Autistic Not Alien | Holidays

Being autistic means it’s virtually impossible for me to relax, but I still love going on holiday. I can’t take a break from my own brain, though I can at least enjoy being somewhere beautiful and trying new things (who said autistic people don’t like change?) In this video, I reflect on past holidays and how being autistic has shaped my appreciation of places and people.
Twitter: / neillaurenson
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Soundcloud: / vitalphaze (House music made in the house.)
For brilliant, honest, and helpful autistic content, watch Adult with Autism: / @adultwithautism
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Credits:
Astronaut photo by Brian McGowan and thumbnail photo by Maarten Van Den Heuvel - both at unsplash.com/
Anderson parody music (‘Melody of Happiness’) by Igor Khainskyi at Audio Library Plus

[@lilynorthover8378]

Your holiday photos made me laugh 😁

[@AutisticNotAlien]

I'm so glad they did!

[@MrIgnitos]

Honesty is so important for me too. It's my best personality trait.

[@cecile-p]

00:52 I've seen this on a school trip ! (from France) I like holidays abroad too, when I'm weird, people just say "well, she's french". I supose I give them a strange idea of my country, but it's relaxing !

[@AutisticNotAlien]

J'adore la France. In my next video, I pay homage to one of my favourite directors: Eric Rohmer.

[@mikko.g]

My work has taken me to so many places. Now when on holidays, I am on holidays at home. Plus an airplane is just a terrible sensory experience with the smells, noise, uncomfortable seats and close proximity to so many people... window seat pls, at least then I only have to be touched by one ignorant person not paying attention to their spacial positioning instead of every one that walks down the aisle.

[@AutisticNotAlien]

I hate flying, for all the reasons you have given. While this video is about holidays, the footage was recorded while I was on a work trip.

[@MrIgnitos]

That photo of you standing behind that huge canon is priceless. That's exactly where I would have stood too. We are kindred spirits. Giggity giggity goo! :P

[@AutisticNotAlien]

It just had to be done! As I said in the video, I love going on holiday because I have licence to be silly.

[@TheAutisticRebel]

Thanks to Jenny for giving you a shout out. I REALLY like how you think... I keep finding autistic people in this community that are just a little more and more like me!!!! 😊 Other than the fact I'm Canadian I COMPLETELY relate!!! ☺️ And the HUMOR!!! 😂😅🤣😆😅😂🤣😁🤣😀😂🤗... ON POINT!!! THANK YOU 🙏 and nice to meet you! 👋

[@AutisticNotAlien]

Nice to meet you too. It has been a huge relief and comfort to know that there is a global community of autistic people - it makes me feels so much less alone. Thank you for your kind words.

[@TheAutisticRebel]

@@AutisticNotAlien yeup... austistic knowledge has been world changing for me... then add the amazing community and I have found... home!

[@AutisticNotAlien]

@@TheAutisticRebel Yes, we've found home, and every human being in history has wanted home.

[@TheAutisticRebel]

@@AutisticNotAlien No truer (is that a word?)... words were ever spoken. (Well, I mean maybe, but that would ruin the effect 😆)

[@stephensaspergerssyndromec5662]

Holidays can be fun and relaxing, but organising them can be a nightmare, especially if you aren't that keen on travel. And don't get me started about being stuck with family for two weeks...

[@AutisticNotAlien]

I agree that organising can be stressful, though I find the paying and travelling more stressful! Once I'm in holiday land, I can have fun mispronouncing words and drafting movies in my head. Oh, and doing karaoke and dancing.

[@kensears5099]

Ohhhh yes, "when I say something I mean it." How many scars life has brought because people insisted on reading an implication into something I said, because "you couldn't have meant only THAT." Excuse me, but...YES. I meant that, only that, nothing more or less than that, and YOU don't tell ME what I meant and didn't. And I NEVER answer for what I never even meant or thought. And then there are the scars from taking people literally when they meant nothing like what they said! Why on EARTH...?

[@AutisticNotAlien]

It is so mind-bogglingly frustrating, isn't it? I want a simple life. I say something, I mean it. Why do so many people insist on these mind games? I am an honest person who wants everyone to get along - so why do people make me out to be the villain? I will carry this hurt until I die.

[@kensears5099]

@@AutisticNotAlien Hopefully the autism epiphany helps, if only a tiny bit, to forgive and thus transcend the hurt. "Why" do they do it? Because they know no other matrix but the neurotypical one. If autistic people are, in their way, victims of the incapacity to understand things (not everything, but definitely real things), neurotypical people are, in their way, equally victims (though it feels much less victim-like and more culprit-like) of their utter incapacity to interpret autistic people. They don't act out with a conscious intention to be traumatize (one hopes), but they "act out" nonetheless--out of their frustration at the incomprehensible, ot of their totally unreflective assumption that everybody will play by the same script, out of their fear and panic at encountering the un-interpretable. Rather than attempt the terrifying leap into engaging with the unfamiliar, many will in knee-jerk fashion rush to squelch the cognitive dissonance by shutting down its source. I'm only 16 months into my autism awareness, but I'm already so much freer from false expectations of others. I don't expect many people to understand the whys and wherefores of "me" anymore, nor am I inclined to match theirs. And the world's "musts," like "You MUST have meant this, you MUST have been implying that," are something I no longer have to take to heart (like, "Wait, DID I meant that? They say I must have? Do I even know myself and what I mean?"), and I don't. Now I've got a new power to dispel the "musts" with a wave and a bored sigh, because they're just wrong. Wrong, stupid, and toothless. I know what I "must" have meant and answer to NOBODY for anything I didn't. Period.

[@kensears5099]

Language is my passion and obsession. I'm a native English-speaker and fluent Russian-speaker, also more or less proficient in several others. At home in American (which I am, not often) people frequently ask me what country I'm from. My answer: "The Bronx." 😏 Not that I grew up there, but I was born there. But I have an accent. And it's me. It always was me--a certain precision, maybe even stiltedness, my own way with vowels, that makes me hard to place. I don't do it on purpose, it's ME. I don't THINK about it, until somebody reminds me all over again. By the way Paul Miceloff (sp?) is responsible for many of my innumerable epiphanies since my autism discovery in May '23, but the one that I think especially relates here, even to you quite possibly, is that an autistic person, who constantly feels like a foreigner to the matrix he's assumed to be part of, can feel astonishingly liberated, can BREATHE, where he really IS a foreigner and is intoxicatingly exempt from what I'll call "matrix expectation." My life is a testimony to that. I have lived "not home" for thirty years and, really, it saved my life. Especially since I didn't know I was autistic. I was making choices, instinctively, that were self-therapeutic without ever knowing why. Thank God. It could all have gone horribly wrong otherwise.

[@AutisticNotAlien]

I can't emphasise enough how jealous I am that you can speak fluent Russian. I watched a couple of episodes of Stranger Things last night and the character Murray Bauman (played by Brett Gelman) made me laugh so much when he admonished the people he was trying to help by translating what a Russian scientist was saying. I know what you mean about feeling liberated as a foreigner. As I said in the video, I love trying new languages and the freedom of creating a new me, albeit temporarily.

[@kensears5099]

@@AutisticNotAlien I learned Russian by living in Zaporozhye, Ukraine for 28 years. It brought many wonderful benefits to my life. Perhaps also the greatest trauma, in Feb. '22 upon the Russian invasion. Lost 30 pounds in four months from sustained, unventable, crisis-mode "overwhelm." Life is never simple, is it?

[@AutisticNotAlien]

@@kensears5099 Oh goodness, what an ordeal. I'm so sorry you experienced such a terrifying time. Living in my autistic bubble in England, it is beyond my imagination to truly understand what it must be like to live under threat from military action.