 Good day and welcome back to my channel. Today we're going to be talking about autistic stereotypes that I personally do not fit into. Some people might, the majority might, but these things that I'm going to be talking about definitely do not apply to moi, to me. And you may be wondering, so if this is just about you, what is the purpose of this video? Well, I'm hoping to raise awareness of the fact that although there is a set criteria around autism and some common behaviors that occur both in childhood or adulthood or adolescence, not every single thing on an autism diagnosis completely encompasses every single person within that. So it's highly likely that some of the things that I tell you about today are going to be in sharp contrast with your idea of what autism is. Let's get into the actual meat of the episode, and I'm going to give you eight. I'm going to give you eight different points and things that really just don't apply to me as an autistic person. Number one, you may have heard that autistic people are exceptionally gifted at maths. You know, your mind sort of recalls back to the last autism movie that you've watched. You know, there's not that many. You look at Rain Man and the guy, the guy drops the matchsticks on the floor and Raymond's like, oh, there's 10,765 matchsticks on the floor. Just an amazing, just unreal level of mathematical and perceptive ability, of course. And even just sort of taking the general trend of that, mental maths is something that I've never been able to do. I'm quite good at algebra. I'm quite good at, well, algebra, that's pretty much the thing that I excelled on when it came to maths. And I did get, I got an A for GCSEs. Going any further than that, doing any sort of statistics or anything of that nature really just falls right off my brain. Like, someone asked me to add up things or minus things or divide things. I am absolutely useless. The things that I am quite good at is science, philosophy, psychology, English. They all come very natural to me because I'm interested in people, not numbers. So that's the first stereotype. Number two. Number two. Social skills. Yes. Very strange. I am actually pretty good at socialising. I'm pretty good at communicating. I do have to caveat by saying that, yes, it is in the diagnostic criteria for you to have some communication and social difficulties. But that was only when I was diagnosed. There is actually a lot of work that an autistic person can do on themselves, building both mental, emotional and social skills, knowledge, theory, practice, anything like that. I've spent a lot of time trying to understand neurotypicals. For a long time, for a long time, the neurotypicals are my special interests. I really wanted to understand them, why they were acting in these strange, bizarre ways that I just couldn't comprehend. I built all these social skills. Navigating the social landscape, whether it be meeting someone for the first time, meeting someone I've known for a long time, whether we have a topic, game, anything to do, I'm pretty good in those situations. The times that I'm not particularly good is when I'm stressed, when my mental health is bad. It requires a lot of thinking for us. If we are to be good at socialising, we need to do a lot of cognitive effort in order to try and understand that situation. When your mental faculties are down for the old fog of mental health coming over the hill, that's the time that I usually struggle. But for any of the time, dating, friendship, any kind of relationship, I'm pretty good at. Number three. Oh, this is a juicy one. Empathy. Yes, empathy. You may have heard that autistic people don't have empathy. They don't really care about the people around them. And really, this is just a really common misconception about autism. You know, the idea that autistic people don't have empathy is sort of delved into by a lady called Lorna Wing. But later on in the research, particularly Simon Baron Cohen's study on different types of empathy among both psychopaths and autistic people, we're going to push the psychopaths to the side because they're not very important. Basically, the autistic people tended to show high levels of what's called adaptive empathy, which is pretty much the empathy that you think of when you think of empathy. It's the ability to have an appropriate emotional response to other people, to other people's emotions, whereas cognitive empathy, stability, stability to tell what kind of emotional state someone is in. Usually not not through direct methods of communication, I'm not feeling great. Being able to tell from the face and the body and the way that they're acting that they're in a particularly negative or positive emotional state. So that's where the misconception comes in. And I would say that the majority of autistic people, banking on the fact that they're not psychopaths, do actually have adaptive empathy, which is the empathy that you're thinking about. Number four. Number four, that bloody mental math skills coming in the finger dexterity and proprioception kills me every time. Sports. Yes, you may have heard that autistic people, we don't like sports. We're the introverts, we're the library kids, the gamers, the people who never go outside, never go and do anything competitive and like to be by ourselves on our own researching whatever we want to do and doing what we want to do. And for a lot of people, that would be the case. For me, because we're talking about my diversion from the stereotypes, I was actually once a Commonwealth and national taekwondo champion. You know, when the Olympics come around and you see videos of people in those red and blue helmets and body armor and stuff like that, that's what I used to do. And I was pretty good at it. I travel all across the world for different competitions, different training camps. Eventually I had to stop it because I didn't feel like the actual sort of professional arena, the place that I wanted to go for to, you know, become a full time athlete. They weren't very autism inclusive. And I got heavily discriminated against for that. So that's why I finished. I'm planning on going back. It seems to be a lot more sort of all inclusive and sort of sort of themselves out. So I will see for the future. But for now, yeah, sports. I struggle with the balance. I struggle with the proprioception, the ability to know what your body is and the balance. But when I'm concentrating, when I concentrate on the actual movement, I'm exceptionally good at it. They have a weird one that wrap your head around it. But that is the absolute truth. Number five. Give me a high five. Yes, you're getting all those positive emotional juices flowing as there's strange YouTube people keep talking about. I don't understand where they're coming from. Am I supposed to like point my butthole up to the sun and recharge my spiritual energy? I don't think so. I don't think that's very scientific. Change. Yes. Changing things. We think of autism. We think, oh my God, their routine has been disrupted. They're going to go into meltdown. They're going to go shut down. They're going to go all these kind of things. And yeah, if our mental health is bad and life is a bit up and down and we don't really know where we are. Sure. Quick changes on the spot is probably going to cause us a lot of anxiety. For me, I've had experiences where I have to cope with a lot of change consistently day to day for about two months. And that was when I went traveling with my good friends backpacking across Southeast Asia. We had to do a lot of last minute changes, a lot last minute booking of accommodation and flights and things of that nature. So I had to be very resilient to change. And I did pretty well. I didn't have any meltdowns on the trip. I didn't have any, you know, sometimes a copy overloaded by the socializing, but overall, I coped pretty well. And in fact, going into the workplace, I am probably one of the most adaptable people that you can come across. The point at which I'm not is when someone makes a change and then they make another change back to the same thing. And then they make another change. That's when it really, really gets to me and it can really disrupt me. And it can cause me a lot of stress, anxiety, things of that nature. But for just things now and again, it don't really affect me. They might affect others, but not me. Number six. I titled this one alternative fashion, because I like the color black and chains and heavy metal music and things of that nature. But I just consider this to be fashion in general. I'm really not shy about exploring my identity through my choice of clothing, because there is kind of a trend in the autistic community for particular items of clothing, like dunkeries and like, you know, soft clothing and stuff. But for me, I really like that kind of smart, dark and goffy look, you know, like I very much like my joggers, very much like my comfy labels removed clothes, things of that nature. And, you know, most people who think of autism, they don't think of like a guy trying to relive his emo phase. But it happens to us too. And, you know, just because we're autistic doesn't mean that we have to dress a certain way or we can't dress or, you know, get interested in fashion and, you know, develop our own trends and things of that nature. I'm not saying that I have, although I wouldn't shy away from it. Maybe, maybe. Give me a call. Send me one of those internet flying through the air messages, if you're interested in that. But yes, I don't like tags. I don't like rough, horrible clothing. Most people don't, but they deal with it. I can't deal with it. So I have to get lots of soft stuff. I have to get lots of, I have to try on different t-shirts. I can't buy anything online because when it comes, I see it and it looks amazing. It looks perfect. It comes. And it's way too sensory provoking for me. So I always have to go around shops on my own. Well, not on my own, but I have to have to go to the shops physically and try things on and things of that nature and try and find things that really don't cause me that horrible distress. But yeah, that's number six. I don't know why I've included this one, but we're going with it anyway. Number seven. I'm not going to bother with the fingers. I don't need to do that, do I? No, no, no. Number six. Relationships. No, not number six. Talking about. Number seven. Maybe I do need to do the fingers. Autistic people like it or not. I don't know why you wouldn't like it, but you know, going against the whole stigma of autism, you kind of think that the other authorities are going to be some kind of, you know, we're all going to be asexual and we're not going to want to find love and have physical intimacy and things of that nature. But actually, a lot of people do. I've been dating since I was in my adolescence probably only at the age of 13, 14. And, you know, just like my neurotypical peers. And sure, it's difficult. And there's been a lot of things that I've had to develop in adulthood to kind of make my awareness of neurotypical behavior and psychology a bit more clear. I've done a lot of work to kind of get over those things. But I think, to be honest, the majority of people have something that, you know, they want to improve on the things that they don't particularly like about themselves in the context of a relationship. And I think this point is basically just to say that, yes, we do have relationships. Of course. And so do I. Number eight, the final one. Yes. Wow. Amazing. I'm annoying myself now. I don't know how you're feeling. Eye contact. Yes. Get these big, pearly, white, horrible things that don't look like like some kind of alien creature when you take them out of your school. Not that I do it regularly, but they're a bit weird, aren't they? Unless they're within the confines of an eyeball. And I suck it. Yeah. Eye contact. Yes. I actually find this pretty easy. And I know other autistic people who do as well. What do people tend to either go one of two ways? They either make way too much eye contact or they make too little, you know, they're looking off to the side and, you know, they sort of glance up now and again. And, you know, at least there were a lot of sort of psychological signaling that this person is perhaps not very confident and not very sociable and mistrustful. And it's been shown in the literature to be that way. That's kind of people's perceptions of it. Not very related to the point, but it does have a large bearing on the way that people treat us. And it shouldn't, because it's literally just meeting the gaze of another human being. The only time again, and there's going to be a big, big, big, big caveat to this, it very much depends on my emotional state, my mental health state, whether I'm very anxious and overloaded or very calm and chill. And I'm calm and chill. It's quite natural. You can sort of look to the side and make eye contact and look away at the right moments. But when I'm not, I tend to just make no eye contact because it stresses me out. Don't know why it's just something that seems to be very common for autistic people. In my situations, if I'm feeling good, if I'm not feeling bad, then I do make eye contact. So I hope you have very much enjoyed this episode. And yes, just to highlight it once again, you know, these things, they're me. They're the things that I don't fit into. And it could be, well, it's very probable that if you go and give the same things to an autistic person, you show them this, they'll be like, oh, yeah, I did follow that one. And then, you know, maybe a large percentage of them, they don't. It's very dependent on the individual, very dependent on the person, their lifestyle, their choices, the things that they've experienced, the things that they've been taught. You know, you can't always fit everybody into a specific mould. And we always talk about, if you met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. There may be some commonalities between us, just as, as very difficult, non-autistics have commonalities between us, between them or people from different countries. It doesn't mean that everyone, everyone's going to fit into that mould. And I hope that this video has been a great eye opener. If you've thought that all autistic people are the same, and we all act in the same way and have struggled the same things and don't do those things and do these things, then I hope I've changed your mind. And if you want to stick around, please feel free to do all the likey, subby stuff. Not, not that kind of, no, that kind of subby stuff. Give me a subscribe, please. A little small channel like myself, trying to grow and make it in the big, the big neurotypical world. All by myself. Well, not by myself. But I'm rambling now. So make sure to head over to my Instagram at Thomas Henley UK. That's for all of my social medias if you want to follow me on something else. Although Twitter, I don't tend to touch because I don't like it. And if you want to check out my podcast, which is probably the central part of the work that I do, the very community podcast, autism and mental health topics, I get people from all different walks of life, autistic people mostly. And so if you want to go do that, all the links are down in the description. And I hope you have a good day and I'll see you later. Bye.