 Hello people, I'm Asperger's Grof, welcome back, and today we are talking about five things that make autistic people amazing. So you might have noticed already, my video quality's gone up, I've got a new camera, it was about 20 quids, not really massive big upgrade but it was definitely a bit better than the camera that I had before. You may also notice that from the background and stuff that I am back at my home, so I've come back from uni, done my exams and stuff, and just waiting to go off to Thailand at the start of September, so all of the videos up until then will be here in my house. So believe it or not, it did actually take quite a lot of effort to try and compile it down into five things that I think make autistic people amazing or make people with on their spectrum, anyone with Asperger's syndrome, really great people. A lot of misconceptions come from autism being a disease or whether you're having some kind of symptoms from having Asperger's or having autism, and what I want to do is I want to show you how that is completely wrong and how autism can actually be very beneficial in a lot of different circumstances that maybe people might not have thought about or they might not know about. Number one, it's quite a common misconception that autistic people have a lack of ability to empathise with people, but I want to tell you why that is wrong. However, I do understand the reasons why people would think that people with autism have a lack of ability to empathise with people, things on show for people in the general kind of public and stuff, things like being very blunt about sharing opinions and antisocial and aggressive behaviour, especially when we're more kind of young and stuff, and other stuff such as lack of ability to give adequate amounts of facial expressions, adequate amounts of body language in order to show that we are empathising with someone in a social situation. The reason why a lot of people on the spectrum may have maybe a little bit less amount of ability to empathise with people is not an issue of capacity, it's more of an issue in learning. So if I give an example, the average neurotypical person will learn all the kind of social skills or the emotional skills through going through daily life, through growing up as kids, learning, talking to people, making relationships. With an autistic person, those kind of links to social stuff aren't made naturally. So a lot of the time, the way that I learned and also the way that a lot of other people that I know learnt to empathise with people and to emotionally connect with people was from being able to justify it logically to themselves. A lot of the reason for getting anxious or not really understanding social situations, especially for kids on the autistic spectrum, is a case of not being able to understand certain things and understand the logic behind people's behaviours. But a lot of the time, when we get to about late teenage age, young adults, we will have more interest in trying to develop ways to communicate with people and trying to understand firstly our own emotions, which is a very difficult thing for us to do because we need to explain it logically to ourselves and we all know that human emotion isn't perfect in its logical reasoning. So we can either teach ourselves or we can have some other means of being able to teach ourselves about emotional connection, how to do the body language stuff and all of that. We should come from parent figures, it can come through special needs teaching, social teaching can come through mimicking things or most of the time it does come from our own personal input to it. So it's something that we're quite passionate about doing, trying to understand, trying to emotionally connect and that's where the kind of wanting to be accepted and wanting to connect with people, which makes us have such a capacity to be able to emotionally connect with people and to empathise with people as well. Along with our journey of trying to understand ourselves and our own emotions, we also go through a lot of straying fall and stressful experiences during our lives that maybe people not on the autistic spectrum might have been okay with. For example this can be anything from bullying, problems with friendships, not being able to understand them or not having them, especially relationships with other people, be it quite close relationships with friends or romantic relationships. And this can cause us to feel a lot of loneliness, it can cause us to feel a lot of pain from those experiences and we all know that having negative experiences failing, you know, having issues with stuff causes us to want to adapt, causes us to want to change and it also tends to give people experiences that they can relate to other people and that's where the capacity to empathise with people is really, really kind of really shines. Number two, autistic people are a lot, a lot less likely to lie about our feelings or opinions. This is something that really rings true for myself when I was growing up. A lot of the time I had this kind of really strong lawful kind of limits and boundaries that I'd put on myself, sort of like rules and laws to my own little laws to kind of follow and that would take place with things like not wanting to swear, not wanting to drink, all of them kind of things that I wanted to do because that's the kind of the kid that I was. But more importantly, in context of this, I had a fixation with not lying so you might think, oh that's a pretty good thing, yeah it is. It's definitely improved my ability to communicate and learn with people but one of the issues that I had with it was I wasn't able to tell white lies and I'm still not really able to do that without feeling some kind of like staring up guilt in my stomach because I've told a lie and I've talked to a lot of people on the autistic spectrum and they have had very similar experiences. Of course a lot of people may not have those kind of views and some people may be compulsive liars even if they're on the autistic spectrum but it has seen to be a lot more prevalent in people with autism. Although it's not the way that a lot of people would like to live their lives, it just kind of made me a little bit of an open book and it has maybe shown me to some experiences like emotionally that I might not have faced if I had told lies and stuff but it is something that I do pride myself on and I think it has helped me to grow as a person. I believe if you're just able to Google it, I believe there's quite a few studies done on the fact that people on the autistic spectrum are a lot less likely to lie and stuff so you can, it's out there if you have a look and browse if you're interested in that kind of stuff. Because of this truth and I want to not lie it does leave us with a little bit of communication issue when we're younger and sometimes when we're older as well. A lot of people on the autistic spectrum are more likely to say things truthfully as they are and that can often mean that there's quite negative things that they've said. Even if it's small like I can recall something recently happened to me, one of my friends asked me if I like their shoes and of course most people were like yeah yeah they're cool nice nice nice sneakers and of course I said I don't really like them I said it in a nice way I've learnt to say and share my opinions in a nice way and kind of put a little positive behind it but that's one of the things that is one of the issues with being so truthful and stuff and that can lead to a lot of friction especially when they're younger a little bit less when they're older if people kind of recognise that you have told them that you have aspergers or something it's a lot easier but it still does cause a little bit of friction. So that's kind of one of the barriers that stops people from really seeing the truth of how good it is to have someone as a friend or in a relationship that is brutally honest about everything because that's not you know pull any punches because a lot of people do lie and some reason people think feel like it's okay it's good to lie in things where in reality people might be throwing a lot of shadow punches but you can't even see them in their little brain. It also helps because you can kind of gauge you can take things more and maybe some people who are more understanding and it also kind of brings you towards people who kind of had more of a light-minded attitude towards you so they're kind of closer to you so more capacity to be closer. Number three passions and obsessions so the reason why I put the little quotation air quotation marks there is because a lot of the time when people are trying to distinguish whether someone or a kid or someone is on the autistic spectrum is, does have autism they look for something called special interests which is when a child or a dude or a girl has quite extreme interest in a certain topic so they'll know basically anything they can about it they'll always do things around them. Let's say I really like Pokemon, I'd play the Pokemon card game and play games on my iPhone when I'm out and about in the car and I play watch movies and stuff that's one example and those kind of cartoon examples and stuff is more prevalent when we're younger obviously we do other things like gaming and all that and obviously interests are very important to us but there's kind of like a hidden thing there is that psychologists kind of dumb it down and say oh it's a special interest whereas if it was someone who was not autistic you'd say they were specialists in the field or they were experts in the field of whatever they're doing and that's the kind of stigmas behind autism but in reality it's a really important quality to have in a person passion and motivation to pursue something that's really important to them or really interest them and from what I know from living my life and going for a daily activities and stuff, passion is a big thing in a lot of areas of people's lives, people's lives. So that can be things like relationships, passion is very sexy apparently and that's one of the qualities that I saw in one of these studies that I was looking at, don't ask why and there was also a passion in jobs because if you're really passionate about your job you're going to do really well because you'll be working in it all the time and it also helped with happiness as well because if you're really passionate about something and you're really going for it it's going to give a lot back to you so generally it's going to make them a more happy person because if you go to work each day doing something that you really like they're going to be a lot happier when they come home if you're in a relationship or if you go to meet them as a friend because they'll be doing something in a job and that can be a really big thing for some people. Number four, now if you know anything about autism or you've looked into autism or asperger syndrome to any sort of degree you will know that people who have aspergers usually have a high IQ and now you might have thought that I would have mentioned that as something and although that is something quite relevant I think something that's more important is a person with autism is a lot more likely to pursue self-growth and pursue personal development in their life. Being in such a kind of alien society and being around people that we don't completely understand is something that people with autism tend to have to get used to as we grow up. Because of these kind of challenges that are put on us as a person and a lot of the time even even kids that I've seen that I've worked with and stuff they've been very passionate about trying to improve themselves and trying to improve themselves a bit more friends, improve themselves to deal with anxiety, deal with depression, even those that kind of age. A lot of the time we have to analyse stuff we need to look at our emotions in a time of analyse the environment, we need to think about you know positives out of things and think about negatives out of things and especially with like the higher prevalence of like anxiety and depression and stuff in people with autism there are those kind of challenges as well. So a lot of the time we develop a lot of coping mechanisms, a lot of abilities to look for ways of fixing things and analysing situations and these kind of qualities are really good in a person for developing person doing personal development and that can make a person with autism a lot more able to cope with life situations with relationships stuff like that. Another study that I looked at show that people on the autistic spectrum are a lot less likely to be influenced by media bias and advertisement all those kind of things. Now just think what does that say? To me that says that someone with autism is a lot more likely to follow their own values, follow their own ideals, pursue things that they think are right rather than being manipulated and taking on board too much what other people think. I know a lot of people can go for out the lies having dreams and not pursuing them because feeling anxious or people saying that they can't do it or it'd be too hard. Those kind of things that are going to have less limitation on some with autism so they may be more likely to pursue those kind of things and in the end make themselves a lot happier with their progress. Number five, quirkiness. People on the autistic spectrum are, I regret to maybe upset some people but a lot more quirky than the average person. I've heard a lot of people talking about how everybody's on the spectrum everyone's different that kind of stuff. Personally I don't like that kind of mindset. I do think that with autism we do have different structured brains and it's not merely, we do have genetics, we have different ways of thinking and our kind of things that people check off when they're trying to say oh we're on the spectrum now I've got these kind of things are as a result of their personality rather than the way that they are made. So I just wanted to make that clear for you know just everyone's benefit. A lot of my friends, family and acquaintances have often told me on a regular basis that I have very weird ways of expressing emotions. I've got really weird attitudes and ambitions towards things or even I have weird ways of coping with situations and weird ways of coping with stress and kind of mental health and stuff. Now from this fact that I'm throwing around the word weird all the time is you know quite relevant I think. However I'm not saying weird as in it's a bad thing because personally I feel like weirdness is a very good thing especially in our society and especially with kind of people in general. As human beings we don't like boredom we like exciting things we like funny things these can be anything from new experiences new people anything like that and those kind of different things and those quirky things a lot of the time especially when I've talked to other people about it I've talked to people on the spectrum and with their family and what the family have said to them and a lot of the time these quirky things and these bad things especially with people close to us aren't always something to be ashamed about or upset about and a lot of the time they are something that the person finds you know special and unique in someone else and it can be kind of like a little bonding thing and a little dare say it cute thing between some I can't. One of my best examples is the relationship between me and my brother with my autism and with a lot of people's a lot of people on the autistic spectrum we like we find repetition very comforting but we also find it quite humorous as well so I remember there'd be little phrases that we'd hear a lot on the on the adverts and stuff on tv and just over and over again in the adverts and the cartoons and stuff and I find it quite amusing because it kept going on and stuff and one day my brother just recited it just like recited the the advert just randomly and I just like burst out crying and laughing and stuff and because I found it very amusing and because I was laughing so much and stuff and found it so funny he found it so funny and he started laughing and stuff so it would be a little thing that we had and that kind of you know broke up the monotony make it kind of like talking to each other fun and stuff and it kind of brought us more close together and those kind of experiences don't just stop on my brother they go with other people and I used to have like a little bit of a tick when I got anxious and stuff and especially when I was first started dating first idea in relationships and stuff I did used to have a little bit of a tick with my neck and it always used to make me laugh and it was used to make my partner laugh and stuff so guys thank you very much for watching my video I know it might have been quite a long video but you know how much I like my long videos I'll definitely try to cut it back a little bit to make sure that it's not too boring it's not too wordy um but yeah um so I'm back home I'm doing stuff I'm waiting on going to Thailand and stuff I'm doing a bit of babysitting um I'm doing some other stuff so I'm in contact with documentary companies and stuff and with the possibility of doing like a documentary on autism and mental health and stuff like that so it's yeah so it's very exciting times I hope my expansions and my examples of situations have been clear enough for you guys to understand and also interesting enough for you to watch um and if there's anything that you think I could improve on maybe I could shorten it down a little bit maybe could reduce the weirdiness of it a little bit don't you know don't be afraid to let me know in the comments and I'll try and get on that as much as I can because it's learning experience youtube um but I'm having a good time doing it so again thank you very much for watching if you haven't liked the video already remember to like that video and remember to click the subscribe button and I think it's down in the corner somewhere or over there and click the little notification bell next to it to make sure that you get notifications and stuff when my content comes out and yeah I'll see you guys in the next video peace peace