This was a great video Hollie! There so many assumptions about autism and people have to remember like neurotypicals everyone with autism different so we all have different traits! ❤
Love this. People have such a negative pre-conceived notions about autism which is honestly really stupid because we autistics can be really happy, healthy, productive, and successful like you.
About the eyeballs, I think if you don't look at just the eyeballs (for ex. Do those eyeballs look into your eyes often or not? Look often enough or too often? Look long enough or too long?) is helpful to read faces, but what is even more helpful if you look at the eyebrows (eyebrows are very important), also some smaller muscles around the eyeballs can be important too to detect fake smiles for ex., or for some emotions (like the almost-crying emotion) the chin is very telling, when people feel very hurt and get into a crying mood but they try to hide how they are feeling, they might be able to hide their tears for a few seconds, because tears come out always a little after people are in the crying mood, but they usually are not able to hide their crying-mood chin shape, when people cry, or even if ghey try to hide or stop their crying, they usually cannot hide their crying-mood-chin-shape, the chin muscles get a little tense when people start crying even if they successfully hide the crying at the beginning, their muscle-tense chin shape will give away their cry-mood emotion which you can read from the chin and the eyebrows. So my suggestion for you in the hope of helping you reading faces easier is to try to look at not just the eyeballs, but also especially the eyebrows and also the little muscles around the eyes. If you search for some kind of picture on Google that has many faces made by an actor for acting class or something, you can see the precise differences between the faces and all the little muscle differences for the different facial emotion expressions, I think that can be really helpful. There are people who if you (even unintentionally) hurt them by miscommunication issues that exist between autistic and non-autistic people, some of the neurotypical people keep a smiling mouth shape and they try to keep even a happy voce tone after you unintentionally hurt them, but their eyes (mainly the eyebrows) is VERY LIKELY changes, so their smile will statt to look fake at that point, but they keep amiling because that is a social rule(?) in their head to keep a happy vibe of the room (even if they got hurt, becauae they miaunderstood something you told them without offensive intention, but unfortunatelly theybtook it as offensive). (This was just a random example for demonstration, but this type of example is relatively common, although it doesn't have to be "crying-mood", it can be just "basic-hurt-mood".)
Autism is on a spectrum. While some are very low functioning others are high functioning. While some get better with time others don't. That normally depends on how they're treated and whether they're treated is disabled or not. Though many autistic people have similar traits they are not all alike and the intensity of symptoms varies. There is no one way to be autistic but you can usually tell. There are things that most autistic people exhibit in one form or another. My son was very low functioning and now he's pretty high functioning. He can now tell me some of the ways that he felt or thought before he could communicate. I like to hear what my son has to say. I like his take on his own problem. I like to acknowledge the fact that though we did a lot of work to help him that he wouldn't have done anything if it hadn't been for himself. More and more over time he kept saying that he didn't want to be that way and he tried harder and harder. It was amazing..... We just opened the door a bit and he walked through it. He began to do more than by himself and spin things. A lot more! When I think back and I listen to him now. When I listen to how intelligent he is and all the things that I didn't think he was ever being taught or learning but he knows..... He was absorbing everything around him even when he couldn't communicate. It makes me think that he was locked up somewhere in there screaming to get out and when we opened that crack in that door he ran. He knows he'll never be like everybody else. It bothers him but at least now he can voice it. He's only just going to be 22 though so who knows what the future holds. He's always had that determination within himself to be better than what we were told he was going to be. He will never get any better..... That's what we were told. So again no case is exactly the same. No person is born the same and it also depends how a person is treated. So where are you lay on the spectrum and how you treated makes all the difference.
This is what makes me happy to have the internet. Thank you for sharing the amazing story. I can relate a lot to that, it's like being trapped and always having to improve on accepting and acknowledging it. Best of luck
Functioning labels are rather problematic and I say this as someone it seems most people are too oblivious to recognize I am autistic. Even the newer grouping for level of support needs is problematic for more than one reason, one of those reasons being that what support level you are at can and will vary over time, and thus, when under sufficient stress, level 1 may transition to level 3, and burnout is a prime example of where that'd likely happen. I'm not readily driven into meltdowns and shutdowns, though I certainly did experience my first meltdown in a very long time during my first very clear experience of burnout. If for no other reason than being subject to meltdowns, shutdowns and burnouts, all of which leave me vulnerable in varying degrees and forms, compared to non-autistics I can only logically conclude I'm legally disabled, and the reasons I'm more likely to experience those are due to sensory issues I cannot control. As a result of the sensory issues details, I hypothesize that, weirdly enough, my extremely hyposensitive sense of smell may be a huge factor in making it hard to go into overload compared to most autistics. In my 52 years, I've never smelled anything I've eaten, I can only taste, and apparently not very sensitively. I think this may be a weird blessing in disguise. Many things a lot of people believe are part of autism are just other things along for the ride, like anxiety: I have no mental illnesses of any kind, despite being neurodivergent 7 different ways. I'm not subject to anxiety or panic attacks, no emotional stress by itself in a short period of time can push me into a shutdown or meltdown.
One of the best so far. Yes - people are watching but if it helps carry on thinking we aren’t! It is hard to show interest or engage with other people’s small talk but I’m sure you’ll learn to do so if you want to or when you start work. It’s just part of masking to fit in isn’t it? Keep making these great videos.
Thankyou very much! And yes I’m always learning how to engage in small talk I just find it so pointless aha and wish people spoke about more interesting topics
Keep in mind they're not mutually-exclusive 😉 Weird is on a spectrum as well. I'm perfectly comfortable with identifying as both diagnosed autistic as well as weird. Being neurodivergent 7 different ways I'd say it's impossible to not be weird.
