When I was a kid, autism was, you know, seen as something incredibly rare for young boys who were quite robotic.
It meant that I grew up knowing that I was different and wrong.
Like, I felt like I was getting everything wrong.
You start off thinking, Oh, no, everybody feels this way.
Everybody's struggling and they're just so much better at hiding it than I am, or they're so much better at, you know, getting through.
It gets taken on as flaws.
You know, there's a million different ways that I've been told that I'm wrong.
So I spent my life trying to fix myself just in every possible way.
And then I got diagnosed.
The biggest weight fell off my shoulders because I thought I mean, it should have been obvious, but I thought, I can't, I can't fix myself.
This is me hard wired.
This is my wiring.
I can't fix myself. So I can stop trying.
I've been trying.
And that was massive.
Massive.
Oh, my God.
So many things.
A lot of mental health professionals have very antiquated and stereotyped ideas of what an autistic person looks like, acts like, sounds like.
And if you don't fit that mould, they're just like, you can't be autistic.
It's this just massive stereotypes that really need to be addressed.
And I think that's one of a really important thing that the National Autism Strategy needs to address, is that, the heterogeneity of autism and how autistic people present.
But also then what is the core of being autistic? What are the main things that we share and how these can be accommodated for.
Autistic researchers and autistic people need to be the source of information for the National Autism Strategy, and they need to be all types of autistic people because I can't speak for the experience of other people.
You know, who've had a different life experience from me.
People need to get involved because otherwise the autism strategy is not going to help autistic people as a whole.
And so it'll just be it just desperately need to hear, especially hear from everybody, but especially from people who don't normally have a voice, who already don't feel represented.
Like if you don't feel represented in the general sort of discussion about autism, then absolutely desperately need to hear from those people.