 being yourself. Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. So the topic of this video is the removal of impossible expectations and acceptance of yourself. I'll give you a bit of context first. It was a realization that I had a few days ago while talking to a close friend. We talked about stuff, a lot of it to do with helping me understand other people and different situations. But mostly about how I didn't realize the negative effect of certain thought patterns and actions had on my overall mental health and self-esteem. Before we continue though, I want to remind you that if you like the video to give it a thumbs up or even drop me a cheeky sub if you're interested in autism or mental health, it really helps me gauge what you guys like and also gives me kind of a big motivation to make more videos more often. Making this video, I have realized that maybe a lot of the content that I make sounds quite self-centered around my personal life. The way that I make my videos is on my personal experiences with certain things and I'm hoping that through talking about my personal experiences you might be able to empathize a little bit with it and maybe kind of realize things that similar to what I've experienced in your own life and try to fix them. I'll definitely try to word my videos a bit better in the future. Okay, so enough promoting. You could say that talking to my friend acted as a little cognitive reset for me. I shared with her the tasks that I'd been trying to achieve over the past few months, which I will share with you now as well. A, to develop a confident and manly exterior. B, to improve my appearance. C, to develop a more athletic body. And D, to develop links within my university and the mental health community. Now you may think that these things are pretty legitimate goals, yeah? Well, most of them are, but one of them has actually been very pathological for me and I've only just recently realized it. Can you guess what it was? It was A. Why is this a bad goal, you ask? Well, what has been happening is that I've been trying to become someone that I'm not. It's that simple. And well, it's been causing me a lot of pain inside because my actions and my persona haven't been well, me. So a better goal for me instead of A would be to work on posture, body language, talking skills, and self confidence. These things are different because they don't involve me changing who I am. They just help me express who I really am inside. And that's a big deal. Do you want to know which goals I achieved? Can you guess? All but A. Sure, I was able to act manly and overconfident and all kind of laddish and stuff, which to be honest, got me quite good results, especially with the ladies and with others around me too. But it left me with a sense of confusion. I couldn't quite put my finger on what was wrong. But as soon as I got rid of the expectation on myself to be someone that I wasn't, it just kind of clicked. All my happiness, silliness, joyfulness, childishness, all of them disappeared because I was trying to put on a mask. And it stopped me from crawling out of my stupid depressed state because I didn't realize what was actually causing it in the first place. These qualities that I listed are actually some things that a lot of people who I'm quite close to say that they enjoy about my personality. But personally, I found them to be negative due to my outlook on life, which I know is silly, but sometimes your brain works in strange ways. All this change I wanted to create in myself came from the feelings of rejection from others around me. And naturally with my esteem problems, I attributed myself as the cause of the problem, rather than others, or even something out of anyone's control. I've done this many times before in my past, during primary school to make friends, and really my whole life, so that I could just fit in and feel loved. All these changes I've tried to force upon myself haven't actually taken into account my autism, my mental health, or even my personality. They massively affected my life in many positive and negative ways, but I've been as ignorant towards them as the people who think they are insignificant. And it shows me that I really need to understand that I am different, need to help yourself, as well as trying to help others. I've never really realized what caused my pain. It wasn't being told I'm worth something, or that I was loved. Sure, that's great, but that feeling of wanting to change myself is what disappeared when I got that kind of affection and praise. I didn't gain anything. At those points of happiness and belongingness, I just kind of accepted that I'm awesome. But I'm pretty awesome anyway without others as well, and that's just not something that I'd kind of taken into consideration. In rejection, I tried to change myself, which led to sadness and anxiety. I'm still making progress, and my next step is to get rid of the expectations on myself to achieve everything and to be flawless every day, which is unrealistic obviously. Because sometimes you need to chill, you need to be lazy. My eyes are really open to this now, and I hope this little story has shown you why you shouldn't change yourself, and maybe helped you to think about maybe some of the expectations you put on your personality or life, and maybe that they might actually be negatively affecting your health and happiness too. So thank you very much for watching, and if you'd like to share your own experiences with this topic, or even would like to suggest a new topic for a new video, please by all means stick it in the comment section. Hope you guys are having a great day, and I'll see you later.