 Why is it that every single autistic creator that you come across on Instagram and YouTube just don't seem to align with your experience or presentation of autism? Some people might be talking about traits that you don't particularly experience and some might be displaying behaviors or certain personality traits or certain interests that you just don't seem to identify with. When you look at these individuals you may be able to sort of clearly see that these people are different, that these people have support needs. They may be talking consistently about the things that they need to survive in our modern era, modern day. The presentation of autism varies pretty massively person to person, naturally. But could there be a reason to why this feeling of detachment from popular autism creators be a thing, be something that is not just your experience and something that a lot of people experience? Let us, let us, let us talk. It's best we retreat now and regroup. Found you. There is a very key concept within the autistic community called autistic imposter syndrome. Whilst many people on the internet are talking about the reasons why perhaps making content about autism is a bad thing in terms of misleading people, getting people to sort of self-diagnose or self-identify as autistic when they're not. Within the autistic community, people, even if they are diagnosed, this is something that I've experienced, still feel to some degree like they're not necessarily autistic. This is something which can cause us to perhaps not self-advocate as much as we should, perhaps not unmask, perhaps not engage with any type of autism-related accommodations, which is a big issue because they can really, really help your overall life quality or overall life satisfaction be it. So let's go into some of the reasons why this feeling of disconnection might be actually pretty founded in some level of logic and why some of them might just be a result of natural variation. Number one, start off, start off with a good old number system. Till it's cool, just cool, into the mouth. Nice. Many creators speak from personal autistic lived experience. The issue here is that the majority of people who are autistic or a large amount of autistic people do have a co-occurring diagnosis, whether it be something related to mental health, like myself, which is depression, anxiety, dissociation, or some other kind of neurodiversity, particularly ADHD. When you have multiple diagnoses, obviously this is going to vary a lot person to person, depending on how much they know and how much they can sort of personally sift through the experiences that are having to sort of assign them to one particular category. Although they are speaking about something which they describe as an autistic experience, it may not actually be an autistic experience. It may be a neurodivergent experience. It may be something related to ADHD. This is something that I've picked up quite a bit from reading posts, which I don't particularly sort of understand as autism related, or particular experiences that people have in the lens of autism, which just don't seem to land very well with me. Given that I've done a lot of sort of personal development and educated myself on both the medical and kind of the more up-to-date sort of sociopolitical side of autism, it still feels like it doesn't really land with me. And sometimes it kind of gets me to question, you know, am I actually autistic? Is this something that everybody experiences? Give me a minute. This is the conundrum that I have. When people don't express that they are already ADHD, people like to call it ADHD plus autism. When they have other diagnoses like depression and anxiety, some of the traits are obviously going to impact their presentation, their behaviors. If they're depressed, they might have a particular way of thinking about things in life, a particular sort of downbeats, maybe it may be somewhat cynical view of life. If they're anxious, they might be a lot more likely to try and avoid situations, social interactions going outside, you know, things related to like agoraphobia. Oh God, natural life. And if they're ADHD, they may find that some of their ADHD traits related to like impulsiveness, need for novelty, all sorts of different things like that, it may just not really apply to people who are just autistic. Now is this to say every single ADHD creator out there is spreading lies, spreading misinformation, I don't like where this is going about autism, probably not. But I think when you listen to somebody who has or is talking about their experiences as an autistic person, if you have some knowledge, if you like go and look at their profile and find that they're not just autistic and they're already ADHD, I think it's a good thing to keep in mind but I don't necessarily think it should be a complete like, okay, I'm not gonna listen to this person cause it's already ADHD. That's not why I'm trying to describe here. I'm just saying that if you don't really feel like it applies to you, perhaps do a little bit more digging, try to understand who this person is. It may be that they are offering some pieces of information or experiences which are pretty akin to a lot of solely sort of autistic individuals or it may just be catered to a lot of ADHDers which big crossover autism and ADHD as I've said could very well be the case. Another important aspect to this is separating watching someone, listening to someone, consuming content from someone from actual real life social interaction, real life. I feel like for myself I am pretty much the same and perhaps a little bit quieter in real life or perhaps a bit more of the listener type rather than the speaker. Mostly cause I spend a lot of my time speaking, I quite like to listen to people but I generally am quite the same. I try to be open about the things that I find difficult but undoubtedly there are going to be some people who see me talking, see me interacting with people on my podcast, see me with somewhat exceptional, feel like I'm tooting my own horn there. When you talk like that I'm tempted to ring for nanny and have you put to bed with no supper. Okay, average above average, whatever you wanna call them, communication skills, they don't necessarily see my needs, they don't necessarily see the difficulties that I have day to day in real life unless I talk about them and I don't always talk about them in every single video and every single post and I can understand why that might sort of paint this picture of perhaps someone who isn't autistic or perhaps someone who you don't really relate to who is autistic. I can understand why it might be quite hard to relate to somebody who is basically crafting a video, crafting a piece of content in a very non-natural, non-regular social interaction way. It's not gonna be the same for a lot of people that you watch, for a lot of people that you listen to or read about and it's important to keep that in mind because quite often, a lot of people are quite different off-camera and I have talked to autistic creators sort of off-camera and a lot of them are quite different to what you expect, it's just part in part, being online, sometimes you've got to kind of craft this somewhat presenter-ish kind of attitude to doing content and I do do it to some degree, but it's something that happens and it's worthwhile being aware of at least. I can't see anything. Use your open eye, Frank. Oh yeah, I can see it now. It's also important and although touched on in pretty much most videos or most pieces of content that talks about autism, you can't take one autistic person and understand them, learn to communicate with them, learn to live with them, whatever, and then think that you can just go to another autistic person and know exactly what to do and what makes them tick and what needs they have. Everybody on the autism spectrum is very, very different person to person, but that's not just related to autistic traits. You may not identify with the autistic traits that some people have and the likelihood of you identifying with everything that someone experiences is pretty low might be able to identify most sort of general things that autistic people have or else it kind of would somewhat dissolve like the impact and the sort of the use of the word autism. Boring. But you get my drift. There is also environmental, cultural, personality, traits, opinions, which are quite, quite sort of important in this age. I'm important in this age. I'm talking garbage. What? And also age, also experience when they were diagnosed. There are so many factors that come into this. You know, if you are from a different country, you're gonna experience the social world a little bit differently. I've lived in a different country. It is somewhat different country to country. There's cultural factors. The way that people socialize is different. Perhaps even in some cultures, some of the autistic traits which are kind of pathologized in places like the US and the UK might be seen as quite good. Might be seen as quite normal for any sort of average individual within that society. There is also a bunch of environmental factors which interplay into this. I didn't really used to have meltdowns in my early 20s. I went through a particular bad experience and over time I developed small meltdowns. So now I have them and then kind of recently I've gotten to a point where I feel quite comfortable and I don't really have them as much. Environment does play a really big role in someone's presentation, someone's life. Personality, not to be underrated, you know. Man, like take me and then have me have a conversation with any sort of randomized individual from the autistic community. You'll very easily pick out the differences between myself and them. Usually that is related to personality. With people's age of course it's gonna be a big factor in that. I mean the pieces of information I didn't really think was common knowledge is out there. You know, your brain continues to develop up until the age of 25. And even after that you can still change. It's just a little bit more solidified. But everyone's very different and it's important to take that into account when you are trying to compare yourself to other autistic people. Big one here, big juicy peach for us to bite into. Juicy peach for us to bite into. Nugget of information, gold nugget. These individuals that you are watching, engaging with may be unmasked online. You may be masked. Individuals that you're engaging with could be masked and you could be unmasked. It's quite a large part of the puzzle here because the differences between myself as a masked individual and unmasked individual is quite large like the way that I presented. I used to be somewhat a bit kind of not very open to new ideas, perspectives, things. Not particularly interested in people when I was a bit younger. Did you get to know anyone who were there? Oh yeah, so yes. What did you keep up with them? Oh, I'm afraid not. Knowing unlucky friend is tiresome enough and unlucky acquaintance is intolerable. You know, as I've got older, I've very much taken an appreciation for the more social, emotional side of life, understanding the importance of it. But over time I have changed and when you mask, you are very much kind of not really uncovering much about what parts of you is related to autism and what parts of you are not natural to you and things that you've put on. If you go about your regular old day and you come across some autism content and you dive a bit into it, maybe you find this video and you're thinking, hey, I could be autistic, not too sure, but this guy Thomas, he seems a bit eccentric, he seems a bit quirky, seems a bit like, I don't know, it's just somewhat about him, he just kind of, just, I don't know, trying to visualize what exactly he might be thinking about me is quite hard. I don't think you have the facilities for that big man. But I've gone through a long, long unmasking process where I've identified the ways where I've tried to change my presentation, my communication style, the way that I approach life in order to appear more normative, in order to not appear autistic. And when you are late diagnosed or when you are coming across the concept of autism after years and years of not being diagnosed, being undiagnosed, you're undoubtedly going to have a lot of these things in that are kind of learned behaviors over time, stimming being learned out of you, which is something that I've experienced and it's something that I'm kind of still on my journey to incorporating into my life. Stimming being stimulatory behaviors, repetitive sort of stereotypical movements that autistic people do. Many people do them. Just kind of the term is usually used for those kind of stereotypical autistic stims like flapping and rocking and all sorts of different things like that. Those things can be learned out of us. And when we see other people doing them so openly and you know, kind of without shame and also communicating very, very directly and sort of advocating for yourself and basically sort of making yourself stick out like a sore thumb, a nice sore thumb, a beautiful individual, unique sore thumb. I usually have a very dry sense of humor, but not today. But something that is out of the ordinary for most mainstream individuals. And you feel kind of conditioned to be like everyone else in this sense, not saying that you're a sheep. I think that's a very negative term because it's just like the way that we're raised. Like it's not really something that you can control. You've kind of adapted over time. You didn't really understand what autism was and that you were autistic. Kind of makes sense. And so there might be kind of a few mental blocks that you have to get over and few things that you have to learn about yourself, delve into, understand more in order to kind of realize the ways that you are hiding your autistic traits, your autistic behavior and presentation. I think once you do that, you'll have a little bit more kind of a feeling of relatability to individuals online. Dad, what's going on? I'm simply centered, activated. Intelli-kinetic? Pretty cool, huh? Particularly those in like the Instagram community spaces who do very frequently talk about these types of things. It's important, 100%. One last thing that I definitely want to highlight is that there is a, from my time being on Instagram, like it used to be that the autistic community, from my eyes, from my perspective as a creator, was kind of this individual sort of monolithic kind of thing. Actually autistic, it was kind of this separated thing. Whereas as I have grown, as I have obviously seen new creators sort of come here and there, that sounds awful. Seeing them come in here and there, dirty bastards. Nice beaver. Thank you. I just had it stuffed. Let me help you with that. But there has been some significant crossovers with a lot of different communities. Particularly when you talk about sort of social inclusion related things, they tend to all get lumped under one umbrella of diversity. And within that sort of umbrella of diversity, you can obviously have like the LGBTQ stuff. You have particularly the autism related sort of disability groups of umbrella. Under that disability umbrella, you have autism, you have different sort of neurodivergencies and such. So there's a lot of community crossover there. And I have seen that there are some sort of trends, you know, creators who are both like autistic, disabled and LGBT. They tend to be the most kind of prominent figures because they hit a larger amount of demographics, obviously. Not saying that they do it on purpose, like this is some kind of Psyop where, you know, they're trying to, you know, appeal to the most amount of people. I don't think that's, that's not what I'm trying to say. You have been awfully loud for New Canary. Keep flashing the big eyes. Now personally balance and rotate your job. And just saying that there is some kind of crossover between these sort of communities. And within each kind of section, you do have different ideologies. And over time, I have seen a varied amount of fighting within the autistic community and also the disabled communities. And it's important to remember that, you know, there are some kind of trends. There are some kind of like fashionable things. There are some kind of, I suppose you could say, doctrines or beliefs, which do bleed into each of them. And between them for myself as a straight white man who's autistic, you know, I don't really have as much of that crossover, I guess, like my representation is just kind of an autistic person. You know, there's not really any kind of other sort of diversity factors really going on there. But now reliving it, all I can feel is how lucky I am to be loved by such a simple, honest, simple man. Simple twice. The thing is you may not identify with all of these community groups. You may even find that it kind of paints a picture of autism, which somewhat goes against like who you are as a person, in a sense. It's not necessarily a bad thing because individual variation and varieties is quite important for understanding sort of the whole, or the autistic lived experience as a whole, sort of cross-creator kind of style. What? But it can sometimes, if you are engaged with those communities and you see all the top creators who are autistic and they do have this kind of heavy crossover with these other communities, it can somewhat feel like you can't relate to them as much sometimes. So there's some of the reasons to why you might not necessarily relate to autistic creators. I hope that some of these have been useful for you. Kind of opened up your mind into considering why there's this sort of emotional or cognitive dissonance is occurring. I can only try and relate to you. I can only try and suggest reasons why. But I'd very highly recommend trying to follow consuming content from a variety of different people and understand that just because you don't share a lot in common with autistic people outside of autism, that it's okay. Like you don't need to. Everyone's got their own personality, experiences, culture, traits, lots and lots of different individual variations going on there. And you don't need to fit all of them in order to be considered part of the autistic community. If you're interested in understanding what exactly autistic masking is, I know I mentioned it in the video, highly recommend you check out this one. It's a pretty comprehensive guide to everything social camouflage. You'll find it quite helpful, I'm sure, I'm sure. You know, no bias here. Kind miss, I can't begin to express my gratitude. But perhaps if I had your email address or beeper number, we could arrange to meet sometime.