 This is, Iris says, what women with autism want you to know? When people think of a disease, they think of something that is degenerative and that will hurt you and kill you. Autism is not a disease. It is a developmental disability. It's about living our best possible lives with this condition. Let's get it on HD. I don't know, I always get that you don't look autistic then. Autism is like an internal thing, not an external thing. No one looks autistic. And people find that out. The first thing they're like, you don't act autistic. And I'm like, you know, I had to go through a lot of stuff to learn how to mask my idiosyncrasies. Autism isn't a linear spectrum of high or low. It's a whole bunch of different traits that are on their own spectrums. That's kind of a 3D weird mess. Autism is simple. It's kind of like a radar diagram, I would say. Like, I think the reason why I clipped this before for my Instagram page is just because there's a lot of good explanations from that one person. There's some good from other people, of course, but I don't tend to get a lot of the you don't look autistic, like, quite a lot, because I don't know. I used to get them quite a lot when I was younger, I think. But as I've got older, I think, you know, I've just kind of been a bit more like full fright with saying like, hey look, yeah, I'm autistic. And then they ask questions and then kind of understand it a bit more. They don't kind of jump to that like presumption kind of judgment mindset quite often. And if they do, I tend not to be like getting on with them very well anyway. So it's a different way of thinking and seeing and, you know, interacting with one's world. I view autism as realness. The words high functioning and low functioning are used by people, again, who are talking about autism from an outside point of view. So rather than using those labels, we tend to say minimal support needs and high support needs to describe the different kind of levels of the spectrum that people fall on. I definitely would disagree with the idea that... It's not even like to do with levels. I think it's just literally just to do with like someone's support needs, which is why I tend to use that quite a lot, because it's not necessarily that like someone is more or less autistic, it's just they have traits. Some traits can be stronger in those people with high support needs, but it's not always the case, you know? I like the idea of using like a radar diagram in terms of explaining like autistic traits rather than using like a spectrum, because it's definitely like this low to high, like you're, this is where you're not as autistic and then this is where you are more autistic. Whereas in reality, it is very much like some things, some traits, you are a bit stronger on some things, not so much. And everyone, to be honest, like, I think people really highlight too much or emphasize too much, like the aspects have been autistic in terms of like who someone is, you know? I think it is quite a large part of people, but there's a massive like experience, personality aspect to it. What's a radar diagram? I think radar diagram's the right word. It's like a kind of like a hexagon radial, there you go, radial diagram. Here's another one. We don't have emotions. That seems to be something that went on quite a bit. Now it's kind of flipped on the other way. So let's see what these guys have to say. Not emotional. I think we're actually highly emotional. I think that we just, many times, we don't express it the way that people expect. I like the comparison to Vulcans. In Star Trek, you know, lore, the Vulcans feel more strongly than humans. They just like don't show it. We're feeling it, it's there. It just might not come out. And then other times it might be overly expressed. I mean, sometimes like we'll cry. I mean, that might be at like weird moments. I mean, well, you might think they're weird. I don't think they're weird. It can be so overwhelming, so intense that in order to function, you kind of have to sort of be still or shut down a bit. We can't filter them out because we feel them so strongly. So we shut down as a way of processing all those emotions. Something that kind of came across my mind when I was thinking about a post recently was, you know, like we talk a lot about sort of emotion. A lot of autistic people that I've met kind of describe themselves as this like empath person, like someone who kind of absorbs the energy of people or like the feelings and emotions of people that they're interacting with. I think that there might be some like level of like validity to that even from just like a scientific standpoint because a tendency for a lot of autistic people, especially if they're like high maskers and they have been for a long time, is that they have this, there's an aspect of social camouflage whereby you have like masking, assimilation, compensation. And the assimilation aspect of that is that you mirror people. So you mirror their facial expressions, their body language, the way that they speak, the kind of the emotion in their voice. And science has actually shown that it is a two-way street. Like your expressions on the outside are not only just controlled by how you're feeling internally, but actually from the opposite way as well. So if you are a high masker and you mirror people quite a lot when you're talking to them, you're undoubtedly gonna kind of mirror the same or similar emotions to what they're feeling and kind of absorb it a little bit. Like it will affect you internally when that happens. I think that's a really good way of I guess thinking about like the negatives of mirroring because I suppose you could, some people could say that like if you mirror people, if you're different from person to person, they might call you like two-faced or something, but I can't really, couldn't really see many downsides to it. So I have recently been trying to kind of consciously be like, okay, right, no mirroring, sitting your own emotion, it's quite a hard thing to break to be honest after years of self conditioning. Tracy says, if you express your emotions, you get slammed. If you don't, you're called unemotional. Well, everyone's got something to say in any kind of negative situation. I think if you do something that people don't like, then people will always slam you either way. I think it's very situational and dependent on what's happening, I guess, because people say all sorts of things, you know? Next one is social interactions can be challenging. Let's have a little listen, a little lucky. To appear like the way I do right now, like it takes a lot of like conscious awareness. Social skills are like a muscle for us. People will often say to me, oh, you're so high functioning, I would never know you had autism unless you said something. And I say, well, you don't live inside my skin and you don't know how hard it is for me sometimes just to get through a day. It's very, very draining. Even with people that I care for and enjoy being around, I have to psych myself up to be around them. All the little things that everyone does unconsciously, autistic people do manually. So that adds up what I'm doing. That is a very, very good comparison. It's one that I use quite a lot. It's like we don't just kind of transiently pick up on social skills as we go about life. It's definitely more of like a cognitive process, especially when you're interacting with neurotypical individuals. I don't find that I get so much of that energy drain when I'm talking to kind of over autistic people. It does happen, you know, especially if like our personalities are quite different, but yeah, I think that's a really good point. With every part of my body, I am to some degree aware of and trying to do. A lot of women, women that I know who are autistic are not diagnosed until their 20s, 30s, or even beyond. A large part of this is because the way that we diagnose autism is by using criteria that were created observing boys. And autism looks different in girls and women than it does in boys. People don't expect to see someone that looks like me or my two youngest children who are on the spectrum also. We know that anyone can, you know, be on the spectrum. I didn't become aware of Asperger's until I was already an adult. At the time, finding a doctor was really difficult because there were people that were like, oh, women don't have that. And then there were other people that were like, well, you're too high functioning. Biggie Stud asks, what is NT and what is AU? NT is neurotypical. Sometimes it's basically just means someone who isn't, who doesn't have like a difference in their brain. Most people, within the context of autism, it's meaning people who aren't autistic, but there is actually like a word for it. It's called allistic. So people who aren't autistic. And AU is autism. When I was diagnosed myself after my children were, I don't think I would have been otherwise. Women are under diagnosed, black women especially. And I think there's also this idea of, you know, the strong black woman, you kind of have to hold down the family and be able to just keep going and not address, you know, whatever needs that you have, your support needs, not prioritize self-care. We just kind of slipped through the cracks for the majority of our lives. I remember parent-teacher conferences of teachers telling my mom that I should be in special ed. I was an ideal homeschool candidate. There was something wrong with my brain. I remember that one, that was cool. You know, and now I feel a lot better. I feel like, okay, I know why I'm this way. I know why other people are the way they are so I can bridge this gap. You invite a girl back to your apartment to watch- That is very much like, that hits home. Yeah, this is an interesting section of the video. I think I have watched this before, quite a while ago. You invite a girl back to your apartment to watch a movie and she thinks you're just watching a movie. Netflix and Chill doesn't literally mean Netflix and Chill. That often does happen when you have someone who is inherently a little bit more naive because they're so literal. And we think of people on the spectrum as not being interested in sex. There is that little literal component, you know. Okay, probably a bit TMI. I've had this happen to me before. Like, when I was like really, really young when I was at university, I think someone asked me to come back to their place and I wasn't like interested in them. And I thought we were just literally gonna place them like video games or something. And then it turned out that it wasn't like that. And I was like, oh, you know, that's happened. So I could definitely attest to kind of not really understanding like the social nuances behind stuff like that, especially within dating sometimes that can be a little bit difficult. Joe says, we met last month and being friends-owned because I told him that we can be friends without pressure. Feel helpless now. It's always me who's initiating texting. Hmm, have you made like, have you like told them that, you know, I actually know, you know, I'm not cool with that. And tried to go on something a bit more romantic. In fact, they might on a date or something. Say what you mean and mean what you say. Should be a law. It'd be a lot easier if that's how the world worked in a lot of circumstances, probably. Not having any kind of sex drive or sexual interest. And it's just not true. We just may need more support in order to learn how to make that happen. We don't naturally understand the nuances that are involved in this. And there are a lot of nuances. There's a huge thing where people think that people on the spectrum, you know, that they all don't have relationships. And if they do, that it doesn't even reach a sexual point. Having or not having those things does not determine whether one is on the spectrum or not. Some of the ways that I show love that he might have thought were odd. He now understands that this is just my, you know, my love language, my way of communicating. And in a sense, he kind of serves as my interpreter to the neurotypical world. Often autistic people don't get taught sex ed at all, let alone like how to protect themselves in like the real world from like date rape. These are topics that often aren't taught to autistic teenagers because it doesn't... And there's also like a lot of aspects even within friendships around like make crime and stuff. I know that particularly when I was younger, like I was a lot less emotionally socially developed than I am now. So stuff like that definitely did tend to like, you know, people kind of pick up on that you're not really understanding certain things in terms, you know, like a social context. It can lead to some very kind of bad times with other human beings. Hopefully we can have some like level of impacts in terms of making people a little bit more direct with life and everything, workplace, relationships, whatever. It's always going to be helpful because it reduces the likelihood that miscommunication is going to happen. Although to be honest, if you do like directly communicate with people, some people are just so used to being indirect about things that they'll think that there is something indirect behind your direct communication, no matter how kind of explicit you are with it. It's very strange. I'm old and past it now, not interested anymore. It's like, don't want to deal with it. It's people on the autism spectrum, especially women are more likely to experience sexual assault or some sort of violent incident than the neurotypical non-autistic population. We are very vulnerable. We definitely can be more trusting because we are very honest to the front people, so we don't think that other people might not be so honest and might be trying to hurt us. One of the traits of autism is not reading between the lines in social interactions and so much of like dating and sexuality is supposed to be indirect and subtle and that it's like inappropriate to talk about sex in a direct way even when you're teaching it as sex ed. Most of what they tested us on were like the mechanics and like, can you label the diagram? You know, no one's teaching the social aspects and honestly, this is where autistic people are the canaries in the coal mine. Teaching. I think the social aspects of it are definitely like the most important. What can happen? What are like bad situations to get into? What do you think people mean by this when they say certain things? I feel like everybody could do with that because especially if you like teaching kids like teenagers and stuff, like being able to like explain to them these things so it doesn't happen to them. I think it's just massively important. Like if they're autistic or not, I mean, especially for autistic people, but you know, it's kind of one of those things. It's like a lot of the adjustments and changes that we make for autistic people in life. It's still like, it usually helps neurotypical individuals as well, allistics. 100%. It's like you change some of the sensory environment to make it a lot more calming, pleasing, less like bright and noisy and open. It's obviously gonna have like a positive impact on the rest of the staff. It's just that we're more like sensitive to and more attuned to it. Some just like games, covert, such hiding. Just smile and leave it, leave the building and go find better friends. You speak in facts. The social aspects of sexuality would help everyone. Autistic people need it, but it also benefits everyone. There's the stereotype that everyone with autism is into science and math and stuff like green man, but a lot of people with autism, women actually, especially a lot of us are into the arts. In my experience, autistic girls are also just as obsessive as autistic boys. They're just obsessed with fantasy novels or their favorite bands or whatever, like not planes, trains, and automobiles. Definitely, I'm more of a social science and literary person and I've met a lot of other people on the spectrum who are into languages or music or art and I think we thrive in some of those non-traditional areas. I just sang it. I've talked about this a lot, but I think it's definitely one thing that Temple Grandin had wrong with her book Thinking in Pictures. I am definitely like a language processor. I'm not a picture person. I can visualize quite well in my head to quite good detail, but I'm definitely more interested in the social language side of things. And also, yeah, I mean, the majority of autistic people that I know, large majority, probably more into the arts and stuff. I suppose that there could be some crossover because I guess perhaps some of the communities that I've been in on Instagram tend to be a bit more skewed towards that. Perhaps the people who are into the maths and the computers and the STEM fields and stuff, they might not be so quick to come upon, come upon stuff like that. Carnegie Hall, I'm a writer. I definitely started off with the interests of astronomy. I actually ended up being one of the Mars 1 finalists, but it tends to be a stereotype and I did fall into that stereotype. When I was younger and I had no outlet, nobody wanted to hear from me and I felt that I couldn't be myself, so I turned to writing. It'd be really good to get these people together again to have a look at or to speak more on this stuff because they all have such varied approaches, but they all just speak facts, you know? People picked on me for any number of things and I didn't know why, I didn't know what it was that they saw that was different. Nobody would ever tell me that, you know? It's like somebody making fun of a blind person, only in this case you're blind socially. I felt broken, I felt strange, I felt different. Everything was so simple. For other people, everything they understood so easily that I couldn't understand, that I couldn't grasp or do. I just didn't understand what was so wrong with me. The travails and difficulties I experienced with bullying and with being suicidal from a very young age, and I would say that we all start from somewhere, but that isn't necessarily where we're going to end up and you have to believe that there is going to be a future. I didn't have that belief at that point. I didn't know that I was even going to have a future. It's very difficult to go through. It's definitely one of the aspects of being autistic that I think has a really big impact on our overall life outcomes. It's tough and it affects a lot of people. And it's right. That is, again, a really good comparison. It's like making fun of a blind person, making faces at them and stuff when they can't see it. It's a very good explanation of what autism, bullying an autistic person is like socially with the indirect communication. There's also, as I said before, a lot of make crime. A lot of people taking advantage of autistic people and manipulating us and everything like that. I remember the time that I realized just how different or just how behind socially I was in terms of the neurotypical school that I was at. I think it was a time when I was about 11, 12. We came back after the school holidays. I don't know, it felt like everyone just in the school or in my form, my year, whatever. They got together and they just had a secret club and they had particular phrases and language and ways of going about things. And they just all decided on it. And then at one stage, came back of summer holidays, everybody was in the know. And I was just completely unable to understand what was going on. Many, many years, especially as a child, having no friends and no one willing to extend a hand out of friendship to you. As I got older, there were high school, college afterwards. There's enough misfits in the world, like people who got picked on. There's so many of us. So you do find your tribe. To finally have friends is such a big, big deal. I think if that 10-year-old girl could see what her life is going to mean, that she wouldn't believe it. She would think it was some fairy tale or something out of a movie. I can't believe it because it almost seems like a dream at times that I've gotten to where I am, that I have a master's degree, that I've started my own business. And I also can believe it because I worked for it. And so I'm willing to give myself the credit that I think I deserve, which has always been something I've also struggled with. I wish I could go back to that little Marenike and give her a hug and let her know that she was just fine the way she was and that she was going to be all right. I think things are going to be. And there's the thing, we need more people like this to actually to be out there. And there is becoming more people who are just out there as role models. Like it was definitely like the YouTube space, the amount of autism content on YouTube at the time that I was young. It was pretty much non-existent. It was mostly just science related things, research studies like WebMD articles, the odd light psychology website. There was not really much. And just the fact that this kind of video is out there, I think, can provide a lot of inspiration for people, I think is really important because I actually, one of the things that really got me through when I was younger is that I always had in my head that things were going to be different after school. It might be a bit harder. It might be a bit different to what I expect, but there was going to be different to my experience at school and it was. And the first kind of few years, a couple of years at uni, definitely very difficult. Didn't really have much, many friends, didn't really have many social connections, didn't really go out and do much other than Taekwondo when doing my studies. But once I kind of came out of my shell a little bit, things started to seem a lot brighter. It's important to have that in mind because it is, school is school. And the people at school that you think are all high and mighty and projects that upon people and believe and do all of this stuff. It's not necessarily going to mean that they're going to be the same in adulthood. Speaking from personal experiences, looking for people I've known in high school and like, you know, it's definitely not the case. It's a very small part of our lives, but it can often be very, very impactful just by the nature that it's our formative years. A lot better for the next generation. Like I'm actually really hopeful. They are going to be diagnosing children more and there is going to be more social acceptance. You know, your kid might be behind their peers, but it doesn't mean they're going to be behind forever. Your kid is a full human being who will grow and change just like everyone else. I would just love to see every autistic person living up to their fullest potential, whatever that is for them. Success is about your child growing up to be the best version of themselves that they can be. Whoever and whatever that is. Don't you agree guys? I saw on an awesome interview video with people I felt like they had a lot to offer. A lot of really interesting takes on different aspects of being autistic. Very much worthy of the 3.7 million views that it got. And it was made four years ago, so it's true today. So that was what women with autism want you to know. From Iris. If you want to go check out the YouTube channel, it's quite a big one. We've got some other ones. Similar sort of vein, vein, theme, stuff like that. Really cool. Thanks for that. And to everybody who was in that interview, good on you.