 school is basically just one of those video games where for some reason people are naturally talented and they've played other video games before and they know all the controls and they can already move properly and being autistic is like having a lot of skills in computing and never touching a joypad or a joystick or anything like that to move the character and just constantly running into walls and trying to get a handle of the movement before they try to play me a good main game. This lag of social understanding occurs around this age around 13 and maybe even younger about 10 it happened to me about 10 years old where all these people seem to be understanding a lot more that I didn't and it was very scary because I wasn't sure whether it was a problem with me or a problem with everybody else and I and I seen that everybody else was confusing and they didn't make sense and it wasn't my problem and this lag is the thing that and usually gets people to get children to be put forward to the diagnosis because at this age you can see a lot of the differences in social understanding and as we try to learn about emotions in school and emotions between relationships and friends and it can cause a lot more issues because we find it very difficult to understand anyone's emotion even ourselves and it can take an extremely long amount of time in order to justify and logically explain emotions to ourselves in a way that we understand. Going back to my references about the video game if you've ever played a game called Skyrim or Fallout any of those kind of games there tend to be a lot of things called speech checks which is when there's a probability or there's a certain thing that you need to say to a character in order to elicit a certain response and sometimes if you've got your your skill your speech skill high enough and you get to know which one you should go for for what reason being autistic is like not having any of those ints or pointers it's like having zero zero speech skill and a lot of things is it's just dependent on luck and chance and whether you say the right thing or not. At high school secondary school I spent a lot of my time in safe spaces when I say safe spaces I usually would go to the computer room or the library and just go up go on the computer with my friends and mess around with some of the software and maybe go on social media if we could pass the firewall enough so a lot of my interactions with people were limited in terms of things that we were doing and the best way to to make conversation when you're when you don't have a lot of conversation skills and a lot of knowledge about something is to do something that you like and try and find someone else who has similar similar interest the same as with someone about autism but it's a lot more important for us because we do tend to have a lot of knowledge on a certain subject and a lot of the issues that we have with social communication is knowing what to say and also knowing why we say something because a lot of small talk especially even when we're a lot older small talk can be a lot more tedious for us than anyone else we generally want to have an intention or certain topic to a discussion before we before we know that the boundaries of the discussion because it makes it a lot more clear for us to to understand what we can talk about how much we should talk it's a lot easier as well as going through these safe spaces I did tend to go to this we had this construction made called the bridge which was a just a bridge between two parts of the school and we had the special needs department in the bridge and because of my diagnosis I was allowed to either take times out of lunchtime or take times out of lessons whereas particularly stressed or depressed and go sit there or talk to one of the the professionals or special needs teachers there particularly around the age of about 14 or 15 I started to have a lot of complex very complex issues with other people and stuff like best friends the meet like meaningful relationships and and meaningful conversations and trying to understand how I can pinpoint when someone is good or when someone is bad or something someone is really nice to me or when someone's really not nice to me and those things can a lot of the time caused a lot of horrible emotions and a lot of horrible thoughts that I had about myself and those thoughts and emotions and the thoughts maybe were confusing but the emotions as well even more confusing and so there's a lot of different different ways that I was trying to understand things and a lot of things that I was getting confused about and upset about and is very hard for live life when you feel an emotion and you can't attach a meaning behind it all you know that is you feel you feel just uncomfortable and stressed and anxious is usually the emotion that we go and we we place our you know our burden on for sadness anger annoyance or discomfort feeling sick it can all be bundled into feeling anxious and for us and it's a very good word for us to just signal that we're in distress because that is the most basic animal animal emotion the all the other emotions are very much human based and we make up emotions based on when what we feel in certain situations so if you know a kid went to went to a party and he was like well smiling is like why do I feel like this say that's because you're happy but for an autistic person we need a lot more of a explanation and understanding in order to accept it as a term that we can use to describe what what's going on in p.m. what's going on in in our body and around us and why we're acting in certain ways so therefore there can be a lot of issues when it comes to understanding emotions coupled with the the issues with the social stuff the stimuli the overwhelming stimuli that you get from crowds of people and school and it is very difficult to hold on to all this kind of confusion that's just going on everywhere and especially when you know that you work in such a linear and logical way it's hard to understand why you can't understand things the only reason we can't understand things is because we want to understand it in a logical way and we can't because it's not it's a different thing and although maybe we will be able to maybe we will be able to understand it and I will be able to understand it in the future now well I'll definitely tell you guys and I'm always trying to think of ways of bridging the confusions that I have about certain concepts or emotions or stuff like that and so all all this content is going to come out on on in future videos so make sure you tune in also I'm writing a book so you can look out for that as well if you want to read a book find me what do you want to do with it so uh puberty happens around round 13 I think it happened around 13 14 for me boys start again a bit deeper or croaky this is usually uh what happens a lot of greasiness in the hair and spots and bo and lovely stuff puberty can be a bad thing for teenagers and it can cause a lot of mental mental health issues because of all the hormones also coupled with the the you know understanding life and understanding relationships more of the hormones that we experience and during puberty can exaggerate a lot of the already intense sensory stuff that we experience their touch can be a lot more intense light can start to you know give us migraines a lot easier it really depends on on us and some of us can develop very strange hypo hypersensitivities it doesn't have to apply to puberty specifically but and we do tend to see a lot more differences in stimuli that you know is to do with eye contact eye contact becomes incredibly hard to do um I found it a lot harder to do after puberty and the eclipse of all the male hormones and the hierarchical like dominance and like anger and showing that like your confidence and stuff and all those kind of things that come with and becoming an adult and being able to interact with people it can make things very difficult for us even even more difficult for us to to interact and to to cope with other things we won't want to stem in front of you know girls or your girl you want to stem from boy or you know I'm not trying to dictate your sexual orientation but generally people that we like we're gonna want to stop doing the stimming trying to perform a lot more with other people a lot of people try to conform and some some others and particularly myself did not like to do that as much I did do it a little bit and it didn't work on many occasions because and I attached a lot of expectations to those which didn't always go to plan our emotions and reactions to things can be more intense than before as it is for non-artistic people but because of the way that our brain works these intense stimuli these intense behaviors can be set off by strange or weird things that people around us won't particularly understand but for me it was it was sunlight I was very very much adverse to the feeling of sunlight on my skin and obviously you can see how that could lead to a lot of bullying and it did but it's not the top of this video no I'm not gonna I'm trying to make this as at least personal as possible and try and make it as general as possible based on my own experiences which is you can argue is a bit controversial I guess so with puberty we also get concepts we start getting our hormones flowing and most of us start to develop sexual feelings and start to develop desires to be with another person more intimately and it can occur at this age and obviously it depends on the person neurotypical aspect doesn't matter some people have it more some people don't have as much and some people don't have as much of a desire to stay with one person and develop intimate feelings some people have more of a desire to develop those sexual feelings that they have and explore more of them but particularly for me I had it in both both fashions and which was a very confusing time to say the least I'd say this is probably the biggest contributor in a lot of the issues that I've I've struggled with over the years but I'll get into that in there in a later video I don't know why I winked that was a very is it is a nervous wink so in terms of relationships and friends we don't really have a good gauge on how to show that we're interested in somebody and that is quite an important and pivotal thing when you're trying to get to know somebody make them feel safe and also make them laugh and build a connection and it's a very difficult difficult thing to do for anybody but more so for artistic people so therefore we can usually be bundled into two two groups and one is the very very standoffish type of person who wants to subtly indicate that they're interested and may work sometimes it I mean it works a lot for me I guess but I was very interested in learning about people and making relationships and stuff and then you have the other type of person who's very very confident not very absorbed in their standing socially you know they think they're all right they think that there's no differences and the differences are very minuscule and they get on with people a lot easier but they can be a lot more intense in terms of talking about the special interests and also intense about asking about certain things like levels of intimacy and it can be quite hard to they tend to go a bit more intimate than they should do in terms of speaking and also in terms of physical physical things as well all of these experiences can leave us very confused and and we can we can harbor a lot of resentment for ourselves for not doing the right thing or saying the right thing and if we know that we're autistic already it can be quite hard for us and we can usually blame our autism for a lot of the flaws that we have when we're trying to communicate with people because generally we get feedback from others and a lot of the feedback that we understand or the feedback that we get we interpret as quite negative a lot of the time and that that can impact a lot of our future conversations it can put us off and talking to people at all or it can alter the way that we think about ourselves in a in a negative way we we generally try to learn a lot more about other people when we start to develop what needs to when sexually or needs to be intimate with somebody so the only way that we can learn to do that is by trial and error obviously but it doesn't work as much for us because we don't have the ability and skills of body language and the skills of self-expression intimacy and learning all those kind of things so we find those skills on the internet find it in psychology we think about it a lot we think about our own theories of why something happens and how to make something happen we watch a lot of you know reality tv or we analyze people and in their regular conversations look at people who have more success with finding intimate partners or it sounds a lot like sociology i don't even know if i can say it properly it sounds a lot like you're a sociopath and it's a lot behaviors can be very linked together and a lot of aspes can be diagnosed wrongly as sociopaths and vice versa and especially with narcissism as well which is an inflated ego which seems to be wrongly diagnosed with aspes all too commonly don't forget to like the video subscribe and if you want to find out more about my videos and know when they're coming out because youtube's done a stupid thing and got rid of your notifications make sure to click that little bell in the corner of the subscribe button so you know when the juicy content is coming back out because you're smart not gonna let the bad google people google youtube isn't it