 This is your daily hydration reminder. Make sure you're getting in some liquid, you autistic person. Taste the rainbow. Good day and welcome back to the Thomas Henley YouTube channel, your home for autism mental health. Self-improvement related concepts. Concept. Content. Today we're going to be covering something that is well and truly dear to myself. And that is my life. My life as an autistic person. Today we're going to be delving into my experience with autism and mental health going from very, very tiny Tom. Very, you know, cute sort of Tom unweathered by the influences of negative experiences and the reality of life. Up until teenage Tom is kind of a bit moody, a little bit introverted and such. And then into early adulthood, starting off my own autism journey and to where we are now. What I've been doing. What I've been up to without further ado. Let us go into some of the caveats which I only have two for you today. This will not cover every single person's experience. The thing is when we talk about autism in a general sense or even we talk about our own experiences of autism is that everybody varies very, very differently depending on who they are. Personality, experiences, upbringing, privileges and of course their specific autistic traits, their specific psychological profile. And so it's not going to really fall into place with every single person. And that's okay. I'm also not a doctor or an expert. So if anything that comes across from this video is that I am an autistic person sharing my experience. Not a doctor. So let us talk about my childhood. And I'm hoping that by the time when it comes to edit this, that I'll have some like video clips that I can like superimpose on this video. I'm taking the camera. Say hi to the camera. Hi. How old is Thomas? Him. How old is Jay? Him. No, Jay's not two. In general, I was quite a bubbly, emotional, kind, sometimes angry, sometimes overwhelmed individual. Yeah. He was a good boy. Stop it, Daddy. Stop it, Daddy. I'm not doing anything. Kick your bum. Kick your bum. Stop it. Kick you. Kick your bum. I had a lot of neurodivergent friends. But I struggled with neurotypical peers, specifically at school. Here we come, Thomas. One, two, three. Whee! They're looking at each other in the mirror. My particular signs and traits of autism, well, I used to stim a lot. So one thing that I did, which definitely got on my parents' nerves quite a bit, is that I used to put on some slippy socks, go onto like a wooden floor or something, and I would spin around like a Beyblade. Like a ballerina. And that's one of the number one stims that I had throughout all of my childhood. That and trampolining. That was another big thing for me. The reason why I did this is because I am very hyposensitive. So I'm very insensitive to my sensory systems when it comes to my vestibular and proprioceptive senses. Vestibular, basically balance, sort of your innate ear stuff, proprioception related to awareness of your body in space. Not up there, down here. Your body in space without you actually having any other input. So if you close your eyes and move your hands about, you have some ideas, some clue of where your arms are. I really didn't get a lot of input from this. And so a lot of my stims tended to be focused around that vestibular proprioceptive input. Things like rocking, things like spinning, things like bouncing, trampolining. Those were all things that I really enjoyed. Not to say that I didn't enjoy other things, like I really enjoyed swimming, used to sink to the bottom of the pool, especially if I was on holiday or something, there was the sun coming in, sort of gleaming, doing all those light rays that come through and sort of spinning around underwater. I really, really enjoyed that stuff. Light on, light is bright. I also had a few particular versions to food. I used to prefer very bland food and very sweet food, so I had a very, very, very big sweet tooth. Here's what though. It's going to grow when you can have a chocolate star. Yes. It could be nicer to it. Chocolate stars. I think it will do. I think you'll like chocolate. Do you like chocolate? Yeah. You don't like chocolate. Like biscuits. No, you like radishes. I do. And you do. And broccoli. Yeah. You do. And a lot of the time I did struggle with very, very bright lights. You know, if it was a particularly bright day outside, I used to struggle quite a bit with that. Sunglasses fixed that, of course. But also noises, busy places, going to the shops. Sometimes it would make me a bit overwhelmed. And that was kind of an early sort of site, early insight into my experiences with my sensory world as an autistic child. I also had a lot of interpersonal issues, which only really started to become concrete and understood when I got a little bit older into primary school, but I will go into that. I had a few issues when it came to anxiety, social anxiety. My mum, quite often, even, you know, when I was talking to her on my podcast recently, I did like a whole chat about my life. Is that a woman kissing it? You're going to be a little kissy monster, isn't it? And she quite clearly remembers a lot of situations where I would go to somewhere new, a new group, a new sporting place. And I would be stood at the side for quite a considerable amount of time just watching the other kids, just like monitoring the environment to both make sure if it was okay for me and it was safe, but also to understand how I could integrate better into that place. I had a lot of fixations. It ranged from spinning tops, Bayer blades, these little kind of micro-Bayer blades that we used to have, Yu-Gi-Oh! in its anime, on its games, and its cards. Pokemon, the same thing. I think I clocked over about 300, 400 hours on Pokemon Emerald at one point. It got even to a point with my fixations that I remember quite clearly I was on the way to one of my Scouts, sort of Cubs, kind of like, you know, like, you have, what are they called in the US? You know, like Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. Well, you have, like, little versions of those and it was at this church that's quite close to me. And I used to go to that, it was called Beavers. And I remember playing Pokemon Emerald in the car and getting to, like, the final stage, the final boss, the champion. And for some reason, the champion kept using these potions on this Pokemon. And it was delaying me completing this. And I remember I was about 10, 15 minutes late to the Beavers sort of assembly thing just because I was so fixated on trying to get this game completed. So, really big part of who I was, I was kind of almost to a point quite escapist, like, in a sense. I really, really fixated on things like that. Other categories of things that I really fixated on were things like Warhammer. Anything that was kind of small that I could collect. I think I had, like, a collection of paperweights that I used to have and I used to get all my figurines and toys and sort of line them up. But I also did some stuff that I think is seen by a lot of women and girls when they grow up, which is kind of this sort of caring side to play. I used to, like, make little houses. I have cardboard boxes for my toys and sort of put them to bed and, like, do whole, you know, imaginative play stuff by myself but also with my friends. Oh, thank you, Thomas. Oh, cheers. There you go. Hello! I also had a kind of a long-standing interest. I was going to say issue. Maybe it's an issue. I had a long-standing interest in things like sports and fitness. I got really into fitness when I started to get into secondary school. For a long time, pretty much my whole life, I've been in and out different sort of sports, whether it be, like, tennis or swimming or badminton. I was a very active kid. I also had a really, really big interest in anime. Of course, Japanese culture, samurai is... Oh, my God. Crazy interest in that. To the point where I tried to do a GCSE, which is, like, sort of a baseline kind of qualification at school in Japanese. Didn't do very well. I had to kind of pass on it just for, like, other studies and stuff, but big interest in that. I had a lot of experiences with other children when it comes to bullying, manipulation, which is something that I'm going to go into. When I was younger, I used to be sort of semi-hypolexic. Like, I used to have a very flamboyant vocabulary, as it be. That's a nice smile for me. Say cheese. Cheese. Say banana. Banana. Say... Contacosta. Contacosta. Say nikinekinu. Nikinekinu. Nikinekinu. Yeah. Nikinekinu. I used to read a lot, particularly of my grandad. Like, whenever my grandad used to come by, we used to grab, like, a stack of books and just, like, plop them next to him and just sit there and, like, read for hours and hours. Look at that! Ooh, yeah, look at that. Okay, well, that is finished doing his filming. I was very, very academic and I wanted to learn about a lot of things as well. But as soon as I went to school, as soon as I went to primary school, I think that's, like, elementary, maybe, in the US, I lost interest in academia. I think maybe it was because of the social and the sensory environment, but also the fact that, you know, I've never really been a morning person and school is very much a morning thing. I can't remember a time where I ever went to school with, like, a restful night's sleep as far back as I can remember. You don't often seem like this. And one very strange thing is that I kind of turned into somewhat of a class clown, which was very surprising to my mum when she went to parents' evenings because I was quite an introverted kind of to myself kid. I used to think a lot. I used to be quite kind. I used to be quite open, but I was never really one for, like, being the centre of attention. And I think that was mostly because of the social environment, but also perhaps a little bit of manipulation as well. When I acted out and when I made jokes and when I interrupted lessons and stuff, I saw the positive responses that were displayed by the other kids. Teachers, not so much. They didn't particularly, they weren't particularly all for that, but the other kids, they had positive responses to it or at least my best friend did. And that's why I continue to do it because that's what I thought social interaction was. Making a mockery of the school system, of course. Throughout this kind of time period, I did have some very, very close friends. I didn't have many friends, but I had some close friends. They tended to be female and that's something that continued a lot through my life, like most of my friends were women. Don't know why. I think maybe my personality aligned a little bit more with women in general and less so with the other kids. I did kind of view other guys, other boys of that age to be a little bit unpredictable and I didn't particularly like that and a little bit less in touch with emotions and feelings and such, which, you know, I'm very much like that. Who is this Thomas? Tell me. Is he your brother? Mm-hmm. Oh, that's good. Thank you. You want to put your dummy in? Okay. Thank you. So that's a little insight into my early life. Let us get into the diagnosis. I didn't understand when I went for this diagnosis that I was doing a test and if I did know that it was a test, I didn't know that it was related to autism. I went to a psychologist and I think we ever did it in one day or we did it over the course of two sessions and at the end of the last session, my mom got the results and she took me to Matt Donald's, kind of the safe haven, got a happy meal, got one of those little toys in the baggies and I had my chicken nuggets and chips so I was happy, got those safe foods and my mom told me that I was autistic. And it was very, very impactful for me and it's very hard, it's very like difficult to describe just why it was impactful for me but it was one of the first times in my life where I felt... I kind of... I felt like it was right and I felt like it explained a lot about my experiences. Bearing in mind that I was the age of 10, I did sort of get the impression that I wasn't particularly like other kids. I did feel a little bit overt in a lot of circumstances. I didn't really understand a lot of the circumstances that were happening around me in social settings. Yeah, I mean, it was hard for me to relate to other kids. I didn't see other kids having the same reactions to sensory environments, having to have as much downtime as I did. I was starting to feel a little bit like an alien, like I didn't really belong in the school or around other kids. And when my mom told me that I was autistic, it's almost like a little flip, a flip switched. A switch flipped in my brain and I was like, oh, oh, I get it. I understand. Wow, it hit me and it's something that I remember. My mom, 100%, she explained my autism diagnosis as a difference. Not necessarily good, not necessarily bad, not necessarily like a really, really bad thing that's happened. She explained to me that I do have certain skills in certain areas that my brain works very differently. And I also have some difficulties as well, which made a lot of sense to me. Being aware that I was autistic through life didn't have the impact that a lot of late diagnosed individuals might think it would have. I had some situations where I did receive some support or adjustments, but not a lot. There was a lot of issues when it came into personally to get into parties and things like that. A lot of the other parents didn't really understand much about autism. So they told their kids to stay away from me. They stopped me from going to certain social events, kind of halting a lot of my ability to socialize in those very early ages. And a lot of teachers didn't really understand either. They didn't really get it. They just thought that I was kind of like a naughty kid. They didn't really understand how to integrate me. They didn't make much. And with attempts, not all teachers, there were some little gems in there. But the level of support that I received was not significant really. Not as far as I know. It wasn't like I had like a personal PA coming around with me in school, going to lessons with me, explaining things to me. Because I was pretty smart. Like I was pretty academic. Got good grades. Or throughout my life I've achieved. And the school didn't really see an issue because I was meeting these certain expectations and even exceeding them in some cases. I also didn't really understand autism. You know, when you first learn about autism, when you hear about me talking about my experiences and sharing different pieces of knowledge that I have about autism, I didn't understand those. I didn't know about those throughout most of my life. It's only recently. Only in my early 20s that I really started to understand that stuff. Up until that point, I just thought of it as having social issues. Not liking people, not being like people. Sensory issues, like struggling with certain sensory environments. And meltdowns. Meltdowns and shutdowns. Those are kind of like the three things that I thought autism was. That's how I understood it. I saw it as a flat deficit, a flat disadvantage other than perhaps doing well in academia and doing well in sports. There is also a really, really key, perhaps quite dark component to my story as a person. And that is kind of my experience in secondary school. Now, I wasn't the most included individual in primary school. It wasn't the best experience for me. But it was okay. I could kind of cope with it, you know. In my journey of understanding myself, autism was and has been a really, really significant part of that. But most of my focus, most of the struggles that I've had have been focused around mental health. And that's something that has been long-standing throughout my teenage-hood, throughout my early 20s, even to a certain degree in adult life as you see me now. And I do want to put a caveat here. Again, if you do not want to hear stuff around mental health and the extremes of mental health, if you know what I mean, then please skip past this and perhaps don't look at it. For the rest of you, this is something very, very close to me and it has pretty much been the struggle, the challenge of my life. Mental health has been a very long-standing thing for me and it all started in secondary school. Overall, the whole being academic, you know, doing well at things in life continued into secondary school. It was never an issue. I always used to ace all of my classes. Some classes I didn't do too well in, like, statistics. That was something that I struggled kind of wrapping my head around. But I did really, really well in a lot of different subjects, going from GTSEs up to A-levels and obviously into university as well. And it was to a point where I read past the academic age that I was at. So I used to, as a GCSE student, kind of a lower sort of qualification, I used to read A-level textbooks, particularly about science, about physics, about biology, about chemistry. I really, really enjoyed learning about things. And when I got to secondary school, I found out that I could go to the library and in the library between classes, between lessons, I could read up about anything that I wanted. All of the textbooks were on the shelves and I just read and read and read. You know, it was for a long time one of my passions to become a scientist. My early experiences of secondary school weren't particularly too bad. I was excited about going to secondary school because of just how, like, great and wonderful my parents, particularly my mom, was when all of the other kids at primary school deciding on which sort of secondary school they wanted to go to, a lot of the parents actually wanted a lot of them to go to some, like, really kind of prestigious sort of secondary schools in the area. Whereas my mom, she was kind of wanting me to go the same route and I definitely had the grades for it. But I found somewhere which was really ideal for me. It was kind of built with very, very low ceilings. It had a lot of sports places. It had a lot of different areas. The feel of the school was good for me. And so I said to my mom that I wanted to go there and, you know, she put her side, her desires and her wants for me and allowed me to go to the school of my choice, which I am, like, really, really grateful for. That self advocacy was instilled in me since a very, very young age, I would say. And my mom definitely took every opportunity to let me relish in some level of independence. But I quickly found as a very, very small child entering in the bottom end of a secondary school in terms of years that a lot of the older kids were pretty hostile a lot of times. I remember a lot of situations where the older kids were kind of barge past. I remember being, like, pushed into, like, a rail and, like, having my head hit while waiting for a drama class. A lot of situations like that. There were also some couple of instances early in my secondary school of, like, perhaps confrontation, but it was never really that bad. It was never really that much of an issue. When I got a little bit into the late years, I started to become sort of worn down by the sensory environment. The social environment became a lot more complex, and I really, really struggled to understand what was going on, why things were happening. I kind of turned from a very bubbly, open, kind of friendly kid into someone who was fairly introverted, fairly shy. I had a lot of situations where I did have, like, a group of friends, but instead of hanging out with that group of friends, I would go to the library most of the time, just because of the lack of sensory input, because of the lack of social input. Over time, as I was a part of multiple groups, I sort of turned into a little bit of a social drifter, a little bit of a wallflower. I didn't really interact with people because that was sort of my very strange way of masking. I didn't really understand social things and how to copy and how to be like the people around me, so I defaulted to not really saying much, to not really adding stuff, providing much input. I was very kind of off to the side on my own. At the same time as not really understanding people, I did become extremely intrigued by them, and that kind of set up one of my special interests that I've had for a long time now, which is people who aren't autistic, you know? A lot of people, a lot of researchers, they develop somewhat of a special interest about autism. My sort of special interest was learning about people who weren't autistic, why they did the things they did, why they interacted and said certain things and interpreted different things from different situations. I found it really, really curious. There was a particular time in my time at school when people's social abilities, their kind of allistic, neurotypical social abilities, started to surpass me in such a way that it left me in the dirt that I just had absolutely no clue. I didn't feel certain, I didn't feel safe, I didn't feel like I understood what was going on in any situational circumstance. I describe it as like one year, one summer holiday, perhaps. Everyone in my year group kind of went away for summer holidays, they got together and they had a discussion about all these different rules that they wanted to implement, the different social rules that they wanted to implement, the communicational rules. And when they came back after that summer holiday, I was sort of left in the dirt, I didn't really, I wasn't in the know, I didn't understand all this stuff. And this was the point at which my mental health really started to sort of develop. The sensory and social environments got so intense for me on a daily basis that I started to develop a very, quite a strong like, I would say probably like a moderate anxiety disorder. When I say moderate, most people are like, oh, okay, so it's a moderate anxiety disorder. It's in the middle of mild and severe, it's right in the middle, it's pretty debilitating in a lot of cases. You have mild and you're like, oh, okay, that's not too bad. It's pretty bad. And then you have moderate and they're like, oh, it's only a moderate anxiety disorder. And then you go straight from this very tame, sort of non impactful language to severe. And so people don't really understand that. But anyway, the anxiety was pretty significant to a point where I started to have to exit classes. I had started to leave during playtime, during break, during lunch in order to basically be by myself. There was a particular part of the school. This is called the bridge where a lot of sort of extra sort of curricular learning and such happens. It's kind of like this special needs sort of division of the school. I used to go there and sort of sit on the sofas and such during my break times just because I needed somewhere to be quiet, somewhere to relax, somewhere to regulate. I had a lot of meltdowns in that bridge just because of the experiences that I was having throughout the school. There wasn't really anything done by the teachers to try and mitigate that other than saying that during lessons, I'm allowed to go to the bridge. I'm allowed to go to regulate. And I don't really need to explain things in front of the class. So anxiety was pretty high. And it was a very, very difficult thing for me to do. I had a lot of circumstances where I used to go home sick. I think it was a lot to do with anxiety, the reason why I was feeling sick a lot of the time. A lot to do with overwhelmed. I used to take a lot of days off school just because of how difficult school was for me. It didn't really impact my grades. So it wasn't much of a concern for like my parents or like the school. But it did happen pretty frequently to the point where I was sort of a regular at like the school nurses department. Every time I saw her, she's going to rolling her eyes like, oh Thomas is here again. She's giving me like a paracetamol. That seems to be like, that was her like remedy to everything. Have a paracetamol. When it comes to greater, more different social interactions, I'm talking about like romantic experiences, relationships, you know, there's little early life relationships that we have that don't really mean much. I had quite a few of them when I was younger. I ran about the age of 14. My first long standing longterm relationship, which went on for a fair amount of years. It wasn't with anyone particularly in the school. It was actually from with someone outside of the school. Although I did have that and we were together for a long time. I really, really, really did not have the emotional social development in order to handle such a thing. I didn't understand the first thing about relationships dating or any kind of intimate one-to-one kind of emotional relationship. I didn't really have like a best friend really. I didn't have anyone who was that close to me or I had never been that close to another human other than perhaps my brother and my dad and my mom or my granddad. And so I didn't really know how to navigate this and I think you could say the same for the majority of people around that age. We're not, you know, we're kind of developing, we're not really mature. Our frontal lobe is starting to develop and become very sort of paranoid and we care about what other people think about us and very hyper aware of everything in life. But I had that and it does surprise a lot of people when I tell them about like my like three, four year long relationship that I had when I was, that I started when I was 14. Most people are like, what? It's like I thought autistic people struggled with relationships. Yeah, but I did have that experience and I pretty much did have experiences like that for a long time. Even when I was like very, very young in sort of the early parts of primary school, I had a girlfriend. I was always like a ladies man I guess when I was younger. Not so much nowadays, I'm a bit kind of a bit doing my own thing but I had quite a few experiences like that all sort of throughout my life. Now this gets a little bit into the darker aspects of my experience in secondary school. Life around the time where I got to like the age 14, 15, 16. This is when my anxieties, my my difficulties with school manifested into a pretty severe depressive period which lasted for quite a while and it developed into a depressive disorder, major depression. I first went to the psychologist because a lot of my friends around me were noticing or some people around me were noticing that I used to wear like a bandage. I used to wear like a lot of like wristbands around my wrist and it was because I was engaging with SH a lot. Like to a very, very large degree. I also got to a point where I was so self-conscious about my social difficulties that I tried to compensate for that. I started going to the gym. I started engaging in a lot of ED behavior particular bulimia for quite a while in order to make myself attractive enough that my social difficulties didn't matter. I was very, very focused on dating and relationships and I really wanted to find my person in my head and I thought that it would fix everything obviously not the case. It did get to a point where I struggled to function. I struggled to be around people. I started developing very large bouts of like insomnia. I had a few suey attempts throughout secondary school or even up into like my university experiences. I really didn't like life. I had to give up my swimming. I didn't have to but I stopped going. I said that I felt sick every time that my parents were going to take me because I didn't want to show my scars which were very, very concerning and extensive at that point to the point where at one time I actually had to go get stitches at the hospital. I developed a pretty intense sugar addiction as well. I used to basically moderate my anxiety levels by drinking and eating large amounts of sugar in order to get a sugar crash that would somewhat, it made me feel sick and horrible and gross but it did lower my energy levels to a point where I felt like it helped my anxiety. No, I didn't want to life and every day, every second of every day, every minute of every day was just filled with this intense feeling of pain, this bodily pain, this dissociation, this anxiety. The only way that I really could be able to cope with it was focusing on something else and for me that was my academics but it was also my taekwondo and I got inspired by a lot of anime characters that I didn't really have. People asked me like what? Who were your role models? I didn't have anybody. I didn't see anything out there on the internet about autism until I got into my early 20s around the age of 19 or so and so I didn't really relate to any celebrities, I didn't really relate to any public figures, any music artists beyond the music that they created but definitely with anime characters those people who were kind of shoved to the side socially isolated alienated but they had a dream, they had something that they wanted to accomplish, they had some kind of inner fire, some inner meaning that sort of drove them to continue despite all the negative experiences that they were having and I really really related to that. Particularly like Dragon Ball Z characters Naruto the story of Naruto was quite impactful as well as like Rock Lee from the Naruto series those were all really really big impacts on me and I remember at one point asking my mum if I could do a martial art instead of doing swimming and she said sure and I went around I tried different martial arts, I tried Aikido and Jujitsu and some weird sort of Mukdojo MMA place at one point and I landed on Taekwondo and it was kind of like a traditional club and I will go into like my experiences with that in the next slide so that was somewhat like a driving thing for me and I realised very very early on that meaning is something that is really really important to me. Whether it be going to university to be a scientist whether it be being a competent fighter and doing competitions and stuff, I really really that was always in my head because it was better for me to think of that and for me to grind and put myself through difficult situations and train and albeit quite boring things compared to like what most kids were doing then to sit by and just be in my feelings in order to like understand what was going on for me I developed quite a lot of delusions particularly about being like an overworldly being which carried on quite late into my teenagehood. These delusions were basically a way for me to try and understand what was going on in the social environment that I was in at school I found that the differences between myself started to widen and widen every year that I was in school to the point where I just I really really just did feel like an alien or some kind of mystical being that just I just couldn't relate to anybody it's like I saw everybody interacting in groups and the way that they acted the sort of emotional sort of driven behaviour and I saw in my brain I like almost infantilised them to a certain degree I give you them as these kind of mindless baboons that just went through life not really thinking about things to the in the level of detail that I did and to a point it was kind of true because you know I was fairly different in that sense I did think about things that wasn't very impulsive the whole secondary school experience was and even my relationship was filled with drama and difficult things and underpinning all of that was my mental health illnesses which kind of continued to get worse and worse as I got older psychological support didn't really help I was put on some meds which sort of helped but also made me feel a little bit like a psychopath I felt so like detached from my emotional emotions like my thought like almost like my brain was split in two like my thoughts and my emotions were sort of disconnected so I'd usually talk about myself like in a third person almost in my head so it made it easy to talk about my experiences but I never really felt them and with a lot of the therapy that I received they didn't really understand autism all that well they couldn't say oh okay that emotional disconnect that you're feeling is like they didn't really understand that stuff nothing was really working other than me trying to realize that this is what my life is and that every day is painful and horrible and nobody understands me and all that stuff you know kind of sounds like the whole teenager story but it was really to a quite extreme extent to the extent that I probably wouldn't wish the whole secondary school experience on like the worst of people like my worst enemy if I have one you know even looking back on it and I'm sort of empathizing with myself as like a kid I'm like in some respects at that age I knew what this was and I had the right mentality towards it that you know things are gonna get better and one thing that really followed me in that followed me and stopped me from trying to end things as as consistently was that you know one day maybe that I could get to a point where I could share my experiences and perhaps I could stop people from having similar experiences to me the mental health the social sensory things the school life the alienation the isolation the all this horrible stuff I just I had in my brain like if I could just tough it out if I could just become something do well perhaps I could get to a point where I could stop people feeling like I did gonna take a break guys need to like get a bit deeper alongside my experiences in my internal world and there were some definitely looking back at it that there were some particular things which made the social environment difficult for me and and that was definitely bullying and manipulation sort of social humiliation was quite a large part of my experiences in childhood and I had a lot of instances where you know I thought I was close to someone I thought that someone cared about me and they shared very intimate parts of my life I shared with them some people invented like like ways of talking about me different forms of language and that they could use so that they could talk about me and other people in front of their faces in a group there were a lot of strange like social things like that happening within like friend groups and I had a lot of times where people would be going out on trips like outside of school and I was sort of a part of the group but I was quite a quiet person but I was never really invited to stuff like that I was kind of excluded and sort of left out in a lot of cases on the front of bullying you know it was something that followed me through pretty much every stage of the day on the bus particularly remember this is one particularly annoying kid who used to sort of harass me and like spit in bags and like put the bag over my head and throw stuff at me and harass me and poke me and I didn't really understand how to approach all of that stuff you know I was at a point where I was you know quite into martial arts and I was fairly strong for my age and athletic but I didn't really understand how to deal with social things like that although it was like a particular group of couple of individuals who used to come and harass me and my group of friends and like flickers and take our ball and like kick it across the school you know come round with like a rubber band and like flickers on the ears and stuff like that it never really escalated to much physically just because I think it's because a lot of people realised that I was kind of like an accomplished sort of martial artist around the time so I think they had a little bit in the back of their head that was stopping them from doing that but it didn't stop some people I know I remember a particular circumstance where I was outside waiting for I think I was waiting for like a French lesson, French language and a group of boys sort of came around me and started one of them sort of punched me in the nuts and I thought okay right if I don't react they're gonna stop they're gonna get intimidated but they didn't so they did that again and they did again and then the friends came in and they were like hey guys you know Tom can get hit in the nuts and he's okay so everyone just kept kicking and punching me in the nuts and you know it sounds funny talking about it but it was yeah it was not good and it made the whole environment like inhospitable it's like every day I didn't really know what to expect I didn't know where this harassment was gonna come from I didn't know who was going to humiliate me and so I just became ever so more like reclusive and I just introverted and just stayed away from things and the only real way that I socialized was like online on social media and you know messaging people because I didn't really have the confidence or you know the calmness in order to like socialize with people in person obviously that led to a lot of scapers and a lot of video games just trying to escape going to the gym doing my taekwondo secondary school was really really hard I don't think there's anything else that I really wanted to talk about when it comes to that but it was a very significant part of my life for a long time that's for sure so as I was saying before about like meaning and sort of goals being important to me I definitely wanted to try and prove to myself and prove to others that I was worth something because I felt like I needed to you know my self-esteem my self-confidence was so down in the gutter my ability to like advocate for myself was so non-existent I wanted to become good at martial arts be good at taekwondo inspired by anime and all that and I got into a very old school club old school taekwondo club for quite a few years that was really really good for me made some friends I trained I you know did all sorts of different things went did a few competitions as well but then I sort of realized that it wasn't right for me and I wanted to actually take my skills to like a competitive level so I went to a sports club sports taekwondo club pretty much went every weekend for about two hours and it was about a two hour round trip each time on Saturdays and then I went to like another club within the sporting arenas and I went there about two or three times a week on top of that so I was training about three or four times a week very very consistently between that I would go to the gym I got like a sponsorship by like a local gym so I could train so I was really in kind of like my building kind of arc and I was always visualized myself as like one of the heroes in the anime and I was really really strong and I could do like muscle ups and I could do like multiple like crazy sort of calisthenic movements and things of that nature I really got into researching it myself and I think that really helped I got beat up by a lot of black belts I used to regularly come home with breezes on my arms on my legs on my face because I was quite an aggressive fighter and even though I was a lower belt level than the other kids I still went pretty hard against the black belts I always went really really aggressive and hard I don't know why I think it's just the inner anger that I'm just like releasing from all there the pent-up irritation from like people at school and such though it was good for me and I learned a lot and I was injured a lot of the time and exhausted a lot of the time but it was good for me and it really focused me I frequently watched a lot of exercise science videos learned a lot about how to build like explosive strength and cardio when I made myself my own programs that I'd do in the summer if I wasn't at the dojo I was at the gym usually after school and I taught it all myself to a point actually that when I went to take my A levels in PE I got like the highest grade in the school in the school's history for PE I think it was like 139 out of 140 it was really really close to being like a perfect A level to a point where sometimes when I was talking to after lessons I would read up some particular like science around like exercise physiology and all that and I talked to my teachers and they wouldn't know about it so I was really really reading far ahead and I do have a little thing in the back of my head saying oh I could have done sport, something sport science or sport psychology or something like that but it wasn't the path for me I got to a point like in my taekwondo where I climbed to like a junior national gold medal it's like just before you get into adults I also went to the Commonwealth Championships it's the first stop iteration of its kind and I also got a gold medal as well in the heavyweight junior categories I even got like a trophy sort of a bit for like the best male athlete performance and I defied a couple of Australian dudes who are absolutely ginormous and because of my weight class we tend to have our fights very late in the day so it was the last fight of the Commonwealth on the Saturday and the entire stadium was watching our fight and it was kind of like a rocky movement rocky moment it was the closest match I've ever had in my life it was the amount of sensory noise from like the audience the people watching was so loud it was it was almost like everyone was literally shouting like a meter away from me that's how loud and crazy and echoey it was it was just it was really like a movie moment for me and I was so happy to be able to take home that achievement it was amazing for me and I carried that on into adulthood I started competing abroad internationally I got a senior gold medal nationally I came fourth in the under 21 Europeans of losing to the eventual gold medalist in the third round so yeah it was it was amazing thing for me and I got to train with like some of the world's best athletes not even just the country like the world's best athletes got to go on camps with like quadruple gold medalists and crazy stuff like that it was mad but eventually I did have to stop and this was kind of around the age when I went to university because I didn't really understand much about politics and social things and I wasn't really interested in understanding at all but there were a lot of politics within the taekwondo world and one of the coaches didn't really take a liking to me they thought that I was lazy I had a lot of situations throughout my training where I would have panic attacks before I went training I would really struggle at competitions for like weeks before I would not feel hungry not be able to eat, not be able to sleep a lot of panic attacks and meltdowns happens but I always did it I never stopped me but it sometimes meant that I was a bit late and that was enough for some people like the GB headquarters to be like this guy's not got the the hutzpah to make it into a professional career so I had a lot of barriers when it came to inclusivity understanding and it was just not something that I felt comfortable going into full time although I didn't really take taekwondo to a professional level it definitely rubbed off like a lot of benefits to me it taught me like what my grit consistency, what my passion could achieve in the long term quite often we only really have those experiences later in life when we get really really good at something progressed to a certain level in our job but I had that experience pretty early on and it informed a lot of the stuff that I did later in life my university, my online work it was also a really really productive outlet for my own anger although I never expressed anger outwardly I was a very very angry kid and if you watched any of my fights you would get that impression too although outside of the ring pretty docile kind of to myself not particularly angry to anybody's measure it definitely got into my social time but that wasn't really an issue for me the whole experience of being an athlete doing taekwondo and going to different places around the world to compete was really really amazing and I have a lot to thank in my parents for helping me like fund that and organize it and a lot to my coach and my team as well. In university it's kind of a different arc I suppose it sort of bleeds into it a little bit to do my taekwondo but for the most of it first year was pretty pretty okay. I did struggle with the change to some degree. I went out very very little sort of socialized very very little other than like Freshers Week and sort of experiencing sort of like the club environment I had that kind of experience but I found myself not intentionally at like the party hot spot of the university the place where everybody went in order to try new things to drink and go out and I really wasn't about that. I remember a lot of situations coming home from like taekwondo where like I saw someone like caholing on the stairs or like pretty much the smell of Mary Jane was about like pretty much everywhere all the time in my accommodation but I was really really focused on studying I was focused on my taekwondo and I had my girlfriend at that time kind of fulfilled all my social needs to a certain extent I didn't really need more than that so this year wasn't too bad in my second year however this is why things got tough. I moved in with one person that was very close to during my first year at uni my girlfriend broke up with me because they went to a very far away university and they didn't want to maintain that and I found myself in a very isolated position. I didn't really have any friends I had sort of loose friends who sort of liked me and were around me because I was part of uni and I had like course mates and stuff like that but no real like genuine people that I could connect to. I became extremely isolated. My mental health deteriorated to like an even further degree than what I had during secondary school to the point where I was having I think about 6, 7 or 8 like panic attacks a day for a very consistent amount of time so so depressed that I didn't leave my room for like anything but getting like snacks and food. I didn't cook myself anything I was just living off snacks I didn't go out and see people I hardly spoke to anybody. I started drinking quite a bit. I entered into like this strange realm where you know I was reading up on psychology philosophy things of that nature and my world was just starting to like disintegrate. I just didn't I didn't have like a grasp on reality at that point like my head was so all over the place I didn't really understand what was going on in my life and you know I was so disillusioned from life that I became so like isolated and secluded it's like one of those philosophies that like convinced themselves that everybody else didn't exist and they sort of lived in like a dustbin. I was basically like that for a large portion of my second year but I mean throughout this obviously I had places to train, do my taekwondo I tried to keep up with studies I had a lot of support from the local support officer who helped me but I had one incident where I made a very sort of significant and like serious attempt on my life not not not a good good time. Thankfully one person I met at a random party in the local area that I decided to go to who is now my best friend actually picked up on the signs of me wanting to end things and called the local security team to come around and check on me obviously finding me very inebriated and I hated her for a long time because of that I understood why but obviously I feel eternally grateful to her now but at the time it was kind of like my life was just so done in my head. I very much glorified my end I just wanted things to stop I started masking a lot during that time reading up on how to date people, how to get relationships how to make friends started masking very very heavily during that time if you don't know about autistic masking I do have a video on it that you can check out after this but that was definitely like a part that is probably like one of the worst years in my life that second year at university. It was awful my parents didn't know the first thing about it because I didn't tell them of course surprisingly this is actually the time at which I started my youtube channel the one that we're watching here I mean it was called a different name at the time but it was basically a channel for me to vent or explain about my experiences as an autistic person I also started my instagram page where I started learning a bit more about autism and sharing my experiences at that time it was very much a platform for me to explain more about myself and not really dive too much into the literature not really dive too much into like self-improvement but just to kind of explain my experiences sort of then to sort of get it out there in the world in the hopes that it would help somebody if you go back and look at like some of the first videos that I made you could probably find the first video that I ever made that was during my second year at uni you know I'm not going to put it at the end but if you want to you can like set the date on my channel back to like the end of it and just like check out the video it's funny watching it back I'm so different it's crazy my third year at university was marked by somewhat of a impulsive decision because of the my university course I did biomedical sciences with industrial experience it meant that I could go to somewhere either in the country or in the world in order to do some research for you I decided I wanted to get out of the UK I felt like it was not good for me I needed to kind of break out of my shell experience new aspects of life so I went to Thailand 4 places to study mosquitoes and for a lot of it it was a really really good experience and I was kind of enamoured by just like the differences culturally and socially and I really really enjoyed sort of being in that place I was studying mosquitoes and what was involved with that is you know I obviously went round with the other sort of lab mates I learnt from this guy called Yasada and I went round like temples basically using myself as human bait in order to catch mosquitoes if you're interested in the science of it a basic says I was studying like the impact of insecticide use on the genes of this particular mosquito that causes things like dengue fever zika virus things like that so it was really fun and I got to meet and I had a lot of interesting conversations with a lot of monks surprisingly you guys would probably be quite surprised by this but monks are not kind of these secluded group of individuals in Thailand they do wear the robes quite often but they have phones, they watch TV shows and Netflix, they go travelling they have their own lives it's not kind of this kind of sort of simplistic kind of lifestyle or at least it wasn't like in Chiang Mai in Thailand I really started to feel a little bit like I was a part of a group for one of the first times in my life I didn't really feel like that when I was in secondary school although I was somewhat but I learnt a lot about neurotypical socialising I had a relationship with a Thai Nepalese girl we had quite a long relationship with that and I backpacked around Southeast Asia I went on travelling excursions with my dad the backpacking was definitely like a big thing that was out of my comfort zone because I really really struggled with routine, the transitions and anxiety and so this was a pretty tall order the organisation and the being in new places all the time it was quite hard we were never really in one place for over like 3 days 3 days was like the max had a lot of very interesting experiences meeting new people going to places sort of torn by recently sort of torn by war and you know places like Vietnam and Cambodia really sort of changed and opened my eyes changed my perspectives and opened my eyes to the experiences that people can have and yeah it was great and I went with my friend Ben we travelled about for like 2 months with a backpack it was crazy I still can't believe that I did that I can't imagine myself doing it again I do want to but yeah I mean completely out of my comfort zone but an amazing experience developed me a lot that whole experience so I touched a little bit on my own personal philosophy this idea of nihilism from about 2nd year at university to even my 4th year at university I started writing a lot I started writing a lot in the notes pages on my phone I wrote about all sorts of different things about socialising, about psychology about philosophy my own thoughts on life and experiences that I was having and I found that my beliefs aligned very very closely to this ideal of nihilism and the thing is these experiences these sort of existential third wall breaking kind of glass breaking moments were pretty consistent throughout my entire life I'm not really sure why I think it's a lot to do with personal desire to understand things that quite often don't particularly have a right answer my own experience of trying to grapple with the limitations of my own brain the limitations of the brains of other people in the society that we're in the greater idea and concepts of why we are here and why things work the way that they do in terms of nature all of this stuff really perplexed me it interests me it was curiosity driving it was also very significantly anxiety producing coupled that with a really poor sort of experience of life and perspective on things and people mental health, anxiety all of that included it led me to a lot of situations where I just didn't really feel like much was real like I couldn't really grasp the simplest of things because after analyzing and breaking apart every single thing that I was thinking about or trying to understand I realized that there is no certainty there is no 100% sort of black and white kind of this is how things are and this is how things aren't there is so much grey to everything that we do as human beings everything that we understand and it's terrifying it just led me to a lot of situations where I just couldn't function I couldn't do anything and I didn't want to because I just didn't see any meaning in anything when I came across this idea of nihilism I really it really touched me sort of on a very very personal level like a lot of the thoughts that I was having the things that I was writing about was so intertwined with this idea of nihilism it was only really until I started to sort of analyze it a lot more and started to realize just how negative and how difficult these existential crises were that I started to move away from like them move away from thinking about them too much I decided at one point to basically in my own head convince myself or make myself believe that life had this form of meaning that these certain things were good and these certain things were bad I stopped thinking in such a grey way I stopped thinking in such a broad way and so much so that I just couldn't function so that I could function so that I could get some level of positivity from my experience in life I moved away from my glorification of ending things it was very consistent up until that point my grandad passed away very recently so during that time and I started trying to think of ways that I could better sort of improve my outlook on things I got a list of values a set of things that I really wanted and really really felt that were a part of me and how I worked and how I fought and how I felt I had those values and I tried to imprint them on everything that I did in life tried to use them as sort of guidelines if it be instead of focusing on self-improvement to make me happy I started focusing on self-improvement to make me feel content to make me feel like I have a purpose to make me feel like I have a meaning to focus on the needs of other people in order to help them this idea of helping people is very very integral to who I am as a person because for the longest time I have failed at making myself happy it didn't matter what I achieved, what I did anything of that nature I always just felt bad I think it's a lot to do with my mental health diagnoses like there's a lot of the time there's not a lot of stuff that I can do to make myself feel good there is some stuff that I can do to stop myself from dipping down so much but my experience of life just tends to be very very negative I don't particularly enjoy life but what I do find meaningful about life is what sustains me and that is trying to erase as much pain in the world as I can try to understand people try to have a positive impact on other people's life if I couldn't have a positive impact on my own and that's pretty much where I was that was kind of like a flip switch kind of moment in my life again where it's like okay hey I'm sort of like a new person in a sense and in all respects in every era of my life those values that meaning has really sustained me and it's really directed me towards a place that makes me feel happy when I'm working towards something not happy but content content feeling like I'm worthwhile feeling like I'm useful feeling like I have some greater kind of spiritual purpose to all of this madness that's going on I started really working on my dynamics between my friends people in the past who've been awful to me and people in the past who I've not been the best either I apologise for to reconnect and understand each other try to get a get rid with all of that kind of background thoughts and feelings that I had about myself which really impacted my day to day self perceptions developed an appreciation for like this idea of unconditional love and I really saw that with my mom and with my family and so I tried as much as I have and even to this day to try and grow sort of emotionally and in lots of other ways as well there was a particular point in my time at Thailand where I had a bike crash I had a really significant injury I had surgery for about a year ago basically it was one of the only times in my life that I gave into peer pressure my friends we sort of going out we're gonna go to this place called the sticky waterfall can't remember the Thai name for it but it was quite far out and you couldn't really walk there so I suggested you know let's get a taxi and stuff like that but everybody else they wanted motorbikes mopeds of course so after about 10 20-30 minutes of them trying to convince me to do so I didn't want to walk home and be on my own and all that so I decided to agree with them about like the most expensive sort of safety equipment that I could find and I went and everyone was being very very silly when it came to like speeding and things of that nature and we went around sort of a corner on this way to the waterfall and I think a couple of my friends fell over they didn't really hurt themselves too bad one of them had like a cut and basically I came around I didn't realise that everyone fell over and I saw my friends and I was gonna run run him over so instead of running him over I ran myself into a metal barrier and went flying over the metal barrier that moped was sort of crushed into like that and I went to hospital one side I had about a massive gash of sort of stuff carved out of my leg could see my bone it was pretty awful lots of different other cuts like the entirety of my arms and my legs were just like shredded like the top layer of skin off and I got infected at one point I had the situation where I went into the hospital afterwards and they weren't the best they didn't really give me enough anaesthetic and they decided to sort of sort the injury out with multiple people holding me down with very little anaesthetic it was probably the most painful horrible experience I've had like physically you know like when people have something really horrific happen to them and they have like sort of a thousand miles stair where they're just sort of zombified I had that for a good amount of time and every day I had to kind of go in and get my bandages redone and such and it was awful one of the more long term things that happened just other than like the physical sort of gashes and cuts that I got I actually damaged one of my ligaments which I did go to the hospital to find out if it was damaged or not they said it was okay, it's not it caused me a lot of issues when I got back to the UK and meant that I couldn't really train properly I couldn't do taekwondo, I couldn't do boxing it sucked and I went through a long sort of injury recovery period like past year or so, finally finished my physio and got a new knee and can do all my kicks and stuff it still hurts now and again but it's consistently as time is going on it's getting better but that was the experience of my year in Thailand bit of a crazy time let's talk about my final year because this is when I started to get pretty into the whole order in the matter because he's stuff I started the 4TOT podcast to find the first episode with Guy Shahar talking about the transforming orders and projects I did that in my final year at university I mostly did it because I wanted to learn how to communicate with people better to learn, I wanted to learn from others experiences as well in a more personal way and I think it's definitely it has helped me in that sense even to the point where before I was scripting stuff a lot in my videos but after that I started to really feel like the whole find something, some like bullet points to talk on and then just talk and over time I got better and better at it. I started doing a lot of public speaking at different events like the autism show, I went on the radio like BBC Radio in Manchester I did a lot of charity collaborations with Born Anxious the clothing company I went to a fashion show I did like a modelling sort of catwalk thing for Katie Price's Sun Harvey Price his gold collection sort of collaboration with Born Anxious. I started doing a little bit more on Insta doing a lot more on my podcast and such I couldn't really maintain doing my videos as I used to but the podcast was definitely there. I started strength training quite a bit I didn't quite getting to the whole hypertrophy sort of bodybuilding aspect of it but I started strength training doing a bit more kicks and stuff to a certain extent just because of my knee. I actually competed at the national championships in the senior category again won two fights and lost to the eventual gold medalist using one leg I just used my one leg I got a bronze medal which I think is pretty cool and I finished my university project I made my documentary Asperger's in Society which was sort of linked to like a research project that I did and that was kind of looking into the link between autism and mental health and it was around the time around that time where I sort of developed my admission statements about like what I wanted to do with my advocacy work what I wanted to see changed in society and that was really reflected in a lot of the events and the public speaking that I did and my content really did start to change a little bit because there was a lot of things that I did personally to help myself through a lot of difficult circumstances in my life a lot of reading that I did, a lot of thinking about experiences in my own brain which really sort of helped me in my own personal journey and so I started shifting a little bit from talking about me to helping others to teaching others about the autistic experience to sharing ways that I did and things. That was kind of the ignition of like I guess what you could see as more of my modern style of video. I suppose like going outside of that my mental health and adulthood is going to run things up still an issue depends on the day, life circumstances there's a variety of my mental illness but still my meaning, my desire to help people is what really drives me forward trying to get the word out more, trying to change people's perspectives and such and such I still have support systems in place but I can live independently if I'm in a severe period which does tend to happen at least once a year and sometimes a bit more of a like a little severe periods that happen as well I do need quite significant support and my family does help me out a lot in that sense. It's very very difficult for me to do anything in those states and something that I'm still working on, seeing if I can try and stop those from happening but it does seem to be pretty consistent even at this point in my life. I started unmasking. This had a really really big impact on me because up until the point where I started unmasking I'd been masking a lot and I was getting very good at socialising and all of that but I still just felt eternally just fake I just didn't feel like I was me in the world. I was getting all these benefits of having friends and going on dates and all sorts of different things but I wasn't myself and it helped me over time feel a little bit less stressed it helped me feel a lot more authentic and genuine. I found some friends who really liked me for me and the ones who were my friends before and kind of stuck by me and saw it as a positive change they had the real me they do have the real me and it's really lovely to feel like people see me and also like me for who I am there are also some negatives that came with this whole process lose friends, get told by people that I'm regressing lots and lots of self-advocacy and explanations lots of different difficult social situations that have happened and also a lot of infantilisation particularly from doctors medical professionals other people and a hefty amount of manipulation as well which has happened somewhat in my adult life. I don't want to talk too much on my sort of working experiences. I did start getting into sort of special needs teaching my mother is a teaching genius I loved helping out with her school inspiring the kids got some experience in mainstream special needs teaching loved it but it impacted my stress levels just because of how hyper-vigilant you had to be and it helped me really understand the life of autistic children in different environments from sort of like a third-hand perspective taking that even further I worked at a social inclusion charity for about two or three years only sort of recently breaking up to do my self-employment stuff but I had a lot of experience sort of talking to leaders and government officials and people of that nature trying to understand what the issues are with including autistic people in our society so I've had a lot of experience both from like a person sort of working sort of way which I think definitely informs a lot of the beliefs that I think we can better include autistic people in our society make the life quality of autistic people a lot better and yeah, I mean there is obviously more to my life I could go into specific positive and negative sort of dating things that I've gone through I think that this has probably been quite a long video as it is I've talked about a lot of different aspects of my life and if you find this helpful and if you relate to any of this please let me know I know it's probably not going to get the best reach just because of the length of it but I hope there is some stuff here that you can relate to on your own sort of autism journey some specific circumstances some ways that I've sort of moved through and moved past negative things in my life I hope some of that is helpful for you I've been talking for so long about myself it's like I try to stay away from doing that but every time I go on to a podcast or have an interview or something everyone wants to talk about me I want to talk about things and ideas and autism and highlighting other people's experiences it's taken me a while to do this kind of video because it's been so long that I've created a piece of content which is solely focused around me so my life in conclusion feels a bit weird doing that I have had a difficult past and it's definitely been hard but I've had a lot of great aspects to my life a lot of achievements that I've managed to succeed in a lot of great supporters in my own life and online particularly two individuals called David one of the first people who started really following me when I was very very small in terms of channel size and also Mr Patrick Vedy who's been absolutely amazing and supported me both emotionally and monetarily with some of the changes that I've made to the channel massively grateful to family friends, everybody like that I've learnt some very valuable lessons about trying to understand work with, live alongside and socialise with different people mostly all this stick and autistic people of course I've noticed that through my own work how much change we need to make for autistic people in lots of different areas of life although mental illness makes it hard for me to enjoy life my meaning of trying to help others and trying to help them avoid the difficult circumstances I found myself in really does fill my life with meaning contentness helps me push on I'm trying to make my living from my work only because I want to do more of it there's been some comments of people saying I'm trying to like grift and make money off other autistic people I am trying to make money and to sustain myself as an adult but only because I want to pop as much time and as much effort as I can into trying to do some good for the community trying to do some good and make some change in society I found any of this helpful, relatable can empathize with it and such if you want to join consider hitting that subscribe button give the video a like comment down below I'd love to hear your feedback what you thought about my story here's some of your own personal stories hope you have a good day, good week good month, good year love you guys, thank you so much for watching listening, whatever you're doing see you later folks