 Good day, my lovely listeners! You are listening to The Forty Autie Podcast. Tune in every week to explore inspiring stories and insightful information that dive headfirst into the world of autism and mental health. With all those tantalising tongue twisters out of the way, let's get into the show. Today's podcast episode is proudly sponsored by Timo, the award-winning app designed to support neurodivergent people, just like yourself, with routine and scheduling. Head to your app store and type T-W-I-M-O to learn more. Booyakasha, welcome back to The Forty Autie Podcast. How are you doing today? Just thought I'd give you a little bit of the old algae intro, of course. This is a very important day today because I have finished work for a week and I've got some time off to chill out and to get my head straight, to get rid of this burnout that's seeming to accumulate and relax. Today we are talking about something that I think most people on the internet, most people with social medias, YouTubers, podcasters, whatever, have already made a podcast or a video on COVID-19. And to give it the little bit of the autism mental health spin, today we're going to be talking about autism, OCD, and COVID-19. Of course, there's going to be some different struggles that people have, whether they're on the autistic spectrum or have some type of mental health issue or what's the politically correct term for it. Something along those lines. Today I am joined by Anna, who has got in contact with me via email, as I've said to everybody on the podcast. If you wanted to get in contact and possibly be on The Vortioity podcast, then you could. And Anna has been one of the first people who has actually followed up on that and got in contact with me. Anyway, I'll stop rambling. Anna, how are you doing today? Yeah, thank you. I'm doing okay. Yeah, I've just been having quite a sort of life back day, following the same old routines at the moment. So yeah, it was okay. From our little sort of pre-chat, we talked about the impact of COVID on your ability to kind of function. And one of the things that you highlighted was your OCD. I think germophobia, did you describe it as? Yes, OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Mainly around germs, illness, getting sick, picking up illness from other people, and getting contaminated in general. That's the sort of main bulk of my OCD. But I also also have a bit of checking OCD as well, where I'll check the oven before I go to bed, things like that. Not too much, but I have a particular ritual where I have to check it properly before I go to bed. And I'm just very, very anxious in general. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why we're doing it on COVID-19. Because I think everybody can imagine how difficult life must be for someone who struggles with needing to be clean and needing to make sure that you don't get contaminated and infected and stuff. It sounds like it could be a very tumultuous, tumultuous, that's not right, turbulent time for you. So just for everyone's knowledge, just to kind of introduce you, would you like to give a little bit of a background to who you are, what you do for work, what kind of things you enjoy? Yeah. So hello, if you want to, my name is Anna. Because of my extreme anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, I'm not fit for work. So I can't work like conventionally. Yeah, obviously, because I can't really, you know, someone, this is even before COVID, someone only has to cough for as if it signs a illness and I'll be out of the room, which is difficult. And then on top of that, obviously being autistic as well, it just kind of compounds it. So I can't work conventionally, but I do, as far as I'm able, I try and do voluntary work because I like to be active and I like to feel like I'm contributing in some way. I still try as far as I can to do things. For example, I attend two groups, autism groups. So yes, it's a group just for autistic women, which is really good as we've been running now for a couple of years. And I also attend a self advocacy group as well, the idea being that we come together once a month to sort of discuss ideas and helping each other out over various issues, could be, I don't know, anything from benefits to employment, things like that, but also just a sort of talk and like it has a sort of social component. So we always have a check in where we tell each other how we're doing, what's been going on. And then if anyone's got any problems, people could kind of chip in and try and help them and things like that. So I really enjoyed that. But that's kind of as far at the moment as far as my kind of activities go, I guess. But it's better than nothing because it's like a regular routine and always look forward to these groups. But other than that, I kind of feel my days really by doing a lot of reading. I'm an avid reader. I'm a bookworm. I'm, I absolutely love books. So I read every day for two hours. That's a very important part of my routine in the morning. Wow. And as I was saying to Thomas before we started a podcast, one of my major special interests is in food and cooking. So I collect cookery books. Yeah. So that's kind of a little background. Cool. And one thing that I found quite funny is that a lot of the things that you've been interested in, like with with your cooking and with, I think you said with your history degree as well. Yeah. We have very, very different sort of special interests and stuff. I absolutely hate cooking. It's, it's one of, it's one of the things that I find the absolute most difficult thing. Got my cleaning done, I can dry my clothes, I can wash up, I can do all of that stuff. But when it comes down to cooking, my energy levels just drop. I think you were saying to Thomas before you were into like gaming and things like that. Whereas that's like, it's funny that that's something, I'm not really, I'm not particularly into gaming. Yeah. But yeah, it's interesting like showing how two autistic people can have such different areas of interest, I guess. Yeah, it is. Well, I suppose that one thing that we do share is an interest in psychology and autism philosophy as well, I think you said. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I love philosophy. Really interested in that. Yeah. Anything to do with the mind and the human condition. Oh, yes, definitely. So what is your relationship with autism? When were you diagnosed and what sort of self-discovery journey did you go on once you, once you got the news? So I was, I was diagnosed late, which is not uncommon for women, I think, because women are historically underdiagnosed compared to men. So I grew up without diagnosis, feeling like very different. Like, why can't I make friends? Why can't I fit in feeling weird, feeling on the outside? I mean, teachers were aware that I had issues from when I started primary school. In actual fact, shortly after I started school, one of the teachers said to my mum, yeah, she said to my mum, you need to try and interact more with other parents like a school game. She said, and that will help Hannah learn to socialize. My mum kind of didn't really like that because she sort of felt like she was being blamed for my social difficulties. Yeah. So teachers were aware of it, but they just, they didn't understand it. And so I was called an enigma. Sounds like a super superhero name. The enigma. Yeah. And it's funny, actually, because there's been, there's actually been a book written on autism, I think it's by Uta Thrift called, I think it's autism explaining via enigma, which is quite interesting because I was actually called that, like a teacher. She just couldn't, it just couldn't understand me because my skills were all over the place. In some areas I was excelling, like I could read far above my age, because I learned to read before I started school. But I didn't understand what I was reading. I didn't, I didn't have any comprehension for what I was reading. So my reading age was five years ahead of my chronological age, but my comprehension was lagging by about two years behind my chronological age. And I had no number sense. I was really bad at maths, which again goes against the stereotype of autistic people being great at math. I'm really bad at math, you know, to the point of dyscalculia, it's really bad. I had literally no number sense at all. My worst ever GCSE score was in statistics. I liked, like the algebra kind of section to it. I like kind of the anything that required sort of logical thought and letters and stuff. But as soon as it came to maths and lots of different functions and different statistics and learning different formulas, it just completely just washed over my head. Yeah, because it's this kind of stereotype, isn't it, autistic people love maths or are great at maths, which I think can be quite damaging to those of us who, who do really struggle with it or who are just not interested in it. And of course, I don't know why I was diagnosed so late being female probably had some part to play in that. In fact, I wasn't stereotypical. I spoke really well, you know, I'm what you could call, I guess, hyperverbal in a sense, that language and just talking, I guess, is something that I've always been able to do. But people often just focus on that. And I think, oh, you could talk really well, you know, you can put sentences together. But actually, they don't understand that behind that there's a lot of confusion and a lot of problems like I'll be taking things literally, your whole communication aspect, where you don't quite understand what someone is saying to you. But because you can talk really well, and you can present as this very verbal, I presented as a very verbal person, I think that maybe led people off a cent of it. And of course, also in the back in the 90s, autism wasn't really as understood as it is today, people only really understood the very extreme, sort of, I guess, more classic manifestations of a child not speaking, going to a special school, kind of sitting in a corner walking back and forth and being very obviously different. It just wasn't on people's radar so much in a kind of mainstream settings as it is now. Because I guess one of one of the common sort of misconceptions is that, you know, like with, for example, like the tribe of impairments, you know, you've got actually two different sections that are sort of to do with each other but are differentiated. So like one of them is kind of speech and language and ability to kind of verbalize things and communicate. But there's also like the other part, which is the social side, which has all the nonverbal stuff, the context, the emotions, the expression, particularly for myself. I read it quite a young age and I was quite verbal. I was able to kind of, you know, talk about autistic people being very, a very old young person and a very young old person. So I would engage in conversation with adults because I find kids just too difficult to communicate with. Yeah, people just get those sort of two things very confused. Sometimes the ability to verbalize and communicate with language doesn't always weigh up with someone's ability to read social situations and understand the nonverbal stuff and, you know, all that kind of behind the scenes communication other than, you know, straight up direct speaking. Yeah, I think this is a very old-fashioned view of what autism is, being the idea that autistic people completely lack any ability to sort of communicate verbally, a sort of classic idea. But again, of course speaking, it's not quite the same thing as, how can I put it, it's like as many different facets to communication. Like, I mean, at the moment, like doing this podcast, in a sense, we're communicating, but we're communicating information, which is just one way of communicating. But in an actual social situation, say, where you're trying, where you're in a, say, where you're doing small talk and that kind of... Narrotypicals. Yeah, you're not like communicating information so much as more about communicating other things like feelings and that, I think I call it social pragmatics. That form of communication is what all autistics struggle with, regardless of their ability to talk. It's almost like the talking becomes a sort of smoke screen for the fact that beneath that, there are all these other problems. Yeah, the best way to kind of demonstrate that is to compare the differences between an autistic person talking to a neurotypical or any kind of neurotypical group and an autistic person with other autistic people. It's like, in a normal sense, you kind of start out with a small talk trying to get an idea of who they are based on how they act and what they do and their eye contact and all of those nonverbal things. And then you start kind of going into the kind of like experiences and how things make you feel and stuff that that seems to be like the main way that the kind of neurotypical dialogue tends to go, whereas comparing that to when autistic people sort of meet each other and chat to them, it's very much... This is who I am. This is what I think about this. Shall we talk about this? And the reason why I like podcasting so much is because that's my baseline preferred method of talking, exchanging information. I think people looking in onto autistic people talking is very much like we sort of take a shortcut and we go straight into a certain topic and start talking about it. And I don't know about you, but I tend to like collecting details. So when I'm with someone, I often want to ask them loads of questions. I have this thing where I just like accumulating information about people, almost like I'm an inquisitor. Well, I guess it's kind of like our main way of feeling comfortable with somebody. I guess most people, they would see whether your personalities jam together or whether the conversation flows or anything like that where for us, it's like, what are their opinions on life and what are their interests and what kind of things can we talk about? Like, what things do they understand and education and stuff like it's very much, as you said, yeah, I guess sort of exchange of information. Yeah. And the fact that we don't naturally know, I think non-autistic people have this intuitive understanding of what's appropriate or not. So they don't have to think about it all the time. They just know naturally how to socialize, whereas because autistic people don't have that built in naturally, we're having to work it out all the time. You've got to do so much like cerebrally. Hardly anything comes natural to you unless you've done it thousands of hundreds and hundreds of times in a particular setting with particular people. So a few months back, I put out an episode with my friend Nick Ransom and we were going to talk about OCD and autism, but we ended up talking a lot about relationship OCD because it was something that I'd never heard about before. And he was talking kind of about the sort of atypical ways that OCD can manifest. I think you're quite a unique guest in that sense. You know, it's a unique situation. You know, we're in this isolation where constantly under the threat of getting infected. And you told me that, you know, there was a lot of negative impacts on your life, particularly due to your OCD. So could you tell us a little bit about how OCD has affected your life? Oh, yes. So my OCD has always revolved around fear of germs and illness. It first started for me sort of around mid childhood. So my earliest recollections of when I developed OCD are around sort of maybe six, seven, that sort of age. And it came about really from taking things literally. So I actually remember I was in year three at primary school. So I would have been about sort of seven years old. And I was sitting on a carpet. And you know how children often like they play with their shoes when they're sitting on a carpet, they kind of pull their shoes. And I did that as many kids do. And another boy was doing it. And a teacher said to him, he said, you need to go and wash your hands. You could get a disease from touching your shoes. And that kind of stayed in my head. And I was like, oh, I could get a disease from this. The demon shoes. And it just shows, I guess, how big an impact had on me that I could still remember that episode all these years later. And the other one was before having our lunch, we were always told to go and wash our hands. But we're never told how long to wash our hands for just as important to wash our hands. I didn't know, you know, no one told us how long. So I'll be, I'll be washing my hands for ages. Other kids noticed it. They noticed it. And they say, oh, you're washing your hands for a long time. Yeah. So I think a lot of it came from taking things literally. And then it just became more extreme as I got older and more aware of the world around me. It became particularly bad when I was at secondary school. And I became more aware of not how diseases and illnesses are passed on. And also around food contamination as well. The food technology teacher really scared me when she showed us a video of a man getting sick from eating a little bit of pink chicken and the aftermath, you know, of him with salmonella in quite a sort of graphic detail. So that really stayed with me. And I stopped eating chicken, you know, I actually still do now, I can only eat it if it's like shop bought and it's like already cooked. I haven't overcome that one yet. But that's just an example of like, of how this literal thinking, not quite understanding being very confused, led on to the development of OCD and related phobias. So yeah, so nowadays, I avoid people who look ill, and this is before COVID, by the way. So I avoid people who look ill. So if anyone's like coughing, sneezing, he's obviously got a cold or anything like that, I will be right the other side, say, off a shop, but say someone's coughing in a shop, I'll be right the other side. And then I'll be thinking for a long time, oh my God, oh my God, did they infect me? Did they infect me and like a fork going through my head? See, I don't cook warm meat or anything like that. I can't handle warm meat. And I have a lot of health anxiety as well. For a long time, I remember I went to the doctors compulsively for a while, because I was convinced that I was going to have a heart attack, because I was getting like aches and stuff. And the doctor checked me out, and she was like, no, you're absolutely fine, your heart's healthy, your blood pressure's normal, it's just anxiety. Eventually, I realized that and nowadays, when I get exactly the same aches, because I know that that anxiety, I don't think catastrophize them, and they're not as bad. You know, like when you focus on something, it actually becomes worse. But yes, it was all anxiety, you know, because when you're anxious and tense all the time, you do sometimes get aches and pains, which is kind of like normal when you're anxious. But because I'm, I catastrophize, I was convinced that there's something wrong with my heart. So I kept on going back to the doctors. There's a word for that, isn't there? I can't remember. What's the word for when you think you're ill all the time? Oh, hypochondria? Hypochondria, yeah. Was it kind of like that? Yeah, yeah, definitely I have hypochondria, which is just, I think generally it's like a fixation on illness and it's why we get something wrong with me and, and like, I'm the worst patient ever. So when I do get ill, I'm, I literally, it makes me panic. I can't take it. I can't tolerate it. I'm like, Oh no, what's wrong with me? Is it's very bad? Am I going to die? Oh, do I need to get adopted? So I think that as well, it's the sense of being out of control, because being, being autistic, I really need to be in control of everything. And of course, when you're ill, you're not in control. Yeah. And also when you're ill, you can't follow your routines. And I think a lot of it is wrapped up with this fear of not being able to follow my routines, a fear of change. I like to, I like to be in the same bodily state all the time. I don't like any deviation from my feeling of normal. Yeah. So illness is a massive threat to get sort of, I guess, a sort of very existential threat to get sort of meaning in my life. I think I can imagine that it was it was difficult, especially in secondary school, because for me, it was the case where my anxiety would basically cripple me on quite a regular basis. So I'd go to the nurse with bad stomach ache and headache and muscle tension and all that kind of stuff. I think that that was mostly due to kind of the environment. I didn't like the unpredictable environment of being in school with lots of uncontrollable and illogical kids. So I very much got sick quite a lot. Now, whether that was actually me getting sick or me, you know, experiencing the symptoms of anxiety, I don't know. So do you think that that kind of heightened state of anxiety kind of caused a lot of physical kind of symptoms to appear in? Yeah. I mean, like, I think because when you're anxious, you often like tense up and it affects your breathing and things that can then sort of potentially result in a sort of panic. For a long time, I didn't even know I had like panic attacks. Someone had to tell me that it was actually a symptoms of panic. Because I thought I always thought that panic was like where you'd be like, you know, like really obvious where you often see it on TV and so I was like really hyperventilating. I thought that's what panic was. But panic isn't always obvious like that. Because I think I have kind of like sort of silent panic attacks, because I don't kind of let other people know I'm in a state of panic because I never really communicate my feelings. I'm quite closed off on a feeling level. You very much kind of go into shut down rather than go down? Yeah. So I can literally be with someone in a kind of state of panic and they won't know. I might even be smiling, looking completely okay, but actually inside I'm in extreme anxiety. I understand that. It's very much. And I think a lot about being, sorry, carry on Thomas. Well, I do get that because, you know, for a long, for a large part of my life, I was kind of in the Taekwondo world. Confrontation has always been something that I find excessively difficult. So when I was kind of on my way up doing sort of local competitions and stuff and fighting with other people, I kind of learned to suppress my panic. Like on the outside, you know, like people would tell me who watch me fight and are interested in my fights would say, you look so confident, you look so in control and relaxed and stuff. Whereas like on the inside, it's like a constant battle to stop myself from like hyperventilating and rocking and showing all those kind of typical signs of anxiety and stuff. So I think I do get what you mean to some extent. Yeah, I also wanted to add that when I was at because of a germphobia when I was at secondary school, it's a particularly harrowing part of my life, which I often don't like to think about too much. But I used to basically hold my breath whenever someone was like coughing and stuff. So I would be trying to hold my breath under thinking that if I didn't if I held my breath then I wouldn't be breathing in any germs. But of course all that does it gives you a headache and means you can't concentrate at all. And the thing is I couldn't tell anyone about this. I didn't talk to anyone. My parents knew that I had OCD because you know, yes only so much you can control with hand washing and things like that. But I don't think I knew the extent of it. I still haven't told my parents to get stay about some of the things I did because I don't want to like, you know, I didn't want to kind of I guess I was worried about what they would say, you know. And you meant like telling people as in like people around you at school or? Yeah, I didn't I didn't tell anyone. I kept it all very much to myself. And whenever my parents drew attention to it and suggested I had OCD, I got really angry and defensive. I was like, No, I don't have any problem. I'll be really defensive about it. And it's the same with autism as well, actually, because my parents first suspected I was autistic, sort of around my early teens, because my dad was a teacher. So he worked in a college and he'd gone on some training course. It also goes someone in his class who was autistic and my dad can see parallels between me and her. And he used to he used to joke about it, like at the table, you say, you're behaving like it'sparagus, because he called it asparagus. It's funny enough, it's actually a book called Asparagus Dreams written by an autistic woman, which is interesting because it makes me wonder how many other people have come up with this kind of pun because it's asparagus asparagus, you know, asparagus. Oh, yeah, for South Park. Asparagus. Oh, you've seen that one. It's so funny. Yeah, but I got so angry though, whenever it was mentioned, I think because teenagers kind of, they want to fit in, if anyone suggests to them that they have a condition, it can make them feel really cornered and defensive, because it almost feels like a threat to their identity, say, someone who's just like everyone else. Well, I think it's, because, you know, when you're a kid and stuff, you rely solely on other people, keep you alive and to keep you safe and to keep you nourished. But when you when you sort of enter that teenage state, state, that teenage age, you develop a lot of self awareness. And, you know, you could say that a lot of that is to do with like the prefrontal cortex. With the development of that, you also develop a bit of an ego as well. So you feel very much like you're the center of everything. And a lot of rebellion towards parents and towards teachers and to other people is based on that kind of desire to show people that you are kind of independent. And sometimes you can go a bit to the extremes, deny things that are obviously blatantly obvious. For me, that was depression and self harming and anxiety and stuff. Like I was having panic attacks. And I was very depressed all of the time, thinking, you know, a lot of suicidal thoughts. But it was always something that I kept to myself and to specific people that I'd talked to about it. For a lot of that time, my parents knew that I was struggling, but they probably didn't realize to the extent that I was because I was trying to show them that I was independent and my own person and all that kind of stuff. And when you are autistic as well, you do feel even more kind of vulnerable and alone because everything is so uncertain and frantic and turbulent that you got to put extra effort into trying to protect yourself, I suppose. And also, I don't know whether you found this, but for me, and I still do, I could find it quite hard to really talk to people how I'm actually feeling because I like to kind of, I don't like to appear kind of weak or vulnerable or things like that. I like, so it's quite hard to kind of open up to people about my feelings. So when people are like, oh, how are you? I'm like, I'm okay. But also, I find because I don't really understand feelings or emotions that much, it's kind of a rather alien world to me because it's not logical because I'm quite a logical person. I mean, it's not that I don't have feelings. I have very extreme feelings, but it's kind of a world that I find rather threatening. Yeah, because if you don't naturally or comfortably understand the social emotional world from that kind of logical standpoint, it can feel very unpredictable. As I said, like it's very difficult to control. It's very difficult to understand and navigate. Because there is something called alexophymia. Yes, yeah, I'm definitely alexophymic. Yeah, that's that's I think it's very, very, very common among autistic people. So it's time for a quick mention from our sponsors, Teemo. If you love visual support in your scheduling, Teemo is for you. The app was designed for people with ADHD and autism and helps empower users to schedule visual routines that work. Users say that Teemo can help reduce stress and support executive function, which are both two things that I struggle with myself. Learn more at www.teemoapp.com or just type in T-Dub-L-I-M-O into your search bar. Thank you so much to my Patreon supporters. Your support means the world. Anyway, let's get back into the show. So yeah, one thing that I wanted to ask, which I thought was quite, quite interesting, quite a good comparison point. Do you think that having OCD as an autistic person differs from how your average neurotypical would experience OCD? Well, I think for me, and I can only speak very personally, of course, because all people with OCD and all people who are autistic are very different from one another. So other people might not relate to this. But speaking very personally, I would say that my autism means OCD is experienced less as an illness. I don't see myself as ill, because often OCD is talked about like as a mental illness, which it can be for some people, particularly if it's making a person feel very, very distressed and took a point of say depression, maybe, and where they literally see no point in life and it zaps them of all their energy and they can't follow their interests and things like that. Then, yeah, you could say it's entering illness territory. But for me, I don't see myself as ill. I see it as more a part of my way of being, because I can't really remember a time. I mean, I'm sure, I mean, there was a time, but I just can't remember it really when I didn't have some degree of OCD. I mean, it did largely develop out of my very literal thinking style. I would say that my interests and routines do help me deal with the downside of OCD and I call this autism's healing mechanism. I think it's funny how autism works in me. On the one hand, it can make me very, very anxious and has given me and has largely contributed, I think, to the OCD and anxiety for me. Although the OCD is separate from the autism, it's at the same time, how can I put it, it's kind of come out of the autism in the sense that the autism has made me more vulnerable to it. And I think because of my very literal, obsessive way of thinking, that has made me vulnerable to develop OCD. So in that respect, I think it probably does have a lot of neurological overlap with the autism for me, even though if you're looking at the strict diagnostic criteria, get separate conditions. I think that in terms of like a brain and neurology, it probably are very much part of the same kind of difference for me. There are some aspects that, you know, to kind of the diagnostic method of autism around sort of routine and as I would say rigid thinking and an over dependence on logic, I can imagine that, you know, some of those patterns of behavior kind of lend themselves more to an OCD diagnosis. One thing that I think we agreed on when we last talked about it was, you know, the difference between being autistic and being very rigid in your routines and stuff is that it's something that you want to do and it doesn't cause you discomfort or distress. Whereas OCD, if you don't do that to the letter or you don't go through these particular rituals, then there is a large amount of stress and discomfort from it. Sometimes it can be hard to separate the two for me because my interests are extremely obsessive and that's because of the autism. They give me a great deal of satisfaction and meaning and I'm very glad that I do have very strong interests and routines. I think if I didn't have what I call this sort of self-healing mechanism that autism gives, I think then all I'd be left with is the negatives of OCD and my life would, maybe I would then become mentally ill. So I think in a sense autism does help me by giving me these more positive obsessions but my interests can also take a form of a kind of compulsive OCD element as well at times because I'm a perfectionist. So sometimes there's always that element of anxiety and stress there even when I'm doing something I love because I want to get it perfect. I'm always think that for example with my cooking interest, I'm always obsessing over oh what shall I cook next and that can then make me anxious but at the same time I almost need that anxiety because if I didn't have it I would have a void and I wouldn't have anything there. So it's a kind of strange dialectic in a way, a kind of positive but then also negative like a sort of yin and yang. Yeah yeah I can see that. One of the things that you highlighted that kind of the difference between neurotypicals and yourself kind of experiencing OCD is that it's very much founded in logic. A lot of people with OCD who aren't autistic I guess would have a lot of compulsions to do things that don't particularly make sense. The owner of my boxing gym that I go to and he has to like move the door handle up and down because it helps him control the feeling that his gym's gonna burn down and obviously that doesn't make any logical sense at all but with yourself and your kind of germophobia you know germs are things that exist and washing your hands and being cleanly and avoiding sick people is a logical way to avoid being sick. Would you say that the reason why you would be diagnosed with OCD is because of the kind of because you know most people don't want to get sick and die from an illness like I can say. The majority of the population. For you do you think it's like that logical danger that the danger of something is like inflated to a massive degree you know when you compare yourself to another person. Yeah I'll say I'm very risk adverse and when it comes to my OCD there is a great deal of overlap I think with my autistic need to follow very strict routines because the way I see it is that if I were to catch an illness then because I have very strong memories of being ill and the way that it messes up my routine and the uncontrollability of it and the unexpected nature of it and the sort of suffering and stuff I think I'm very sensitive to pain as well so the memory of it combined with my need for routine really kind of amplifies the sense of risk because if I were to catch the illness I wouldn't then be able to follow my routine it would disturb it would mess up my sort of my day I wouldn't be able to read I wouldn't be able to do my cooking all the things can bring life meaning and I think non-autistic people because they're not so fixated on particular interests or routines they're just more laid back I think yeah they can see a bigger picture maybe they might be like oh well no one likes going ill but you know but you recover and stuff like that and you know and maybe going out and putting yourself at risk is worth it because if you use other things even if there's a slight risk of getting ill and stuff whereas I just focus on illness it's like it's major catastrophe kind of the centre of your decision making and what you do yeah but I was getting better before Covid with kind of rationalising it to some extent because I did have like I had some cognitive behavioural therapy in the past it didn't cure me of OCD and I have to say that it it wasn't particularly helpful because it wasn't tainted towards my autism hmm that's that's a big problem like with traditional kind of therapy I mean it's crazy to think that you know just how high the rates of of mental health and comorbidities there is with with autistic people that the therapies that are traditionally used to combat those conditions aren't geared towards autistic people so I've got like um I went through at least seven or eight years of counselling I didn't feel like that helped me at all like every week for like seven years seven or eight years didn't see much benefit from it because they were they were approaching it from a very emotional angle rather than kind of teaching me about it and giving me the research and the statistics and the methods and you know you've got to have that reason to do stuff rather than just kind of as you said I guess kind of being laid back and going with the flow in any sort of sense yeah I mean I have to say though um when you're talking um earlier about the question about how OCD is different for me being autistic one thing I would like to mention is that um my interests and my teams do help me deal with the downsides of OCD because I prefer to autism what I call autism's healing mechanism and my my very strong interests can actually at times motivate me to overcome aspects of the OCD so long as the interest outweighs the anxiety so I can give an example when I was a teenager one of my major special interests was babies and young children I was really really obsessed with babies um and this was all because um it was actually a spin off interest because I was I was very into the actress Kate Winslet and the actress Kate Winslet had a baby called Mia in the year 2000 and um as soon as she had a baby I was like oh this is really interesting I need to go and find out everything I can about babies so I can better understand Kate Winslet's existence so I started to read her parents names like that and and so I volunteered at a nursery school um I did a work experience there um and I carried on volunteering at a nursery school for several years and this was with uh sort of two to three year old children and they always have colds and coughs and things like that because you know they're building up their immunity and things so when you're going to a nursery school you're surrounded by these little um I don't know what you're calling them um plague rats okay yeah like carriers yeah and so I had to then sort of overwired my OCD in order to be in a situation among lots of kids who were coughing and you know um but because my interest in babies and toddlers was so strong it motivated me to be around them I mean I still got triggered and I still think oh I hope I don't catch it all get very infectious but because I had the motivation because of a strong interest to be there it meant that I could tolerate it in a way that I wouldn't normally if I didn't have the interest that's really interesting because you know like we were talking about elixaphimia and emotions and stuff I imagine that that a lot of the the impact of OCD is emotional fear you know like fear is quite a big driver for for humans and and our behavior but I guess like your desire to learn about something and so you're interested in something the positive emotion that sort of surrounds that is quite kind of kind of overrides the negatives that that you experience oh yes definitely I mean I used to say when I was obsessed with Kate Winslet I would often say you know if Kate Winslet had a really bad cold or something but I had to go and meet her say if I was invited to kind of sit down next to her in London that she just happened to have a really bad cold and she was like really infectious I'd be like I'd still go and see her even though I had OCD and I'd normally avoid someone like that with a plague but it'd be like if Kate Winslet and I'll be catching Kate Winslet's cold so we talked a lot about the difficulties of OCD and I know you've said about how special interests has been quite a big sort of grounding factor for you and in terms of dealing with the many facets of OCD but there any sort of other strategies or help that you've received that help with your OCD or the anxiety that follows with it? So I would say that in terms of strategies so other than that we've talked about already my interest as a form of distraction is one of my major strategies for dealing with it because safe is a good argument I'm out and about at the moment with Covid I don't really go out at all my dad does my shopping for me he does my food shopping because I physically cannot enter shops at the moment I'm lucky that I live right next door to my dad and he's happy and supportive and willing to do my shopping for me yeah and I mean of course not all people with OCD are fortunate in that respect not all of them have that support network and I can't imagine what it's like for them you know there must be others out there who you just physically cannot enter shops at the moment I mean when I say physically I mean literally physically it's like the brain just makes the body go into absolute like paralysis where you cannot physically step into a shop I mean I don't know what would happen if I didn't have my dad to do shopping for me I guess I would probably be buying food off Amazon and spending a fortune on a can of beans that like cost about 20 pounds of Amazon or something because you know I'd rather do that than go into a shop but yeah so that's a strategy I guess at the moment that's helping me deal with it so that I can avoid some of the extreme extremes of the OCD because I'm not actually going into situations that make me feel contaminated so obviously if you're not going to situations that make you feel contaminated you have less compulsion I mean you could I guess it is a coping mechanism but I guess it's also a symptom of OCD and anxiety sort of avoidance yeah definitely avoidance I mean I mean normally before COVID I was trying to work on reducing my avoidance and I was trying to use those cognitive behavioural strategies that I'd learnt from when I was in therapy as I said earlier over therapy didn't really help because it wasn't tailored towards autism it did still give me some kind of strategies I think I think a lot of these strategies though also came about via reading because I've done a lot of my own reading and reading a lot of self help books and things like that so again a lot of it I think came about from my own study as opposed to what I learnt from actual therapy so I probably would have found out I discovered it even without therapy actually but before COVID I was using some of those CBT strategies you know like where you have to like assess the evidence you have to kind of think okay so say if I was going in a shop and there was someone coughing or whatever you'd sort of think well I've got a good immune system what's the actual likelihood of me catching it you know all those things it only helped to some extent I have to say because when you're like really anxious and things like that you tend to not really listen to logic so if they're coughing I'd still likely go right the other end of the store or things like that and avoidance has always been a big factor well it's like phobias like I have an experience with phobias with needles I can go into into a doctor's office to get like a vaccine javels or something like that and be completely fine up until the point where a needle is at least like a meter from my skin and then I just get this kind of blood rush to my head suddenly a massive amount of energy and irritability and I just like even move away or kind of stop the needle from from going into me you know phobias are quite like a protective mechanism for me I guess strangely is is kind of like a logical thing for me because that I don't like the idea of something being inside my body like anything like pregnancy or obviously it's not gonna happen to me of course but um anything like that like parasites or needles or implants or or anything like that just seriously like messes with my head so I can imagine that you know like if you have a phobia of germs that a lot of that is kind of an involuntary response yeah I think I think I mean it's yeah definitely it feels involuntary um it's it's kind of almost like yeah quite a flight thing like you're in survival mode um when you're in survival mode all logic stops because we know you's trying to think logically if a tiger was running after you'd want to escape straight away and so I think it has this kind of evolutionary it's like an evolutionary sort of throwback to kind of uh wilder times that technically we no longer need to behave like that but if it's like that that's the reason why we have so many spider and snake phobias because if you get bitten by a poisonous spider or snake there's nothing that you can do about it it's gonna it's gonna kill you like in those times yes you don't have time to try and think logically and stop and think you have to get help straight away well we have anti-venoms and anti-poisons and stuff now but it's still like that that that threat that it poses to you because of the way that you're brain's wired or you learn behaviors or knowledge of things you still have that very much kind of fight or flight response to things that that people people wouldn't worry about so much yeah and I mean and you could think like maybe like say go away with evolved like if we were living say in hunter-gatherer times people with the sort of OCD type of brain or like hyper aware and hyper alert and phobic or because they're beyond alert all the time they won't be it might not even be OCD in that situation those types of people would be most likely to survive because they're going to be so risk aware whereas now it is it is a disability and a hindrance because we no longer need it but actually you could think of it almost as sort of almost you could think as an extension of the immune system in a sense that the brain is almost like a first arm of the immune system in terms of preventing foreign bodies even coming into you in the first place I like that yeah I think that there is definitely but it's like it's like with anything isn't it it's like with the problem of obesity and stuff like we're designed to gather resources and eat when we can and then store it we're not supposed to have endless supplies of food and nourishment and because of that we can get so over nourished that we become obese and we become fatter and fatter and it causes a lot of health issues that usually wouldn't arise in it in a sort of natural pre-modern time kind of state yeah it's like it's like a gene's fork and makes someone more likely to be obese I think I was reading that the reason they exist still is that they did have a purpose and a benefit in times when food was scarce because those people could then hold on to the you know they could they were better able to sort of store store the food and things yeah it's the same with with ADHD as well like it's proposed that the ADHD was beneficial because you'd be able to keep yourself alive like if you're able to stay constantly hyper-vigilant and aware of your environment and and small things small kind of noises distract you and and grab your attention then you're going to be a lot safer and you'll be kind of like the watchdog of the tribe if that makes sense right it's a lot to do with the kind of the interaction of these things with modern society like with learning and stuff ADHD is is not good because if you get distracted by small noises in the corner in a very safe confined building it's going to distract you from your learning but I suppose in those kind of pre-modern times that distraction was good but other than like your your special interests and that kind of flow state that autistic people get when we're when we're interested in something and the the avoidance is there anything else that you've that you found that helps I mean I find the internet is a sort of help um I guess in terms of like distraction I spend a lot of time on youtube and social media and stuff like that also I do have a support worker when after I got diagnosed um I was referred to my local autism charity and I was given an autism support worker and their job is really to sort of like help me to go out and about because at that point in time um just shortly after I got diagnosed I literally was hardly leaving a house at all so um we kind of worked one kind of just going into the library and things like that um I've come a long way since then and um over the years um obviously before covid and struck um I was you know I was traveling I was going on the train only only to certain areas that I felt safe only I was only going places that I felt confident going to like mainly local places I got there through the help I'd received from one particular support worker who was now um sadly left um was absolutely amazing and she was with me for um well she almost yeah it was about eight nine years um and she was really good she just she just completely hug a knack um and really helped me um you know travel and kind of break through a lot of my phobias and helped me so much more than any cbt could ever help me that's brilliant we talked a lot about ocd and the interaction with this whole covid isolation situation for you how do you think the government or your local council would have changed things if they really understood the impact the covid and this isolation could have on people on the spectrum well I think more online support would be good um so things like skype support I mean as I said I'm lucky in that I do get support from a local autism organization anyway that are funded by by a local authority so I get that support once a month but I think um at the moment I would quite benefit from like more support so like more online support maybe like sort of mentoring and specialist say sort of therapy services I'd really benefit from just to have a more regular input maybe more like a sort of once a week kind of um input from an autism expert or someone who can help me would be really useful yeah also more help with food chopping and support for carers I mean like my dad he he doesn't mind doing my food shopping for me but I kind of feel we haven't had any kind of um real input from say social service I mean I'm under social services because I get support you know I've got a care package and stuff but I haven't really kind of like got in contact with us to say oh do you need any help with that can we help organize this and things like that so it's like my dad's very much doing it on his own um because we have to like commonly ask for any support it's not like others are kind of really checking in on us we have to there's a sense that we almost have to like actively kind of seek for support out which is one of one of the difficulties of being being on the spectrum because you have to actually engage socially with someone and a lot of the times when you need the support your social battery is is very very flat that's that's one of the things that I struggled with at university they had the support there that I could use but nobody was checking in and asking me and telling me where to go as when I moved into my accommodation they didn't it was but it was very much I had to go to them directly and ask about it and say what can you help me with yeah and I think that's really unfair because like it means that many people just are not getting the support they really need because it's like it's almost like a kind of um it's a self-fulfilling thing like say you lack the ability to to find out about the supporting the first place because of your problems you need support to help you deal with those problems but those very problems are not allowing you to get your support I think what you said about that sort of one-to-one contact is is quite an important thing to highlight because there is extremely high rates of social isolation and as we said social anxiety so being able to have that kind of one-to-one chat with somebody you know for someone who doesn't have a network of friends or you know even a family or a supportive family it's very important and it especially to you know with the same person over and over again that kind of routine aspect to it I can imagine that that would make a lot of the difficulties that I've seen you know from people telling me about you know how covid's affected them it make it a bit easier yeah definitely I mean as I say I'm lucky and I do get at least some of that support from the autism organization it's better than nothing and I think I'd be struggling even more if I didn't have it and the autism groups I go to have been really good as they're still getting you know I still I still connect with them online every two weeks basically I have a group I attend and that's been invaluable at this time but I just sort of feel maybe more of that really I think and also I think it should just be rolled out more sort of nationally because it really is a postcode lottery like where you live yeah I think it should just be almost like a given as a kind of right I think that all autistic people should be able to access these types of services if they say wish yeah you know obviously it's a choice some people might not want to access for them but I think the choice should be better and but people should be given the information and helped to get the support so they're not left to go any devices yeah I guess this is one of the situations where the the high functioning label that's that's applied to you know people with ASD1 or Aspergers can be quite detrimental in terms of you know GPs or doctors or psychologists or councils thinking about the impact of particularly particularly Covid on the mental and physical health of autistic people because we have that kind of that that sort of high functioning label I suppose that that limits people's concern for us in a lot of cases would you agree with that? Oh yeah definitely I mean functioning labels are really quite yeah controversial because they're often based upon how well someone presents themselves and usually it's to do with how well you speak so someone might see me and and say you're really high functioning and actually about one time someone did actually say that to me they couldn't understand why I was receiving a type of support I was getting they were like well you see really high functioning them you see really high functioning I don't you how did you get your support kind of thing it's quite an intrusive question really yeah and it's all because of the way I present myself and often people do this without they don't really know you so they don't actually really know what you struggle with they're just going on how you present I wouldn't say I am always particularly high functioning I mean in some areas I function well like I could talk I can you know I can live sort of semi-independently I can function well in certain areas but of course I can't work you know because of because it gets done on OCD and things like that so in that in this sort of occupational sense I'm not really functioning you know in the sense of being integrated in society so functioning is just so it's really complicated because we're not kind of uniform people we might function well in some areas and then really struggle and not function well at all in other areas and I think and I think it can mean that people say underestimate your need for support because of the way you present yourself and vice versa someone else might appear say low functioning they might actually have function better against someone who appears the opposite I think that you know we need some way to differentiate people's ability to be independent the actual functioning labels as a concept itself is an important way to distinguish how much support someone needs it's just as you said I guess for outside outsiders and people that talk to like social workers or gps or anything like that would sort of underestimate the the needs need for support based on your ability to socialize as kind of like a they kind of use that sort of linear spectrum model rather than the the kind of spectrogram the the spiky profiles I really think they should be coming at it from the person from the individual they should be getting to know the person what does this person struggle with what support does this person actually need as opposed to just judging them on how they appear how they present themselves and I think they should try and refrain from comparing people against others because yeah this functioning thing is really a throwback to the time when autism was thought of in a very very narrow sense as someone who can't talk who has an intellectual disability the thing is someone who who doesn't have an intellectual disability he's autistic but say has a sort of average or above average general intelligence it's obviously going to present very differently someone with an intellectual disability and speech and language problems but you're not comparing like with like so it's kind of futile to say that that person is lower functioning because on some respects obviously they are but you're not comparing like with like it's a different condition and it doesn't really matter that someone else might be functioning lower in terms of the person's need for support because absolutely irrelevant that person needs support and they should be judging in their own terms I think their own merits as it were. One of the difficulties that I have around sort of functioning labels and stuff like that is generally most people don't particularly understand autism to any sort of great they might have a particular idea of what an autistic person would be like and the way that they behave and all that kind of social difficulties and stuff but I think in terms of speaking I do think that it's not necessarily the functioning labels that the problem it's it's the way that people attribute functioning labels like ways to compare people and differentiate between people are quite important. Oh yeah definitely I'll agree I mean I definitely I mean I think that autism itself because autism is we do need yeah I'd agree with you that we do need some way of I think distinguishing say good persons maybe type or type of need or things like that because autism isn't one thing like saying that someone is autistic isn't really giving you that much information about them in terms of their support needs and things because I would say that autism is really just a sorting house if you like or sort of you know when you put lots of different people who are all diagnosed autistic into the same bucket but actually they don't have the same condition as in a sense that they all have autism but autism is it's such a wide wide thing it's so broad especially now yeah I mean probably on a neurological level yeah I probably actually very distinct different types of autism I would imagine yeah there are a lot there are a lot of different kind of classifications that have been given it's it's difficult nowadays because we did used to have a lot more commonly used terms whereas now it's just everyone's lumped into the autistic label and we're giving levels it helps people to assign support to people and and all that but it doesn't necessarily uh leasing the train of thought it's a very complex social issue honestly like I think it's it's important for us to differentiate in in some way between people as as I've said you know to some extent the ability to socialise and ability to talk and communicate with others is quite a massive functioning skill you know your ability to kind of communicate with the outside world I mean you know you're controversial but it's very controversial at the time when they got bit of asparagus from the DSM yeah I I can kind of understand in one sense why they did it but I kind of feel that it was possibly a mistake to just have one autism spectrum disorder without further specifications like I know like you mentioned earlier like the one two three kind of specification level but in a sense it's just like recreating the old functioning labels in a way a sort of I I'm not sure how I mean it's really controversial and it's absolutely my field but I because autism is so many different things like you're saying obviously the ability to talk and stuff is a functioning skill and obviously sets people apart with that skill from those say you can't talk at all I can't imagine what it's like to be nonverbal autistic and I'm really glad that the type of autism I have is not nonverbal autism because I think I mean I've seen videos of like say nonverbal kids and things and what their families are going through and things and yeah I mean not to be able to talk or have any like functional competence at all like that I can't imagine what's that like and you know I'm just so glad that I do at least my intellect is spared and things like that so and I've got obviously like a type of autism I have and a type of autism you have is it's very different to those people who can't talk at all things like that and yet we also have our own struggles yeah in terms of being understood and I don't think we can really compare them against those who can't talk and things because they're very different struggles that's why that's why I tend to so if you functioning labels as that kind of differentiating thing because we can't just say this person has Asperge this person has autism because it's not it's not a thing anymore you know not everybody knows what the levels are and and what that means and it's not very well integrated into the base knowledge that medical professionals or you know like GP general practitioners and the only real kind of differentiating thing that you can use is those there's sort of I guess sort of functioning labels without going into detail and but speaking in a general sense it's important to kind of be able to distinguish because you know like I just can use myself from someone who needs 24 hour support I mean what I usually do is I usually do refer to the old labels which I think like Asperger's it's still very much in a public understanding so if I'm talking to someone say who's very well versed in autism and understand the nuances of it I just say I'm autistic yeah but if I'm speaking to say a member of a public who doesn't have much understanding I would say I'm autistic Asperger's type because they understand that yeah it's a very interesting sort of thing to think about I think generally with social media and stuff with very much boiled down people's views and opinions based on what type of words they use and sometimes that can be a difficult thing because if I was to use a functioning labels to differentiate between people and people that know about me and know about my views and the reason why then you know people kind of lump me into that category of being very judgmental and all that whereas it's more of a generalized way of telling people apart and what kind of support they need it's a minefield as we said but yeah I think we should probably try and move on to the last bit I think it's definitely something important to talk about you know it's a big thing we've talked a lot about OCD we talked a lot about autism and the interaction and how that interplays into the situation that we find ourselves in during sort of isolation and tears and covid stuff it's all very crazy and unpredictable and strange and it's been really nice to kind of chat to you about it I think it's it's good to hear it you know from someone who is very very directly affected by this this current situation so just kind of round up the podcast what three main things do you think are really important to highlight some things that that people can take away from this podcast first of all I'd say that autism can make people more vulnerable to OCD due to the literal and obsessive thought patterns so there's a high correlation between being autistic and having OCD obviously not all people not all autistic people will have OCD there'll be many autistics who don't and not all people with OCD will have autism but having one or the other does mean that there's a higher likelihood that someone will have the other condition so it's something that I think therapists need to bear in mind when they're say treating someone for OCD if that person then is talking to them say about problems making friends and social difficulties and other things that aren't directly connected to their OCD the therapist does need to have a go back to their mind I wonder if this person could be autistic secondly I would say that OCD is not always experienced as an illness but as a logical part of a person's being that needs to be managed as opposed to cured so OCD means different things for different people it can be experienced as a very severe profound illness that really makes a person very distressed might need to be medicated but for other people it's it's more like almost like part of their personality but which means that they're always going to be vulnerable to having OCD and it's not going to go away and they might not need to take medication but they do need to have someone there who can help them work through strategies so that they can better manage and live with their OCD but it's not necessarily the case that they're ill so I have OCD but I do not experience it as a mental illness finally number three I would say again needs to be far more specialist OCD therapy provision that provides long-term support because often the only support that is provided is a six to eight weeks of CPT and then a person is you know it's sent off on their merry way or not so merry way and left to go on devices again you end up almost like with a revolving door system where a person gets better temporarily we're going to need support again because OCD very often is a lifelong condition so we need to be thinking more about management as opposed to say cure and that needs more consistent regular support which I think is absolutely vital and currently unfortunately we don't have that support because OCD really is a Cinderella I think in the mental health so the mental health system we just do not get enough it's just not talked about that much I would say so it goes to my three points anyway brilliant thank you very much for that I can I can tell that you thought a lot of thought into those points everything everything is planned for me everything I don't do anything spontaneously well I appreciate it I'm not good at doing things on the cuff so I've got a little script but that's brilliant thank you very much for those I've got one last question for you which is an open question what does autism mean to you Anna so I would say that for me autism is an information processing different that is pervasive in a in a sense get it affects every area of my life I would say that the social interaction problems are really just the tip of the iceberg autism means that I focus very intensely and obsessively on narrow areas to your detriment of other areas get a less interesting to me so that can be both a positive and a negative a positive side means that I get so engrossed in things that I can for at least some of the times switch off my OCD anxiety because I'm focusing say on a YouTube video or I'm reading a book and at that point in time I'm so focused and engrossed on that but all of the OCD anxieties are no longer at the forefront of my thinking but the downside is then that other things can get neglected because I tend to mono focus on things my line of thinking is so mono it's so almost if you could say blinkered that I'm I can kind of ignore the other stuff that needs to be done the world can be very overwhelming and confusing I mean it's too fast it's too loud it's just too much going on at once it's like it's too much information that you have to process I would say that autism affects everyone very very differently but all autistics are united by their atypical information processing resulting in social difficulty and difficulty processing sensory information in a sense autism is a nation or an island that contains many cultures that share a diagnosis but they're very different at the same time because autism is an umbrella someone might think they know about autism because they've read all of the books they've seen like loads and loads of autistic people and then they'll see another autistic person and I have to start like from scratch because they'll because that other autistic person will literally confound everything they think they know about autism because autism is so barely see that's kind of what I say you know in quite a long wind is worth putting it thank you very much for us it's always nice to hear I like that you've taken that kind of more scientific logical kind of thought about autism some some people it's a very emotional kind of thing you know like when I ask the question some people will give their feelings and thoughts and how it's interplayed into the different experiences that they've had whereas some people kind of speak about it in generality and sort of give the you know the facts and the logic and stuff behind it's always it's always nice to hear what what people come out with um so sadly this is this comes to the the very tip of the the iceberg the very tip of the tip of the iceberg um thank you so much for coming on to talk about OCD I know it's it can be quite a personal topic to kind of discuss I usually sort of give people the opportunity to kind of share links and and to the like social medias and a website or or anything like that but do you have any any any of any of that kind of stuff to share yeah I mean I've got a I've got a small youtube channel which has been running now for about two years um and it's called autism's individual so um going off the top of my memory it's ridiculous I can't remember I think it's a capital A but if you type it into youtube it should come up it's possible that some of my followers are actually tuning in right now to this podcast so again might be pleasantly surprised to hear me welcome welcome autism's individual crew yeah as and obviously I'll um I'll mention as well when I'm on there that about your your um channel Thomas again you can hopefully get some more subscribers as well really it's been real pleasure to be on here and of course if you want to catch the Forty Ooty podcast anywhere else on this lovely internet that we have you can always find it on apple podcasts spotify and youtube under asperger's growth all you gotta do type in Forty Ooty podcast should come up if you want to stay up to date with my life the kind of things that I do behind the scenes all that kind of juicy lovely stuff you can always follow my social medias all that asperger's growth facebook twitter and instagram if you have an exciting or interesting story or a topic that you're particularly passionate about and want to come monologue on the Forty Ooty podcast about you can always contact me on my social medias or my email asperger's growth at gmail.com and with all that said and done that is all of the uh the information that I wanted to put across what have you got planned for this this evening Anna uh so this evening I'm gonna have my dinner that's kind of like a full front main thing I think about this time well please get off my dinner what are you cooking um I'm making uh it's a pasta dish it's involves um disolone pasta which is like your tiny little tube so you're gonna look a little bit like penne but a lot shorter so a tiny little pasta shape so a bit like baby penne I love the uh the kind of compact pasta like the few silly pasta yeah I do too yeah I love yeah I love that one yeah like good little shapes I like well everyone out there I'm gonna leave you with this little piece of information did you know that you can cook pasta in a microwave I found this out during my time at university all you gotta do boil a kettle up get a bowl put your pasta in fill up the bowl of hot water and put it in the microwave then you'll get your pasta nice and ready I didn't know that I didn't I figured it out while trying to dodge cooking you really don't like cooking so I tried to find there's many ways of possible to use a microwave and that's one of them so enjoy that information people and I'll see you in another episode of the 4080 podcast see you soon