 Good day, my lovely listeners. You are listening to The Forty Autie Podcast. Tune in every week to explore inspiring stories and insightful information that dive head-first into the world of autism and mental health. With all those tantalising tongue twisters out of the way, let's get into the show. Hello everybody and welcome back to The Forty Autie Podcast. It is the 20th episode, the big 2-0. I'm very happy to have someone on who is a very amazing person. We're going to be talking about neurodiversity today and the reason why I've invited my new guest on is because I recently got into audiobooks and I was looking for audiobooks around autism and one of the things that sort of popped up in my feed was a book called Spectrum Guild's Survival Guide, How to Grow Up Awesome and Autistic and I found it a really good read. So today I've got Sienna Castellon. I hope I said that right on the podcast. How are you doing Sienna? Oh I'm fine, how are you? I'm alright. As we sort of said in our pre-chat, I am struggling to get out of bed these few couple of days so it's nice to have something exciting to get up to. Just for anybody out there, Sienna is a multi-award winning autism advocate and anti-bullying campaigner. She's founder of the Quantum Leap Mentoring, a peer mentoring service for people with autism and learning differences. She's also author of the Spectrum Guild's Survival Guide as I've said and creator of the Neurodiversity Celebration Week which is absolutely amazing and how old are you Sienna? I'm 17. Wow, so you've already done quite a lot of good work and you haven't even reached your 20s yet. It's very exciting. Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your sort of journey within all the work that you do and the media stuff? Yeah, so I'm autistic, dyslexic, dyspraxic and I also have ADHD and when I was at school I was bullied a lot for my learning differences. I was misunderstood by teachers. I ended up going to 11 schools. It was really difficult for me and I constantly felt misunderstood and kind of alone in my experience. I would join schools and have classmates tell me I've only been to two schools in my whole life, my primary school and then the secondary school. Then I'd sit there and be like, oh yeah, my record is three schools in one year and I just felt like everyone had a really easy path and it was just kind of me struggling through secondary school and being alone in it. Then when I was 12 I was diagnosed with autism and I went online and I read about it and I read about the stories of girls who are autistic and I found that I'm actually not alone at all in my struggle. A lot of people actually have it worse than me and have been kicked out of mainstream school and their parents are being forced to homeschool them and it's a very common story within the community. When I learned that it was just a feeling of relief for me because I didn't feel so alone and I felt like actually there's a community of people who are like me and so from that day on I kind of wanted people, not just autistic people but people with learning differences in general to know that they're not alone, that lots of people are going through what they're going through and it kind of inspired me to start my QL mentoring website when I was 13. I found that there were a lot of resources online but they were kind of directed at the parents. I would go online and it would be like how to comfort your child who has, who's being bullied and is autistic and it would be like tell them this and I just didn't know how to apply that to my life. Do I just tell myself that advice as if I'm the parent of an autistic child? It's hard to apply and so I decided to start my website with the focus of just giving advice to kids with learning differences. That's brilliant. I think when you get your autism diagnosis and you find that sort of community of people, I think for me the biggest sort of change or good thing or positive thing that came out of that was that I stopped comparing myself to most people and started sort of developing a new standard for how well I should be doing or all the type of skills that I had. I think sometimes you can get sort of frustrated at yourself if you're having a bad day sensory wise and all that and it can be quite hard to treat yourself with kindness and I think the autism diagnosis allowed me to treat myself with kindness. Yeah. No, I completely understand that. I went through, I had really low self-esteem and I was constantly wondering what was wrong with me, why I couldn't understand these social situations and why I was constantly getting bullied and I would spend hours on watching TV and trying to mimic different body language and mimic conversations and I'd even script conversations and the whole time it was just like I shouldn't have to do this. Nobody else is doing this. Everyone else is able to do it naturally and I'm having to fake it and it gave me a lot of self-esteem problems but after I was diagnosed I just felt like, yeah, this is something that a lot of people do who are autistic. It's not as weird as I initially made it out to be and it's fine. It's just my way of coping. I think it can definitely feel like you're the alien in a lot of situations but could you tell us a little bit more about your experiences like with the media, like with your awards and stuff like that because I'm quite interested to know about those? Yeah, so I've been doing my neurodiversity work for four years now and each year my kind of relationship with media has completely changed. The first year I started doing it. After I set up my website I made a few contacts and I started being invited to give speeches and I remember the first speech I gave. It was a really, really, really big deal. I remember I had to go out and I had to pick the right dress to wear and it's very difficult when you're autistic to find the right dress to wear because it has to be the right fabric and then it also has to like go with the event and it was such a process. I remember it took the whole day and then we had to drive into the middle of nowhere. I still can't remember where it was. I just remember it was like I think a seven-hour drive and we had to stay at a hotel and my mom took me there and we show up to this event and I think I'm going to pass out. I'm so nervous and my heart is beating so fast and there are literally three people in the room and including my mom and she's there supporting me and I give my speech and I remember because I'm dyslexic sometimes I skip lines when I read and I like skip words as well and I remember like I've never read anything as badly as I read that first speech. It was like I didn't know how to read and then I would be like oh wait I'm going to restart this and so I'd restart it and I'd make a mistake and I'd be like I'm just going to say it really confidently like I meant to make that mistake and I thought that would work out for me but it just made it sound like I didn't know how to speak English kind of. It was so cringe worthy and so embarrassing but that was my first kind of experience in like medium doing like speeches and going to like a public event like that and slowly it started to build up and the biggest one I've ever done is when I did the BBC Teen Hero Award. I've heard of that. It was like an insane event for me. I was so grateful to have to be a teen hero and we got to meet Kate and William and there were all these kind of there were all these like different people who did like morning shows and different TV shows and they all met with us and I got to like talk to Kate and that was incredibly nerve-wracking. Somehow it wasn't as nerve-wracking as that first media event I did but it was up there because she like knew my name and she was talking to me and I remember just thinking like just remember the name of your website and I thought that I was going to end up forgetting that I was just so starstruck and I'm like you've just got to remember your website and you've got to remember your different campaigns and that was a great experience and then we got to go on stage to collect the award that was in front of 10,000 people who were there and then there were people watching it live on TV and I think there were like 3 million people watching it live and I was it was so nerve-wracking. It was a big difference between like the first event I did which was like 3 people including my mom and then this one which was like 3 million people and it was so nerve-wracking. I was the last to go up out of the teen heroes and what they did was they put us in a kind of trap door that would then come up and so I was in this small room to begin with and it was kind of like dark and very sensory processing disorder friendly. Like there was nothing bright in there because you'd be able to see it. I'm sort of picturing like a hunger games sort of style thing. You know when they stand on those platforms and then get raised up. Is that the kind of thing that happened on? Yeah it felt just like that. You had that same emotion because you're just so terrified of what's about to go down and you know that if you make a mistake it's going to either become like a viral joke or it's going to end your career until you're like okay you've got to make this work and so I climbed into this little trap door thing still inside a very kind of like sensory processing disorder space and then all of a sudden it fills with like this um dry ice kind of thing so that you can't see the mechanisms underneath it's like an effect that they do and they slowly start pulling you up and then you just hear like the sound of the crowd who are like clapping and then these bright stage lights turn on and then all of a sudden it goes into the most autism unfriendly thing ever and I'm like oh but it was such a shock to the system I've never had like a really friendly calm in space and then all of a sudden your worst nightmare like the lights were so bright and they were kind of strobing as well and I'm like oh my god definitely like a hot to cold moment isn't it? Yeah it was it was a real shock to the system and I think that that was partly why I was able to pull it off because I just I was in so much shock that I couldn't quite panic yeah I remember I just forgot everything I was gonna say and I was walking up to them to collect my award and I just forgotten everything and I had to make it up on the spot I was actually really proud of the way I handled it I talked about like kindness and anti-bullying and acceptance and the words I use I still kind of use on my website and I remember stepping off that stage and being like you know I think I did it I did a good job I'm proud of how far I've come like that was a really big bump as far as like I went from three people to like three billion people and it worked out and it just kind of showed my journey and I was really grateful to have been given that opportunity. That is a very good story oh like I empathize to a small extent I um I've done I think maybe two or three sort of speaking events the first was like this what is it called the Sunday Assembly in Manchester it was like quite quite a small event with probably about 30 people in it and I did that with one of the BBC freelancers called Louise Crooms and that was sort of a nice introduction I was invited to go to a special needs school to sort of give a talk on sort of sport and tell them a story about my taekwondo journey and all of that and I tried to write a script and I am notoriously bad at sticking to scripts like I'm much better just speaking my mind but you can't really do that when you've got like a certain amount of time so it was I definitely did stumble over my words a lot and it was quite frightening even at that scale it wasn't even recorded so it was I can't imagine what that would feel for you crazy but well done thanks it's just it's it's been a journey and the more speaking engagements you do the more kind of confident you get in it just because you feel like you've done it before and it got to a point for me where I was giving very similar speeches um like when you're talking about neurodiversity and the work that I do like there are so many ways that you can describe how you started a website yeah at a certain point when you're giving your speeches it's you can pick apart bits that you've you've already said a hundred times before and so you got a kind of confidence to it yeah I get that it's like um repeating your story isn't it it's just like I do I don't think like when I do go on to like other people's podcasts and stuff I do have like what you'd say like a a stick like something like I say a lot I make my girlfriend does pick up on that quite a lot like you should say it's like you always start these interviews saying the same thing I'm like yeah I know I always tell the story about going to McDonald's and getting chicken nuggets and being told that was autistic I know so yeah I I get that actually there's one one thing I want to ask you you have met Lana Del Rey I didn't meet her but she did a video for me like a recording and she was like oh hi Sienna congratulations on the teen hero award wow which was amazing it was amazing um Shawn Mendes also did a video for me and I remember everyone would be like aren't you excited that Shawn Mendes did a video and I'm like I'm excited that Lana Del Rey did a video because I've been a fan of hers for forever I still play her Born to Die album at least once a day um my thing is with my sensory processing issues I often listen to music to calm myself it's just I used to stem but then when that when people stressed that that wasn't socially acceptable and I was kind of forced out of it I used music as my craft and like I would whenever I go on public transport I'm always listening to music and whenever I have big kind of bullying or stressful events in my life I spend maybe like 60 percent of my day just listening to music and a lot of her albums got me through like really tough times I I definitely use music as sort of like an emotional crutch as well it's it it definitely helps me count myself I do like to listen to sort of upbeat stuff but I think there's a time and a place most of the stuff that I listen to is kind of sort of downbeat and relaxing and I agree with you like some of her songs are like they're so chill but Lana is definitely one of my favorite musicians and it's not often that I sort of listen to would you would you consider her to be her to be like pop music she's um I think she's alternative but like summertime sadness definitely did have a kind of pop to it well yeah they did like a like a dance track to it and stuff didn't they yeah yeah the cedric one but yeah that that was one thing that I sort of picked up I think you but I think you might have mentioned it on a live stream that I joined in on or it was no it was your book I think you talked about a little bit in your book I remember but I'm very jealous very jealous of that I think she's awesome but that's really interesting you've done a lot with your life so far and I think you've done a lot of good thank you could you tell us a little bit about sort of how the the mentoring website works like do you have any like stories of people who benefited from your service yeah so when I first started my website I started just putting little articles on there and it's stuff like you know how to keep organized when you have dyspraxia you know tips with girls who are autistic and just school organization things and I also have a page where you can contact me and I have my email and so people started sending me different emails and and you know talking about their experience some of them were parents and they were just saying you know I'm having this really difficult time my daughter has read your website and has applied all of the tricks that you've given and it's not really making an impact because no matter what we can what we try to do to help her confidence and help her esteem she's still getting bullied at school and like we have to just kind of address that first and there was stuff like you know you have all these tips about you know how to keep yourself organized and how to do well at school but it's really hard to apply them when you have a teacher who is discriminatory yeah and the more emails I got the more I was like you know I need to do something and I need to try to change this because it's not enough to just have autistic people feel confident in themselves and know how to support themselves you also need the people who are spending the majority of the day with them like when you're at school it's like eight hours to be supportive as well and so I started my neurodiversity celebration week program with that in mind so my neurodiversity celebration week program it has three aims to educate neurotypical classmates and peers about learning differences to educate teachers about learning differences and then to empower children with learning differences and I do that by just having different activities on my website and different kind of like assembly ideas and posters that you can put up around the school that have inspirational people who have learning differences and so you can look at it and be like oh you know Emma Watson is incredibly successful and she's got a learning difference it's not going to hinder my success one activity that I put that's gotten really good reviews is this one where the teacher splits everybody into groups and presents them with this activity you have to cut a piece of paper into different shapes and the person the group that does it the fastest wins but the catch is you have like disadvantages and so one group will have their hand tied behind their back one group will be blindfolded and then one group will have no disadvantages and what happens is the group that has no disadvantages always wins and when they win you know they'll celebrate it and they'll get a reward and all the other people will say like that's really unfair because they won yes but like look at what we did we had like our hand tied behind our back and we came up with this really ingenuitive way of cutting this and we used our creativity and we worked really hard and they'll kind of phrase it that way and they'll be like we should get some reward for the effort that we put in even though we didn't win like we we put a lot of time into this and we thought it through and like we showed different skills yeah and then the teacher will say like that's exactly what it feels like to be neurodiverse yes you may not get a hundred percent on the spelling test like everyone else did but you put in the time and you came up with all these different ways like I remember I'll be practicing my spelling tests like on the bus in the car I had like my quizlet before anybody else had quizlet like all that stuff and then you feel like it comes to nothing because everyone else kind of wins and they get a higher score even though they'll brag about not putting any effort in and you feel like I should get some kind of acknowledgement for the effort but it's a school system that prioritizes you know the end result and if you're not getting that high grade or if you're not getting the results that everyone else is a lot of the time they assume it's because you're lazy and I remember you know being eight years old and my parents going into meetings and being told Sienna's really lazy and she doesn't try hard my parents went why do you mean why do you think that and they would say well here's the thing she writes good essays like she writes good creative writing stories but her grammar and her spelling is really bad and so that must be because she doesn't decide to try and she's just like I'm not going to try to spell correctly because someone who can write a story like that is someone who can spell correctly and so she's doing it on purpose that's awful and my parents would be like who does that like laziness is not doing it laziness isn't writing a three page essay when everyone else is writing a one page essay but having spelling mistakes in it like it's flawed logic but teachers would constantly tell me that and it was really hurtful for me because they didn't realize the amount of effort I was putting into it was hurtful and so the activity kind of showcases some of those ideas and helps neurotypical children understand their neurodiverse classmates I absolutely love that I think that's a really great way of giving people a taste for what it feels like I guess you know sort of the irony about autism is you know that it's it they often say that it's a difficulty sort of seeing things from other people's perspectives whereas what's needed for non-autistic people to understand autistic people is that sort of shifting perspective I guess which is I find quite quite funny like I think it's I think it's funny that the the autism is tied to that label of not seeing things from other people's perspectives where it's like a two-way system isn't it people don't see the perspective of an autistic person because you know they either don't want to put the effort into doing that or they just don't have the capability to do it on their own I've definitely found that as well yeah but that's um that's really that's really interesting I like that idea of getting people and and giving them an experience about there are I think some things out there like the autism reality experience which have sort of chatted to the the managers and stuff like that and they go around in this van sounds very weird they go around in this van and it's it's basically like a they put the headphones on and they've got a lot of strobie flashy lights and they basically try to overload a non-autistic person or at least give them an experience of what sensory processing difficulties are like and then they get them to do tasks and they sort of compare not being overloaded with being overloaded I mean it sounds like quite a good way of sort of translating experiences to another person a lot of people they'll kind of see individuals who are autistic and think like oh you know this person might be making eye contact with me or like this person is kind of holding a conversation I'll be like well you can't really have that many struggles and people tell me that all the time but like how are you autistic you just gave a speech stuff like that and it just shows that they don't really understand the experience it's also because you're quite a strong a strong person to be able to sort of push yourself to do to do all of those things so I can I can empathize to a certain extent with sort of pushing through those difficult and grand things that require a lot of a lot of attention and concentration and sort of stress management so it's I think it's it's also because you're achieving as well like you're achieving more than more than the average person so people don't see the difficulties they only see like the tip of the iceberg yeah with the laziness well when I was sort of going up the talent pathway in the taekwondo sort of world when I was sort of going to these events there was a particular instance where I was going to this training session with the GB national team the the person who was sort of overseeing the event was a very decorated taekwondo athlete and someone that I think everybody in the taekwondo world sort of aspired to be like and because I had sort of like a meltdown before the training camp and it it took me a while to sort of feel comfortable enough to train properly they actually pulled my coach to the side and said that I was too lazy and I was unmotivated it was it was the biggest most heart-wrenching insult that I've ever got because that was like the only thing that I felt like I had over for people that I wasn't lazy and I pushed through difficult things and I guess when you were telling me that you know that story of people sort of calling you lazy and all that kind of stuff it sort of reflected a little bit in sort of my experiences with that as well and it really does like have an effect on you just long term because I'll be doing stuff and I remember I always said I was doing an internship and um everyone else was like oh yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna go get lunch and so they all went to go do that and I was like I've got to stay here because they'll think I'm lazy if I if I let go they'll think I don't have a work ethic because I I couldn't understand why those teachers had thought I was lazy and so I just kind of assumed like oh everyone's gonna think that about me so I've got to overcompensate even more than I'm already doing so that like there's never any kind of question about my work ethic because it always just kind of hurt me that there are other people who maybe don't put in as much effort but because of their social skills they're able to present it in a way like they're working really hard and the teacher can see that yeah and then you have people on the other side who work really hard but because of their social presentation the teachers think oh yeah that they're the ones who aren't putting in the effort and so I was just kind of trying to emulate that behavior and I would like go online and try to figure out how to make it look like you're working incredibly hard and so I would just like sit there and and like do extra work and I would constantly like send it to the person in charge so that they knew like oh yeah this time I was doing this then completely overthinking it it's mad that you have to sort of resort to that I think like throughout secondary school there's definitely been teachers that don't really get me like and they think that I'm being lazy and not working hard and stuff but then there are certain teachers that I had at school that really sort of saw the struggle and the effort that was put into sort of studying and all that and those those people are very sort of influential for me and they they gave me a lot of support I guess so more emotional support really because instead of sort of bashing me and and punishing me like some of the other teachers would do they would do the opposite so they would encourage me and sort of give me that emotional crutch I guess and at the one of my English teachers and my philosophy teachers were those people I guess and maybe that's why I feel very drawn to the art of debating and conversation and all that I get that I was at this school where I was being bullied and my parents decided and I as well decided to file a disability hate crime and other different things at the tribunal and in doing so we file the subject access request and what this subject access request does is the school has to send you any email any note anything that relates to me and has my name on it or I'm somehow involved in it and I was going through all these different emails and one of these emails was talking about sets and different like so you had your top set and your bottom set and which set I should be in for all my science subjects and my biology teacher was like she should be in the bottom set she's not good at biology she doesn't have the critical thinking skills she and he was he was going on about all these skills I lacked and he's like she's just she doesn't deserve to be in in in a top set at all she should be at the bottom set and then I had another teacher who was like who kind of spoke up for me and was like there's no way that's not right and so I ended up in a middle set and I didn't know that this had gone on behind the scenes um because I was a student there when I was put in this set and I just felt so mortified because I was an academic scholar and when you're an academic scholar there's like a pressure to to achieve and to be in the top set it's kind of embarrassing to be like in I was in the middle set but the bottom of the middle set and it was it was so mortifying for me yeah so how it worked is you had the top four sets and then the bottom three sets and the bottom three sets were actually all the same set they just kind of randomized it and so you had one big kind of bottom set and then you had the top four sets that were ranked and so I was in like the fourth set and it was so mortifying I was like the only scholar in that set and every time I went to class I just was like I had all this anxiety and I was so embarrassed that there were no words to describe and it didn't get better throughout the year if anything it got worse and I remember I loved physics so much but I after I found out what set I was in I was just so embarrassed to go in well I ended up leaving the school and I'm put in this different school and they're really really supportive and I'm talking to my director of studies and she's like I think that you should take math early so I was 14 at the time and I was like in year 10 and she was like just do it this summer and I'm like I don't think so like that's really and the thing is since I'm an august child I was young for the year I was in and so I was already kind of like I don't I don't want to do this and she was like really you should do math and so I decided I was gonna do math and then we have another conversation and she ends up convincing me to take my three sciences early and the whole time I was like I was I was in like the middle like I was in a really low set like at this other school where they knew what the thing was the school that I was at previously it was a high achieving academic school where they had a system and they had ways of getting people top grades there's new school I was at it wasn't quite like that it was more of like a you do what you want and see what happens and there wasn't as much of that strategy and so I was like maybe they don't know what they're talking about maybe I'm gonna get like oldies and use and it's gonna be embarrassing and it's gonna well I end up going into the exam and I take my different tests and I felt like it went well I'm so nervous about getting my results I finally get them and at 14 I got 4 a stars wow three sciences and in the math wow and I remember sitting there and being like there was this teacher who said that I deserve to be in the bottom set because I had none of these critical thinking skills and I was so like I didn't deserve to be a scholar and all this stuff and I'm like and at 14 I got and I was I was so proud of it like I just felt like I proved everyone wrong and it was a lot to do because I'd actually wasted a lot of year 10 because of the bullying that went on yes and there was a time where like I wasn't going to school and I had all this anxiety and I was spending I had PTSD from the like disability based hate crimes that were going on and so I was spending like a lot of time in and out of different like counts those officers and just dealing with my mental health and like my sensory processing disorder got so bad that like I couldn't leave the house and so that three months leading up to my GCSEs that was the time in which I got everything together and got those grades and I'm just thinking like yeah I've got all these skills that you said I didn't have wow it's a very inspirational story it's really great to hear that as well like it's it's like sticking it to the man isn't it just I don't care about your opinions I'm going to do it now I'm going to do well like really well that is yeah that is absolutely amazing like I'm so happy for you like okay now it just goes to show how like some teachers get you and other teachers just completely misunderstand what you do yeah exactly and one of the things that I wanted to chat to you about is because you've taken this neurodiversity celebration week and you've tried to do all these sort of anti-bullying campaigns and stuff and I feel like there's a lot of commonalities between yourself and I because I recently released a documentary about autism and mental health and my sort of main things that I'm trying to tackle is mental health I think what you were saying about education in schools for people who aren't autistic is very important because I think like autism is is very much like a um it lends itself to the social model of disability rather than the medical model so it's it's caused by a difference as opposed to sort of the rest of society I guess rather than an actual straight disability yeah I think that bullying and even in the workplace as well needs to be tackled as sort of like a young age so there needs to be at least like a little bit awareness of autism at a young age and sort of to normalize it so that it's it's more of a a commonality because it is common like in every school you're going to have at least an autistic person in you know every said year or in the school in rare cases I guess and you sort of do do sort of the same thing so you're you're taking more of that neurodiversity angle and sort of tackling tackling bullying as a sort of a lone thing I know I know this is sort of a little bit late in mentioning but it's it's been really nice sort of hear your stories and could you give a little overview into what neurodiversity is and why it's important sure so neurodiversity it refers to variations in the human brain so autism dyslexia and dyspraxia are all natural variations and the way our society works is it kind of pathologizes these conditions and focuses on trying to cure them my kind of neurodiversity campaign it flips that and it focuses instead on recognizing that some of the greatest innovations have actually come from people who are neurodivergent and being neurodivergent can really help our society if you look at like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates they're all neurodivergent and look at what they've contributed to technology and just our lives in general and we should be focusing on promoting empowering encouraging neurodivergent students instead of trying to kind of push them out of education tell them that they're lazy and they don't work hard and they don't they shouldn't go to university and then trying to cure like millions if has been spent on trying to cure autism and it's just upsetting to me because like there are a lot of people who are autistic and have contributed a tremendous amount to just like technology like if you look at like temple granden she revolutionized the like cattle so she yes i read a book yeah and that had a big impact um and they're just not i can give countless examples of people who have because they see the world differently are able to come up with innovations that maybe a neurotypical person wouldn't be able to come up with and we need all kinds of different minds that's what is going to best serve society and so this idea of like oh yeah we've got to got to cure all of this because it's a disease it's just upsetting to me yeah and i think that's something that a lot of sort of autistic minds in the the communities on instagram and facebook think as well that there's very much certain organizations that the autistic community sort of shuns quite a lot and those organizations tend to focus more on sort of treatment and treatment accreditation marks and research sort of around like testing kits and stuff which is obviously not what we like to hear the idea of neurodiversity is very grounded because it makes it makes sense if there is something that is so prevalent in society and it doesn't influence uh functioning to such such a large extent that you can't live a normal life then it makes sense that that was advantageous in the past so you know maybe there is this sort of community and the people who have more that neurodiverse people for example people with ADHD would be sort of like the watchdogs people who keep the tribe safe they'll wake up in the flick of an eye and obviously if it's a little bit more hyperactive kind of side things but wake up in the blink of an eye be a bit a lot more alert and in tune with what's going on and have a lot more energy to sort of play that role so the autism side things would be innovating and bringing things on and in many different areas like not even just like STEM sciences and stuff I think neurodiverse minds can be very influential in terms of like social progression just because we can sort of have that non-biased detachment from things and and sort of being able to view it as more of a this is what's wrong this is how we could fix that kind of mentality which I think yeah it has a lot of grounding for the the sort of basis of neurodiversity so you've already said a little bit about why it's important in society do you think it's important in the workplace like sort of the general workplace do you think someone having autism could benefit some work environments so I gave a speech at this event and I was just really happy to have been invited it was a diversity event at the quick interview and it was talking about diversity in the workforce and ordinarily they would just include someone who would talk about the importance of having women in the workforce someone who would talk about the importance of having racial diversity and then someone who would talk about LGBT but they invited me along to talk about the importance of having a neurodiverse workforce and I felt like that was a really great step forward and including neurodiversity and diversity initiatives I'm a big believer that you know if every single person was the exact same and had the exact same skills just to say we wouldn't really accomplish anything yes like you need people if you have a group of people who are going to design something or come up with something you want people to be able to do different things you want someone to be able to you know come up with the idea then someone else to write the code then someone else to market it you need just different skill sets and different backgrounds and if you have someone who's neurodiverse and just has a brain that people often say you know why are differently someone who sees the world from a different perspective and who you know people who are dyslexic for instance have been known for having an insane amount of creativity just because you have to come up with all these different ways of getting around the differences that you have yeah so I on my in my book like I've talked about these different like tips and tricks I've come up with and these ways that I've kind of overcome hurdles and when you spend your whole life doing that I have countless hours that I've dedicated to problem solving and someone who's neurotypical may not have to spend you know hours of their day thinking about how they're going to use a tube because they have sensitive processing disorder like that's not something that they would ever have to worry about and so I have a different skill set because I spend a lot of my time you know focusing on stuff like that and so if you put me in a group with a ton of people who have never experienced that before my brain can just work through things you know faster sometimes like I remember I was in a group where we had to do like a problem solving thing and I was able to do it really quickly because I've like dedicated that there's this book I read about like 10,000 hours it's like if you dedicate 10,000 hours into something you'll be an expert yes I have 100 percent dedicated 10,000 hours into problem solving with all my learning differences and like overcoming things so I'm an expert on my problem solving and it's just you just need different perspective you can't have every single person on a team have the exact same skill set do the exact same thing because why have a team why not have one person then well I guess there is definitely a lot of utility and having sort of a different brain in any sort of situation whether it's like in social groups or at workplaces or you know in companies and all that I think having a little bit of a as you said like a little bit of a different angle is quite important but again you know that there's the flip side of that you know that we've got all these positives and stuff but you know I came across this statistic recently about self-autism in the workplace and there are some ridiculous statistics around unemployment and even like autistic university graduates it's definitely not something that has been well integrated into workforces there's a lot of bullying that goes on that people sort of chat to me about some of my friends on Instagram and Facebook and all that they quite often tell me about sort of the the bullying and the the isolating that goes on in workplaces and I guess you know sort of it ties in very nicely that you're sort of doing this do neurodiversity work but you're also trying to sort of target anti-bullying and I think it's very important to try and facilitate autistic people into the workplace as much as possible I think it's just about convincing like managers and heads and stuff that putting in these placements and doing a little bit of educational work in workplaces or at schools can reap a lot of good results it's just getting people to listen isn't it yeah so um I know you've talked a little bit about sort of your backgrounds sort of meaning behind your advocacy work but if we look at your view for the world and what you would like to see enacted what would your perfect world be for including neurodiverse individuals well I remember I read this this article and it was like and it was like about changing perspective and it talked about like if every single person had to use a wheelchair then you wouldn't have to fight for things to be wheelchair accessible because it would just be done already yes and I kind of think like if everybody understood the struggle that autistic people have just in public settings where things aren't sensory processing disorder friendly when you know people just set up events and kind of create situations that are like a real nightmare for autistic individuals if people were able to see it from our perspective and understand the effect that it has things would just become better for us and I believe that a lot of the struggles that I have with my autism are because other people don't understand me like a lot of the issues like the main problem that I describe when I talk about the downside to having autism is the anxiety that comes alongside it yes but I don't think that that's inherent anxiety from my autism I think it's just anxiety because I live in a world that hasn't been adapted in any way for us and so if schools were to take some time and just think you know what would it feel like if I were incredibly sensitive to bright light and I was sitting underneath a fluorescent light how would that feel like if they were to just think through that way and they would be like okay well you know if we have to renovate our school or something let's not do that again or if I've got a student in my class who is autistic then I just won't sit them underneath a bright light and something like that is so minor if you're a teacher just moving someone is seat over but that would completely change their school day it has like really big ramifications and so it would just I would like to see a world in which people just try to put themselves in our shoes see our experience and see how they can help us yeah yeah definitely from from doing the documentary and stuff there's this character called Peter Bainbridge he's not a character he's a person and he said that the best people that he's found for sort of treating autistic people right sometimes have no experience with autistic people they just genuinely listen to to what a person has to say and tries to put things in place to make them feel better genuine sort of humanitarian kind of nice things that you do for other people and I thought that was quite impactful but I guess one of the one of the issues is is people don't really understand sort of like ASD1 and Aspergers I guess there is sort of that gray area for people I find that people either demonize it and say that I'm not the disability or I'm not it's not me like I'm separate from it and they sort of take that angle and demonize it a little better and then you've got sort of the other side of things where people just they think that you you're exaggerating or they don't fully appreciate the extent to which you can struggle and that those are those are the two types of common things that I get when I tell people that I'm on the autistic spectrum so I think you know having people like yourself out there for people to learn from and learn a bit more about it in terms of parents people who are autistic people who aren't that kind of work is priceless definitely yeah I mean it's just I mean I can really relate to you know some of the best and most supportive people for like autistic individuals people who are just kind and who listen to you I've had Sankos who are meant to have had years of training on how to handle and how to help autistic individuals and they just are really difficult to work with and they'll be like oh you know if you want this adjustment then you need to go back to the person who diagnosed you and get them to write in the report that you need that adjustment and it's like so what I have to spend another you know six months waiting to meet to see this person and another like if you're doing it like privately like a thousand pounds just so that someone can write a line saying don't put a nearer window if I can say really that difficult this was this was hilarious like I look back on it now and I find it funny but at the time it really wasn't I had this teacher who was like everyone's a little autistic and so if I gave you that adjustment so I asked her to sit near the front of the board because it was to do with like dyslexia but it was also like an autism thing yeah like dyslexia to read the front of the board but there was also some autism thing oh yeah it was because the heat from the radiator like the radiator was vibrating we're doing oh yeah that was it I could hear the electricity in the wall or something and this was years ago and I was like I'd really really bothering me and it's giving me a really bad headache and there's like a fluorescent light thing so can I sit near the front of the classroom and there was an empty seat in the front of the classroom and she was like no because everyone's a little autistic and the only reason that you are diagnosed with autism is because your parents wanted you to be if I wanted to be diagnosed with autism I could easily be diagnosed with autism everyone's got autism what is this teacher and I'm like oh my god like it was so crazy to me and so I asked her for like extra time on an exam and she's like okay everyone gets extra time and so then I went to a I went to like the Sanko and I was like I didn't get extra time on the exam and then she's like no everyone got extra time on the exam and I'm like yeah but I'm meant to get extra time on top of everyone else's extra time and she's like no you're meant to get extra time and you've got extra time and so the teacher would do this thing where if an exam was meant to be 20 minutes she would make it like 15 minutes and they'd be like but I'm giving you five minutes extra time and so it was it was the weirdest thing it was so bizarre to me and it was like some emotional twisting no it's horrible and then I had another teacher who did this thing where she would give me extra time but she would make everyone else wait and so she would say we're doing this thing in four minutes and then Sienna gets one minute extra and so everyone has to wait for Sienna to finish her one minute and so the whole class would look at me and wait for me to finish the one minute and so then I would say it's fine I don't need the one minute when I really did just because I didn't want everyone to get mad at me and then I went and I talked to her about it afterwards and she was like I gave you the extra time you just didn't take it and I'm like no but it's the way you gave it to me well if you really needed it you would have taken it I'm like that's just you're not listening to me and then I had other teachers who were just so supportive and I'm like I need extra time and they didn't even ask me like oh you know why do you like there was no like interrogation over like which learning disability I was using to get my extra time it was just like okay like you have a report that says you need it like the senko told me you need it so okay your extra time it's absolutely fine and they would be like oh just come into class early so that then like there's no drama with people having to wait I'm like okay awesome like and it was so easy and I feel like the teachers who made life difficult for me also made their own lives difficult because it's just a pain to have to deal with like giving me this whole monologue about how I'm not autistic and then having to like send emails for the senko and have meetings and meet my parents whereas if they just moved me it would be it would be over within a second yeah and so I just I don't have people I think some people who are sort of trained and have experience with autism they they obviously learn quite a lot about sort of like the traits and stuff but I found that some people can get like worse from from having that training because they just have such solidarity of how they think autistic people should be that it's difficult for you to convince them or at least you know have them appreciate how you may be different to the other people that they've encountered and they can sort of be a bit sort of harsh I guess just within sort of the ASD kind of one category like people even with that crossover people just seem to get so confident in their knowledge of it that they just disregard what you're saying I know then people come up with their own definitions of different neurodiversity sometimes which makes no sense to me like I had a teacher who thought that dyspraxia just meant like you weren't Olympic level good at sport and so this like sport teacher was explaining to me just because you're like not top set it doesn't mean you have a disability I'm like the reason I got diagnosed wasn't because I'm top set the meaning of the reason I got diagnosed is because I'm like 10 years old and I'm still like tripping and like leaving a mess everywhere because I can't organize things and like I can't I remember when I was getting diagnosed for dyspraxia I couldn't catch a ball they did they do this test where they throw a ball at you like 20 times and then they like count how many times you catch it and then from there they like create like a little percentage and then they like they use it to diagnose you and I remember I think they threw it 20 times and I didn't catch it once and I put effort into it like I was really trying to catch it because I didn't want to be like embarrassed by the fact I couldn't catch this ball and I'm like that's a problem that's not being like top set and being upset because I'm not top set but this teacher had kind of categorized dyspraxia in that way and it just it bothers me and it doesn't really make sense to me because like why would you be that dismissive of like an eight-year-old who's like telling you like you know this is the situation that I have. There was one thing that I wanted to ask you and obviously with any sort of mission to change things in society you know it's quite a big task and so what are some of the the barriers that could be a problem and how can we overcome those barriers? We're trying to promote neurodiversity. Trying to promote neurodiversity and trying to promote top anti-bullying and autism awareness and stuff. I mean you encounter a lot of people who are very fixed in their way and they know nothing about like neurodiversity or the little that they do know is completely wrong but they're so fixed in it that they'll come up to you and like tell you stuff like you know you're not autistic. I'm like oh okay because you're a girl girls you can't be autistic. No way does that still happen? That's not even like yeah it still happens and it's not even like debatable it's not like we could sit there and like have a little discussion over it it's like just wrong like so thoroughly wrong and a lot of people think that you know with like dyslexia and dyspraxia especially ADHD ADHD is a big one that it doesn't actually actually exist it's just middle-class parents not parenting their kids properly and their kids ending up being like rowdy and hyper and then them being like oh we're embarrassed by this let's let them diagnose with something. It's just a toxic way of viewing it. But like a lot of people feel that way and from my perspective like my story about getting diagnosed with ADHD was I was 15 I'd been in the neurodiversity kind of space for years at that point I'd heard a lot about ADHD but felt like I didn't have it because I wasn't that hyperactive that it's associated with it. Yeah do you have more of this sort of inattentive form? Yeah and I that hadn't been advertised as much like when you think of ADHD you think of more the hyperactive that you don't think of and so I was just like I don't I don't I don't believe I have that and then I was just having a really difficult time focusing I'd already done all of my GCSEs that I enjoyed like the physics and the math and all of that that I can hyper focus on and now I was dealing with stuff that I didn't have an interest in like like English and all that and I was just having such a difficult time focusing and it got to a point where I felt like this isn't normal like there's something that is off and I'd explained it away with like my autism and like oh well you know maybe it's just not working out and but then I went online and I was like actually this ADHD like this inattentive ADHD it's exactly what I've had and I've had it for years well I've had it my whole life but like I've been like I could have been diagnosed at any age of someone or even myself just like properly read what inattentive ADHD was and I ticked all the boxes and so when people say like oh yeah you just have ADHD because your parents trying to explain your bad behavior that's that's not what happened I got myself diagnosed you know and to make those assumptions it can be incredibly offensive because it's kind of saying like well you don't have this yeah and it's difficult to reason with them when you know you're sitting there and you're like this is something that has become a really large part of my identity like I spend the majority of my time talking about my autism my ADHD my dyslexia my dyspraxia like it's something that I see is like a cornerstone of like who I am my personality and what makes me me and so when you're having this conversation with someone who's just saying like there's no way that you have these differences just a bit of putting but you've just got to ignore it and focus on the people who you know want to listen support and want to listen and to hear what you have to say yeah definitely I think that there are a lot of barriers to achieving those changes is I think at that sort of more personal level it makes sense that you are going to come across people who just they don't really care or they don't fully appreciate what you're saying to them but then again there are people who do and those people they can be the people who lift you lift you further towards your goal which is great I think one of the challenges that I have found is we've got a wealth of knowledge and experience and great sort of neurodiversity autism advocates on like Instagram and Facebook and stuff like that there's a lot of people doing some really great work even on YouTube but it never really seems to enter the mainstream and that's one thing that I was trying to sort of achieve with my my recent documentary like it's it's so hard it's so hard to get it to get things seen about autism like it's we need people to be on news programs and tv programs so that people have a have a good idea of what autism is it needs to have some precedent in the mainstream because there's a significant amount of the population who are autistic even in the UK and although that is one percent that's still like upwards of you know one or two percent rather it's still upwards of like seven hundred thousand people that's sort of bare minimum and it's important to try and include those people in society I just think a lot of the typically negative traits and stuff of autism can can make it hard to it can make it hard to want to connect with people and talk to people when your whole life has just been a sequence of traumatic social events it's like why would you want to be a part of the society and and there's a lot of people who think that as well it's just it's just hard isn't it you've got to keep trying as much as you can and try new things and hopefully something will stick and obviously if you've made a good impact a very good impact in terms of your public speaking and yeah and your work and your book and it's all really amazing great stuff and I'm very humbled to be talking to someone who's made such a already made such a massive impact thank you no worries like you you deserve all the praise that I can that I can give you so I'm sort of leading up to the end of the podcast would you like to give us three main things that you want people to take away from it okay so I would say you know if you are neurotypical just be supportive of the neurodiverse community around you if people are asking for adjustments just like listen to them I would also say that don't make assumptions this was quote that I kind of like and it's like if you've met one autistic person that means you've met one autistic person people kind of like to generalize and think like oh I met this one individual who was very sensitive to touch and bright lights and they were autistic and so I know what the autistic experience is because I've met this one person and so then when I meet another person who is autistic I can apply what I've learned and I think that that's wrong with dyslexia I feel like if you were to line up a hundred people who were dyslexia can ask them about their experiences they would all say a very similar thing like talk about spelling and talk about reading and that would be their experience we all share that but within the autistic community there's a lot of variation and there's a spectrum and so if you try to apply lessons that you've learned from one individual it may not work out as well you should just listen to what this person is saying and make the adjustments that they're asking you to instead of make adjustments that worked with someone else and just be open and then I would also say if you are neurodiverse just know that your differences are advantageous and like there may be times where you feel really down and it's really difficult and you're overcoming a lot of hurdles and people aren't being supportive but just know that like if you're confident with who you are and you put yourself in a position where you're in spaces where people support you even though that is hard to do I like recognize that all the problems that you're currently having will dissipate over time if you're kind of conscious of the differences you have and you're supportive of those differences and you make sure to make little adjustments in your life and just increase your confidence that's what I've found so just yeah know that you're awesome very good thank you very much for that um we have the last question which I try to ask every autistic person who comes on to the podcast what does autism mean to you Sienna um I feel like the way I would have answered this question would drastically change over the year um when I was you know going through my bullying I would have probably given a very negative answer and I would have talked about how like oh it's all these difficulties and all these challenges but if I look back the challenges I was having weren't really to do with my autism they were just due to toxic people and I want to separate that because like if I look at my autism and and just that not the way that other people have interacted with me or the way the world has set up that has made me upset like if I just look at my autism I can only think of positive it's given me a different perspective on life it's made me more kind of considerate of other people and what other people are going through it's helped me with my math ability which is the biggest passion of mine I don't know who I would be if I didn't I can join math the way I do it's just given me a lot of passion and a lot of the reason why you know I work as hard as I do with like my neurodiversity campaign is to help other people and to make the world a more inclusive supportive space and if I weren't autistic I don't know what I would be doing with my life I don't feel like I would be trying to help people as much because a lot of the reason why I try to help people is because of what I've gone through yes yeah I mean it makes me who I am and so I can only say positive things at this time in my life negative life experiences can be absolutely horrible but there is always a way of turning every negative into a positive I guess with you it's it's that you were bullied and you had a tough time at school and so you've used those experiences and use that that drives to improve things to try and improve things for other people who go through the same thing it's one of one of the most honorable and wonderful things that someone can do I think it's it's very brave to to face those and sort of process them and try and improve them and work around things for other people I guess it must it must bring a lot of meaning and like to your life yeah it does and it just makes me when I get emails from people saying you know I read your book or I read this post that you did and it's completely changed my life and my perspective on myself it it makes me feel like what I'm doing has a purpose and it's helping people and it's just very fulfilling when you hear about people that were going through the exact same struggle that I went through but because of advice that I'm given I'm able to have a different outcome that's more positive it's just really empowering for me it's brilliant CML would you like to give out some links to like your website and your book and all that just for anybody who wants to sort of follow up this podcast episode and check out some of the stuff that you've been doing okay so so you can follow me on twitter at at qrmentoring you can go on to qrmentoring.com to read articles that I've done and you can go on to siennacastleon.com and from there you can get signed copies of my books you can also get a pin that says I support neurodiversity very cool and I will put those links as well as anything else that you fancy sharing in the description as always just to give a few little links of myself out and you can always follow me on my social medias at aspergisgrowth facebook twitter and instagram youtube if you want a little more of a video style approach to the autism and mental health things that we discuss um I think we've got a few things on on neurodiversity on the aspergisgrowth channel if you want to go check that out and of course you can always find the 40 orty podcast on youtube spotify and apple podcasts so there's a lot of different ways of listening to these amazing people like sienna talk about um what they're passionate about and talk about their stories and their motives in life and if you do want to go check out the documentary it's still out there it's just past about 4.5 thousand views which i'm so grateful for it's called aspergis in society and you can find that on the aspergisgrowth channel or aspergisinsider.com sienna thank you so much for coming on to talk about your experiences and your thoughts on neurodiversity it's been very very nice to hear your your stories and very interesting thank you i really enjoyed being here and talking with you thank you everybody for tuning into the 40 orty podcast i definitely think you should go check out sienna's new book especially if you are currently at school and you are on the autism spectrum yourself if not it can be read by anyone i found it very insightful into the into the life of autistic girls because obviously i'm an autistic male so it's a little bit different in some aspects but it was great to hear about and learn and possibly in the future if i decide to have any kids and one of them is a neurodiverse girl i think a lot of the things that sienna has brought up in her book could be very applicable to me understanding my daughter said so daughter i don't have a daughter in a hypothetical world very interesting definitely recommend you go see it have you enjoyed your experience on the podcast yeah i really enjoyed it you're really great to talk to i'm so great to hear that i'm so great to hear that i'm so honored to hear that i think um it's definitely taken me a while to get to this level of uh competency with talking um i still sort of stumble over my words a little bit but i appreciate you coming on of course yeah everybody stay bright stay fresh maybe this episode will be coming out when covid is all over um if not i hope that these episodes fill your days with um something interesting to talk about and always make sure that you stay safe social distance keep yourself clean all that good stuff try and keep the country going and hopefully we'll be out of this ridiculous situation that we find ourselves in that's all from me i'm thomas henley from the 4080 podcast and hope you have a good day see you later folks bye guys um i should really start briefing people on like saying bye at the end because it's something that happens a lot i think there's only been like a couple of people who've done it right no it's like it's hard to do because like each show has a different like etica and like with some shows you just have to like be quiet while the host is talking and then with others it's like more interactive and so it's hard to just figure out what what to do it's a learning process but i'm getting better at it i also don't know when to finish podcasts as well i really struggle i'm trying to think of some ways of exiting the podcast in a in a flamboyant way but nothing's come up yet so a good old buy does does his job thanks for listening