 My experiences in high school left me lonely, mentally damaged and incredibly insecure. I experience things like severe depression, anxiety, existentialism, nihilism, paranoia, being generally mistrustful of everybody around me, excluded, ridiculed by people both in public and online, discrimination on all and pretty much all levels and a lot of body dysmorphia and bulimia. I've experienced a lot of negative things in this life and one of the most transformative things that I've ever experienced was getting involved in the autistic community online. Before I met these wonderful people that I now call my friends, I felt like an outcast. I hated my existence. I wondered why every day I had to fight in order to make myself feel like I was worth it, like I was worth something. I think a large amount of autistic people experience early life trauma and for many, discrimination and isolation only continues into adulthood. I talked to many people who perhaps got a late diagnosis later in their life and they really have a tough time. They haven't really got their life together. They don't really have a lot of friends. They feel quite isolated. They haven't really been employed and they kind of live day to day. I don't know how they've done it for so long, but they have. These experiences can leave us with very low self-esteem. We can feel like the bottom of the pile, like the outcast, the weirdo in the group, the person that everyone picks on just for fun. We're only there for entertainment of other people just by nature of how weird and strange and different we act and behave and feel and perceive. So there's a lot of things that can really, really harm our self-esteem. Today we're going to be talking about autism and self-esteem, if you didn't know. I know it's a little bit of an intense intro, but I feel like sometimes it's good to kind of get to the meat of things, because this is a really self, I was going to say self-issue, a really, a really important issue that we really need to talk about. The rates of mental health disorders, low quality of life statistics, discrimination is very, very apparent, both from listening to the experiential experiences of other autistic people in the community, but also through statistics and research. These things together give a pretty good theoretical and experiential basis for knowing that autistic people are really, really low in terms of quality of life. And it's not necessarily because they are autistic, it's because of the interaction of them with the outside world, with other people, with society, with systems. In general, we have a lot harder of a time with life and it can be very, very hard to build up a moderate level of self-esteem, not having pitifully low levels of self-esteem that we can't feel confident in anything that we do, anything that we want to do, any goals that we have in mind. It can be really, really damaging. I guess in this video today it's going to be a little bit more of a short one because I feel like the message is quite clear. If you are struggling, you know, feeling very alone in life, if you feel like you're not really worth anything, it's always worth to get involved with other people. I'm not just talking about the general population, although that can be a good step after you've sort of built your self-esteem up, but getting involved in the autistic community, understanding the autistic identity, understanding the traits that you have, understanding all aspects of autism in many different scenarios in life, and listening to other people, explain how they got through things, how they experienced things, the different ways that they experienced things due to being autistic than other people. There's so much wealth of information on these communities. The main one that I'm talking about is either on YouTube or on Instagram. Instagram being basically the hub for all of this. I feel like over at the autistic community over on Instagram, we like to explore things, we like to talk about things, we like to be open and honest. Not everybody, of course, but there is a large majority of us who really want to make proper change to people's lives and proper change to society. When I joined the autistic community, I felt like I had a free pass to be myself. I learned to appreciate and love my differences rather than, you know, ask myself at the end of the day why I was cursed with this autism, this horrible condition that I have. Slowly and surely, over time, I built my confidence from the inside out. I talk a lot about how martial arts and being in combat sports has really changed my life, but its magnitude is lower to the level of acceptance, the level of inclusion, the level of oneness that I felt from actually interacting with a large group of autistic individuals. I think one of the main things that people fall down on, especially when they haven't really understood themselves as an autistic person, it's comparing yourself to other people and specifically neurotypical people because we as autistic people, we have differences to us, differences in our brain, the way we behave, perceive, think, feel, all of those things can be different. Comparing your life to that of a neurotypical who doesn't have the issues that you have, doesn't perhaps have the skills that you have, is a really bad idea because it's like comparing an apple and an orange, although they're both fruits and they're both tasty and you're supposed to eat them, they are different and they offer a number of different benefits and they grow in better places and in better conditions and this whole host of different factors that contribute to the success of that fruit. I find the idea of becoming very autism very tenuous, but I think that's very tenuous, maybe. It's a stretch, basically, but I think it gives you a good idea of what I'm trying to say. You shouldn't compare yourself to neurotypical individuals because you're going to take large hits to your self-esteem every single day, but if you're competing against neurotypical individuals all the time and you're constantly feeling like you're one step behind the more you just don't understand a certain aspect of things or you can't do certain things, you're going to feel like a lesser human being and it's going to be amplified by the fact that you're trying really, really hard. So if you're in any of that circumstances, you feel like your self-esteem is really, really low and you feel lonely and you feel a lot of those experiences that I talked about at the start of this video, it might be an idea to join a community. It doesn't have to be online, it could be in person, if you want. There's lots of different organizations and services out there, perhaps not in all places in the world, so I will say that, but there are things around you that can help you get involved with more autistic people and build a greater, a more realistic model of growth for yourself in terms of pulling out your deficits, amplifying your positives. So I just want to end this video by saying I hope that this short video has helped you and I hope that you can identify with some of the things that I'm saying and I hope that if you feel like you really do have very low self-esteem and it's impacting lots of different areas of your life, getting involved with the community as well as looking to improve yourself in the areas that you find hard can be a really, really, really, really great way forward, especially amplifying those special interests, amplifying those positives, looking for work that really fits your traits and the things that you're good at. Obviously this is very simplified, there's so many other factors involved in every single circumstance of life, but just having that basis to know that you are, you're not a neurotypical, you are an autistic person and you need to live your life according to who you are. Please go follow my socials, I've got a full write-up of this video over on my Instagram at ThomasHenleyUK and yeah, go check out the podcast. I've had, I've had a few podcasts around this kind of issues, so if you want to learn more about the statistics and mental health, there's one that I did with Autistic Positivity as well as the Spectrum Girl. So definitely go check out the podcast whether it's through a podcasting streaming service, Spotify, Apple Music, Google or on YouTube and I hope to see you there, bye bye. Don't like it doing that, I'm not a captain, I'm not an army sergeant. It feels right, you know, send off, goodbye.