the life of Leon Trotsky... (Two of my major obsessions)

Is suppose the difference is that my random outbursts and 'zoning out' just make people frustrated, rather than thinking I'm unintelligent, because I have a reputation as a nerd.

Wow I would swear the poll creator is my bf if they exchanged the word "classmate" for "coworker"

Let me preface by saying that I did NOT read any responses to this poll/story. But it sounds to me that you are quite the opposite of what people think and perhaps the average person/conversation bores you. Maybe you need to be around more "deep thinkers" and perhaps should try and find a more intelligent group of friends to surround yourself with? Have you ever considered taking an IQ test?

This sounds like symptoms of aspergers. I have the same set of problems off and on, especially around the holidays.

I think you underestimate what people are capable of as I did.

Consider for a moment that you haven't been to the depths of others thoughts. If you could peer in there you'd see thought just as complex as your own. After all you haven't had a 'higher' conversation with them. no, mostly its 'hi' or 'that movie was great'!

Now what separates you from them is that you process your deeper thoughts in full conscience which is what keeps you in that dream state during class.

you've tapped into a part of your mind you weren't meant to tap into, it makes you more a asleep of the outside world and more awake of your inside world.

the advantage is that unlike them, is you have concious access to a deeper powerful part of your mind, on the other hand your functioning in the real world is impaired or as you say:

"not be able to answer a simple question, as if I can't snap back to reality". see what I mean?

You prefer to set your deeper mind onto more challenging things other than celebrities and gossip etc , every time you learn something new you just want to learn the next thing... and the next... and the next.

All said and done it's really important you take time out to learn how to interact with everyone else. They have so much to offer, maybe not always in deep intellectual discussions, but also in laughs, girlfriends ;), belonging, parties, support...

If you sit there stuck in all your deep thought your going to start feeling a little down kid!

smart people in this world are the ones who can make it anywhere.

This gave a new perspective on some people I know. When it comes to me however, I observe people. I don't crave a lot of attention, merely an audience. Due to my observations, I find ways to communicate with people. My thought is simply this, humans are here to keep me sane for if I didn't socialize then I don't know what looney bin I'd be jammed into.

I'm kinda like this. I've been alot better since I left school though. I hate people, and I have having to be with them. But when I am with them I feel as though I don't belong there so I try to join in with their convo's ect ect.

At school, I used to fight for stupid things. Just to give me something to do, I used to get told off and expelled for a couple of days or what ever but it wasn't about the attention, or rebbelling, I just did it for fun and to quench the boredom.

But looking back now, I wish I could start it all again. Because I would know what to do now to fit in.