 When somebody would come up to me and talk to me about life or just any sort of questions about myself in a formal situation or psychologist, psychiatrist, whatever, I didn't care about telling them about my passions or anything like that. My main focus was on my mental health and how I was suffering and how I was suffering. I was suffering immensely and sorry. Boo! Hello, what's up people? I've got a hood on today. Should I keep it on? I don't think so. It doesn't really go with my vibe, does it? Yo, I like weed and gangsters and cigarettes and all that would be for life, you know what I mean? Oh yeah, I love being in the hood with the gangsters. We're killing each other and getting those drugs off each other, you know what I mean? Yeah, that's all I live for, mate. That's my narrative. That's my narrative, mate. Apologies for that, guys. It's a very poorly drawn sketch. As you can probably tell, I'm a little bit bored from doing some work. No idea why you would know that, but maybe I just think that everybody is me. What am I talking about? Anyway, welcome back to another video. Today, I have got my camera propped up. So I'm not constantly moving it about and what I'm moving about now. So I'm kind of defeating the purpose. So, oh, it's on that angle. Stick. Stick. Hello. So, start moving. Today, we are talking about your narrative. Now, you may be thinking when I say narrative like as a narrator for a story or something like that, or if you are somewhat familiar with that word. A narrative is sort of the life story that you give to yourself when you think of yourself and where you've come from. If you were to write down your experiences and stuff, that would be your narrative. I could be completely wrong with this, but this is how I picture what a narrative is. For example, if you were to say, you know, I grew up in the back streets of California or something and I had a mum who was a bit abusive. I don't know why I'm going down this path so quickly. I'm sorry. You get what I'm talking about. Narratives are the story that you tell yourself and the story that you tell to others that make up a significant part of your personality and what you do as a draft coming. And these narratives can be very important because they shape who you are, they shape most of the things that you do because you take them as very significant parts of your life. One of the issues with growing up is you're under the preconception that you have a personality or you have someone that you are, that you truly are. Obviously, that's one way of taking it. My experience with life and trying to find out who I was, it didn't come from finding who I was. It more came from making myself what I wanted to be. One of the pitfalls that you get from having mental health conditions, having depression, having anxiety, having any kind of negative thing in your life is that you make that a very big part of your story and you make it a very significant part of your story. The problem with that is that if those things are very negative and it impacts your personality in a very negative way, negative, negative, and you don't like it, you won't change it unless you have the revelation that you are in the ability to change your person and change who you are. So this topic kind of comes into the whole personal growth, self growth kind of thing that's going around a lot and it's a very positive thing because changing your narrative can be a very important step in overcoming some mental health conditions. The difficulty with changing your narrative is that the things that you have in your life that are significant and they have had a very big effect on you, it's very hard to let go of those things. You can feel like if you let go of them then they're not going to mean anything anymore. So if you had some bad experience you tried, you were addicted to drugs or you tried to kill yourself or something, that part of your life would be a very integral part of you and you don't really want to let go of it because you feel like it pushes down the importance of it. And that can be one of the issues with the whole personal growth thing. I'm here to tell you today that you don't need to change any of that. You can keep those significant parts of your life in your life. You don't have to forget about them because they are important and if you were to deny those kind of things then you're basically just denying a large part of your life and a large part of who you are. I'm here today to give you a bit of insight into my life and how I changed my narrative or I'm in the process of changing my narrative and hopefully give you a bit of inspiration if you are struggling with overcoming depression, mental health, any kind of negative life experiences that you had when you were a kid or had when you were in adulthood as well and trying to give you a bit of a new perspective on how to deal with those kind of things. So, when I was younger, I had a lot of... As far as I can remember, when I was about 13, 14 when I started to actually live life away from my Nintendo DS, away from any kind of games console, my narrative was a bit dark. I took a lot of my own personality traits and tied them in and tried to emphasise them and those personality traits came from my negative experiences with people in relationships, with depression, with anxiety and autism as well. So, I basically lived my life in the assumed role that I took to myself which was being a victim and being a victim is a very easy thing to slip into because it's hard to admit sometimes, especially if you have a large ego like myself that you are capable of making mistakes and you are capable of, you know, overcompensating your opinion over other people and just completely ignoring the whole story. Talking about story, I've completely lost it. One sec, I'll find it again. Basically, in my head for most of my childhood, up until I was about 16 or 17, my narrative was that I saw my future not as something spectacular or happy. I saw my future as a pretty dark place. I was sort of trying to... It sounds really horrible seeing it on camera and I want to be as truthful with you guys as possible because I value a lot of you. I value you all and I'm sure you value me being truthful. But a lot of my life, especially when I was younger, I was expecting that I was going to kill myself and I tried multiple times over the few years and I expected when I reached adulthood and I made a decision about it and I knew how to do it, then I would do it. So with some of the self-sabotaging things that I would do is trying to make myself lonely, trying to isolate myself, you know, be off or mean with friends and family and relationships in order to try and fulfill that narrative that I had in my head, which is obviously not a great thing, but when I was that age, I didn't care. When somebody would come up to me and talk to me about life or just any sort of questions about myself in a formal situation or psychologists, psychiatrists, whatever, I didn't care about telling them about my passions or anything like that. My main focus was on my mental health and how I was suffering I was suffering, I was suffering immensely, sorry. But the point is that I was not doing it any good because I had already made up in my mind that I was going to do it. Fast forward, maybe a year or two, between maybe the age of 18 and now, I've sort of made myself get over that whole victim, that whole victim thing, get over the whole expecting to be dead and expecting to have a big media board coming like this person with autism, suffering with depression, has killed themselves or something like that, I've given that up. My new narrative, my honest narrative these days is that I want to help people. I've become a bit more accustomed to accepting that people can be similar to me which is something that I struggled with because I didn't, especially as a kid, I didn't feel like I could connect with anybody even like my relationships, my family, my friends. I always just had this thought in my back of the head that I feel like I'm pretending to have these connections to some degree. And once I got down to it and I was on my own, I could go back into my own world of just being completely alone which is how I felt most of the time. Once I tried to connect with people and I actually felt like I am sort of similar to other people, I thought about it a lot more and a lot of my thought started to become less about the pain that I was going through and more about the pain that other people could have because if people can be like me, then obviously people can experience maybe the same amount of emotions that I felt when I was a kid and the same emotions that I feel nowadays as well. That was one of the really big steps that I had to take. I did a lot of stuff, I forced myself to not conform but I forced myself to be a part of a group and it was very, very difficult for a long time. It was stressful and I felt like I wanted to separate myself and establish myself as a singular person again maybe so that I could feel important or something. But then after a while, it started getting better. I started actually feeling like I was similar to the other people in the group and I talked to them a bit about my experiences and they could relate to it on some level or they could at least say that they sort of understand but obviously don't fully understand which is obviously, it is one of the best ways to deal with this kind of stuff especially if you haven't experienced it. That really helped me a lot. So that was the first step in my changing my narrative. The second step was I put all my unmentally, I put all my values on the table. I wanted to find out what kind of person I am and what I wanted. I had my dreams of being popular and successful. I had my dreams of people understanding me and the third one was I had dreams of one day being able to help people and they didn't really become apparent to me about how much that was important to me until I started actively trying to help people. Once I started helping people and you know, you could argue it's not helping people but once I started trying to make these YouTube videos I started promoting myself as an autistic athlete trying to raise awareness for it getting involved with my university trying to do all that kind of stuff. I started to really feel like that had a positive impact on myself. One of the pitfalls I had with that was that I find it very hard to justify doing something for other people or rather than I just do things good for other people so that I feel good. That's one of the difficult things. I'm not going to go into it too much but that's one of the things that I struggle with even now to be honest. I'll let you know when I've sorted that out. But definitely as soon as I accepted that that was going to be my thing that was my main core value. I wanted to turn my negativity and my horrible past and put it into something that can actually help people. I started writing a book I started making notes on philosophy and self-help on autism and mental health trying to rationalise some of the thoughts I had and trying to find ways of communicating between autistics and neurotypicals I've got a lot in the back readers ready to go out as soon as I've got this book sorted out and all together it's all going to be out there and maybe it will lead to good things maybe it won't but hopefully it will help somebody. So at this point I have my narrative in my head. My narrative is that I was once a person who was depressed and was victimised victimised myself and now I'm somebody else I'm the older person, the older me not a different person but it's easy to think of the older me as a different person I don't really feel like I'm that different person, person, person, person but it does help and once you make that distinguish that choice to put that person away in the draw take it out a few times for self-reflection show yourself how well you're doing and what kind of positive changes you have but you put it away and you don't want to touch him you want to make sure that once you've established this new positive thing depending on what values you take to heart it doesn't have to be helping people it could be creating it could be doing science just for the reason of progressing knowledge and the society is it can be anything you could be helping animals you could be growing vegetables and eating them in your backyard I mean, not eating them in your backyard but... I'm just imagining this like weird version of myself eating carrots in the back garden you get the point it's really important to make this distinguish this distinguishments between what's happened to you and what you choose to be that's the main point if you can do that, you'll be golden so just to wrap up this video accept what's happened in your past don't dismiss it as something that's not not happens, try and ignore it accept that it's happened and accept the ways that you deal with it and try and move on to something that more fits with the values that you actually have the values that your logical brain and you as a person that you want to be a part of your personality that you want to move on with in the future I really do appreciate everybody I know I say this in a lot of the videos and a lot in this video as well but I really do appreciate all of you guys by watching these videos I don't even care that I'm not making any money off this because the new YouTube thingy-ma-jiggy I wasn't making that much anyway all of this is just me talking to a camera maybe getting a bit of catharsis out trying to put together my opinions and voice trying to communicate and also like I really enjoy helping and I really enjoy giving people something to think about so that you can help other people deal with some really horrible things that can go on in life I love you guys so much you are my life line just any comments they always just give me a smile I really love just reading them and commenting on them and I hope I can keep that going for as long as I can and then another side of me is also I want to be famous but it might be a few years or so until that happens but anyway, love you guys you're golden, make sure to like and subscribe I told myself I wouldn't do that I told myself I wouldn't do it forget that put your comments down in the comment section tell me about your experiences tell me what you think of the video you like it, you hate it you're eating some chips right now I don't know what some people feel like sharing with other people is abysmal to me and I'll see you in the next video I don't know how to end these things