Being an autistic teenager was hell (it got better)

Watch next: Reading my teenage diaries https://youtu.be/CiP2NaHMNAY Alexithymia https://youtu.be/S3tD94tB6T4

I remember being a teenager and my parents told me "You'll look back on these as the best years of your life." I was having a terrible time and all I could think was "Wait... You mean it gets WORSE!?!?!!"

That feeling on "someday I will arrive and be normal". That was so much of my teenage and young adult years and not understanding why I couldn't just figure it out

I spent virtually all of my teenage years stuck in my room, drawing and painting. The curtains were permanently closed too! Funny how my parents never asked if I was ok. Typical 1970’s parenting, they probably thought it was just a phase. Out of site out of mind. 🤦‍♀️😂

I've heard it said, "To be autistic is to know bullying intimately and immaculately." The bullying I had as a teenager has left me with lots of psychological scars and additional disorders around abandonment, social anxiety and a touch of complex PTSD.

My best advice for autistic teenagers is to teach them how to recognize and process their emotions in a healthy way (don't just ridicule them for being "moody" like my parents did). Actually, that's probably good advice for anyone...

"Resting is not laziness"...this hits hard. I need to hang this on my wall! Thanks for the reminder Sam!

For me being a teenager was more purgatory than hell. I struggled with undiagnosed autism and was unhappy in all the ways one would expect. But there was a daily routine to high school that gave me a framework to live. I didn't understand the social life going on around me but I found the table in the lunch room for the 'weird kids' and felt I had a place to be in all the confusion. Going to college was hell, no daily routine and no weird kid table. No place I could figure out to be. I didn't last long in college.

I’m an autistic teenager and I relate to this video so much. I will never ever “look back on my teenage years with joy”, I’ll look back at them with pain. Autism and school doesn’t seem to work at all (I’m British so I’m not sure about American school systems, but the British ones are horrific lol). Thank you for making this video! It made me feel less alone, have a lovely day <3

i’m on disability 33 years old. i was expelled from high school and got a GED. i was expelled because i didn’t show up for classes due to social / sensory issues. i had no friends. it was very dark isolating time. i’m not perfect now but i’ve come to peace with myself. thanks for sharing your story sam i’m glad you are still here. i will never forget being 13 and getting awareness of how out of touch i was with everyone else. such severe depression, i hid inside bathroom stalls. the day after my 18th birthday they called my dad in and told him i wouldn’t be graduating and kicked me out. dark times. life got better though.. i still can’t listen to music from that time. now i’m living alone, found a boyfriend and have two cats. thank you.

✨ Vintage Trauma ✨ I'll definitely be using that term lol .

Thank you. Humor is a self-defense mechanism, and this has helped me cope with a horrifying life.

One of the things that caused tension between me and my friends when we were 12 or 13 (in the late 1970s) was that I wanted us to continue being the way we were when we were 10 or younger. I didn't want to go to youth club discos. I didn't want to chat up girls (I was attracted to them but also very shy of them). I still wanted us to do things like play cowboys & indians like we always had done. Saw no reason to change. Some of my friends found my "childishness" exasperating. One of them said, "We've all moved on but you're the same as you were when we were 9." Another friend berated me for my apparent lack of interest in girls. He said, "You don't care about girls do you. You don't care two hoots." Also, from age 12 and into my teens I experienced an upsurge in social phobia (especially around girls), OCD symptoms and obsessive worrying. I was a bit of a worrier in prepubescent childhood, but nowhere near the scale that I experienced in adolescence!

Oh the teenage period pain, I wish they wouldn't downplay it it, it can be agony! As a 13 year old you're just thinking what fresh hell is this!

What’s painful is I’m 30 and I feel like I’m still struggling with things you felt with in your teenage years

As a teenager I had a lot of social anxiety because I didn't know how to relate to my peers. I wasn't outright bullied but I was never included in anything, or at least that's how it felt, and even with "friends" it didn't seem to me like they actually liked having me around, we were just the people "left over" after not fitting in anywhere else. One of my main coping strategies was pretending that I didn't care, about any of it. I vividly remember when it dawned on me that I could do that, and it made daily life at school a lot simpler for me (but was obviously very damaging in the long run). I always felt different but I thought that's just what it's like for everyone! And all the advice of "be yourself!" which is SO unhelpful when me being myself meant being alone at home reading a book or watching Star Trek.

I needed this today. Just got diagnosed with ASD and my daughter also got diagnosed when "everything clicked." Your videos helped me a lot before I got diagnosed. I related to a lot of the things you went through as a child. Thank you for this.

😳Wow. "It is hard to be yourself when everything points to how awful that would really be." Thank you for making this video.

I literally had my therapist today tell me 'Resting is not laziness'. She didn't use those exact words, but it was close enough that it shook me a little to hear it again in one of my subscription videos.

This is so, so relatable. It really was utter hell. Childhood and teens in the 80s-90s was rough, so much invalidation and gaslighting. There was still a lot of stigma around mental health, nobody very trauma-informed, not a lot of support or acknowledgement of difficult things and parenting norms that were really sub-standard. Also no nerd culture that was mainstream yet and misogyny, racism, homophobia and bullying were rampant, unrecognised and insidious. Yikes. We Gen-Xers were so often quiet survivors. I've had to undo so much of my thinking that developed in those years.