 What has been your experience with experiences with friendships and relationships and what barriers have kind of come up that have prevented you from moving forward in these areas? I can't really speak much for relationships, in terms of friendships it's incredibly difficult for me to make friends. That's partly because of my autism, well that is actually all to do with my autism. Trying to find people with similar interests is always difficult and it's not something that's like the stuff that I enjoy doing, the stuff that interests me, it's not easily researchable online because it's sort of hidden away on Facebook or it's hidden away as an advertisement on Meetup or something like that. But I mean I have one friend and I've known this friend now for years and I still speak to him and he's still happy to speak to me, but I can't rely on that one friend so it would be nice to have other friends because when you have other friends, those people back you up, those people give you positive reinforcement so that if you're being pressured by your parents, if your parents are having a go at you all the time, then at least you have someone who's maybe on your side or you have a different point of view as well. It's not just about being on your side, it's about having a different point of view and people who look at you in different ways is always better than people that look at you just one way and I think criticism is good, I think in moderation and I think positivity is good also in moderation and at the moment I'm getting a lot of criticism and no positivity because it's a lot easier to criticize me than it is to be positive towards me because if you asked, I mean this is secret but if you asked my parents or my sister what are the positive things about me, there'd be hard press to find good things to say about me. If you ask them negative things, they have loads of things that I'm not good at or problems that they have with me. That's not very nice at all. It's one of those things where they're very honest about, they're not trying to be mean about it, it's their honest opinion, they're not interested in my interests as well, so that is where some of that lack of positivity comes because they don't value my interests. Sure, I know that particularly like as I said with that kind of post, kind of 18 age, when we are in school we have pretty much all of our social interaction or opportunities for social interaction kind of laid out for us is not always the best and easiest and there's a lot of bullying and difficult situations at school but it is kind of set up like that. And particularly for me when I went off to university, I quickly found out that if I wanted to make friends, I needed to like find them, I needed to go out and find friends and chat to people and it was something that I really struggled with at the time and it took me a long time actually to feel comfortable with kind of approaching people or talking to people or even going to events in groups and finding friends. So it's definitely like a very unsupported aspect of things but I know that someone in my own life, someone that I know had quite a lot of success going to, there's this place called like Andy's Man Club. I think they have a few places around the UK which is basic an opportunity for men to kind of meet up and have a chat and talk about like mental health aspects of things, like things to do with their life, things that they're struggling with and the person I'm talking about is autistic and they've found that to be really, really, really great for them. But it's kind of like, it's not set out for you. It's not like after school, they can be like, hey, let's help you sort your social stuff out for the time after school or, you know, this is the path that you're going to take down for going through work and there's not really much of that. And I think that's really a tough part of life that I think it's taken me a long time to really get a grasp of and understand how to navigate, you know? Well, I've tried to, I've tried to do, as you say, try to find groups to be involved with and try to make friends and stuff like that. But it's, it's kind of difficult because it's so easy to feel left out all the time. And I tried to go to London Film and Comic Con, for instance. Oh, nice. And I, my friends stopped going with me because he gets bored of like the repetition of going every year, unless there's someone that he really wants to see. He doesn't want to do it with me, right? He doesn't want to go there with me, right? But that's kind of like your, your kind of yearly kind of routine thing that you like to go to. But the thing is, is you think you make loads of people, because everyone there is like, mind you, you think you'll make loads of friends, but I don't make, I don't make any friends when I'm there. There'll be a couple of people that I get into conversations with. But for the most part, if you go to something like London Film and Comic Con, it's, it's, it's kind of, everyone kind of keeps their own little groups. No one wants to mingle. There's no one, there's no one by themselves. I think, I think now nine out of 10 times, there's no one by themselves. And, and so I, and, and, and it's a huge effort for me to go to London Film and Comic Con. I mean, it's like, it's got some of the worst things for autistic people there, like sensory, sensory, you know, taking pictures with celebrities and stuff like that. It's, it's a real hurdle for me. It's, it's definitely hard to, to, to kind of form those friendships and particularly something that, that's hard for me is maintaining friendships. Like I'm quite good at like meeting people and talking to new people. But I think just like the intricacies of, you know, how, how people are in terms of like texting and, you know, having to maintain things and having to organize things. I think that's something that I really struggle with. And, and also to be honest, the majority of people that I'm friends with and people that I know, they tend to be not in my physical vicinity, like they tend to be people that I know online. And although that's, you know, although it's good to connect with people who are kind of like-minded and they may be autistic themselves, it's still like, I feel like it's quite important for me to kind of get outside and get and go and do things with friends and things of that nature. Have you had, have you had much success with like making friends online? Like, have you, have you joined any kind of groups or? Yeah, there's one group that I, well, there's a YouTuber who he's a, he's a former, where he's a former director, but he's, he's editor and producer. He has a YouTube channel where he does a podcast about films and TV and kind of like the sort of sidestime. So his, his name is Robert Meyer Burnett. And he owns the, he owns the kind of the Burnett work, as he calls it. And it's Robert Meyer Burnett. And he has a YouTube channel where he does podcasts, and he has all these different podcasts that he's set up by with different people who have worked, who are working on those podcasts about various corners of kind of geek fandom and stuff like that. Sure, sure. I suppose I'm, I'm meaning like, like chatting groups, like online, like zoom, like peer support meetings or like group meetings that people do online or particular servers in Discord or, you know, and anything like that. And it could, could also be through things like social media, like, particularly, I know a lot of people who have found, you know, friends and people to talk to, you know, they're kind of lonely and kind of isolated in their, their own country and they talk to other people online, who are, who are also autistic and they find that to be quite good, quite transformative for them. Well, I've, I am part of many different Discord groups and Twitter pages and social media pages of forums and stuff like that. So I've met people and people do know me. I haven't, I'm not with any specific autism groups of any kind in that sense. What I have done, what I have done is every Tuesday, or every yeah, every Tuesday, I go to a meetup group for autistic people at Nice. So in Wimbledon, it's called the Sunshine Recovery Cafe. And it is where people sort of talk about their week, how their week has gone. And we kind of chat about, we chat about funded by the NHS. Yes, yes, yes. And it's, it's, it's, I think for me in the long run, I feel that this is better than speaking online as a faceless person. I'd rather people get to know me in person than just, than just typing away hidden behind a computer. True, true, very true. I get that. Like, as I said, it's something that I feel particularly at the moment, you know, trying to find people to do stuff with and like, go out and have a coffee with and stuff like that. It's, it can be hard. Yeah. And plus, there's no one local to me as well. Anyone that I've sort of interacted with online, there isn't anyone really local to me. So it's, it would be impossible to meet up with that particular person anyway. So sure.