The title of this blog post was the title of a book I was supposed to write in 2007 but didn’t. It would have been my second book but I asked the publisher to pull the contract due to me only having enough content for a chapter and not a book! However I have a lot of content in this space from a lived experience perspective rather than an academic one.

Between 1995 and 2004 I had a big problem with illicit drugs. I used mostly marijuana to self-medicate in a world which was confusing and frightening. Some people can do drugs their whole life without it affecting their mental health. Sadly I am not one of those people. In 1995 I smoked cannabis pretty much non-stop. This resulted in my first psychotic episode. I am still prone to psychosis over 25 years later which is not OK. At the time I was in complete denial about my sensitivity to mental ill health related to drug use. I also used amphetamines and LSD as well – not good for psychotic illnesses either!

It took me almost ten years and several hospital and prison stays to realise that drug use was largely the cause of my mental health issues. I am happy to say I have not used any illicit drugs since 2004 and I never will again. These days I am trying to avoid psychosis, not encourage it!

In 2003 I moved into public housing. This was a time where I had few friends and was desperate to be socially accepted. I had over 100 neighbours, most of whom were alcoholics or drug users. I made friends with the drinkers and so effectively became an alcoholic myself. I was at university at the time and lived a double life. I often went to university classes very hung over and cranky! I knew I was drinking too much but found myself at a different neighbour’s house each night drinking to excess. I didn’t want to drink so much but to be socially accepted by alcoholics it is pretty much a given that you need to drink heavily. While I was definitely a drug addict in every sense of the word I was not really an alcoholic. I drank excessively to be socially accepted. When I moved to Canberra to take up a professional role in 2007 I stopped drinking excessively. 

I know the stereotype of an autistic person is someone who follows all the rules and doesn’t get involved in drug use or alcoholism. In fact a lot of autistic people have issues with substance abuse for a number of reasons. For me the drug use was about numbing the trauma I had experienced as a child and young adult. For some it is about being socially accepted or being better able to socialise with neurotypical folks. What can happen for some autistic people is that when they are under the influence of drugs or alcohol they are better able to connect with neurotypical / allistic people who are also under the influence. Another reason is that emotions can be very confusing and uncertain. However when you are under the influence of drugs or alcohol you feel drunk or high which is a reliable feeling. When I used to smoke cannabis I knew what feeling stoned was like. It was a consistent feeling and there was no uncertainty. Some drugs and alcohol can help with anxiety as well and many autistic people have severe struggles with anxiety meaning it is tempting to take drugs or alcohol for a sense of certainty and to address anxiety.

Drugs and alcohol are not necessarily all dreadful. Many people use cannabis for pain and other medical conditions and find it helps a lot. Alcohol in moderation can be a lovely thing. I myself occasionally drink wine or my signature drink, a gin and tonic – and in moderation it is very pleasant. Situations where drugs and alcohol are a problem include if someone needs to have them constantly just to live their ordinary life, if it is getting in the way of work, parenting or relationships, if it affecting mental or physical health negatively or if someone is spending all their money on drugs and alcohol and may be stealing or committing fraud to support their habit. 

I can tell you it is possible to overcome drug and alcohol addiction because I did but it can be a difficult thing to do and can take a lot of time and effort. Accessing helpful support is essential in overcoming drug and alcohol addiction as is accepting that you have a problem and wanting to change. Autistic folks can have issues with drugs and alcohol just like anyone else does. It is not a reason for judgement or blame, more a reason for kindness and support. 

This blog post comes courtesy of my mum – probably my favourite person in the world. I was talking to her on the phone which I do most days and she said ‘you should write a blog post about epiphanies.’ And I thought yes I should!

I always say that I love a good Yenn epiphany and I do. I have had some doozies over the years. I want to share some of them with you because I think they are lovely and maybe they will inspire you to have an epiphany as well! The first one that I remember was in 1999 when I was 25 years old and a very broken and desperate prisoner. I know a lot of people don’t think it is possible for me to have been a prisoner but I was, on several occasions between 1994 and 2000. The epiphany I have in 1999, just as the millennium was about to happen was ‘new millennium new life.’ I thought that I could change my life and I did. A month later I left prison for the past time and started on my journey to the amazing place that I am in now.

The next epiphany I had was in 2001. I was living in accommodation for young people with mental health issues. The house was a crumbling mansion in Albert Park – one of the most salubrious suburbs in Melbourne. I would see these women walking their kids in the park during the day. They were not unemployed and poor, their partners had such a good job that they could afford to pay a million dollar mortgage on one income.  I saw these women and thought I wanted to be ’ordinary.’ I didn’t want to get in a relationship with a rich man and walk my baby in the park but I wanted an education, a ‘real’ job, a mortgage and a suit. I was determined and within eight years I had all those things. In fact I have had TWO mortgages at the time of writing this as I sold Whimsy Manor in 2020 and bought Yennski Central last year,. ‘Ordinary’ was s a lovely epiphany which yielded a new life and an escape from poverty.

I also had an epiphany recently which was around taking responsibility for my life and knowing that I am in charge. I make the decisions who drive my life. I have had any number of mental health-related epiphanies over the years. My advocacy career is based on an epiphany as well. In 2012 I was in the psychiatric ward and met an autistic young man. When I told him that I had written a book and worked in the public service and that I was autistic he told me I was lying because that was impossible. This young man had been told so many negative things about being autistic and fed a bunch o deficits thinking that he genuine believed my life was impossible. I realised that I needed to make the world a better place for autistic folks and that if there was one person like that then there must be more. This sparked my current passionate interest for autistic advocacy. Since then I have given countless talks including two TEDx talks and written a further 16 books and become quite well-known as an advocate!

So epiphanies can be a really good thing. They have definitely changed my life. The other things that tie in with my epiphanies are determination, motivation and inspiration. I have all of these things in spades. The epiphanies alone probably wouldn’t make much difference without the determination, motivation and inspiration to deliver them. I know that I am unusual in this space. I have made immense changes in my life and gone from being the most desperate and miserable prisoner to being a community leader and all round awesome human being (if I do say it myself!). I love my epiphanies and the qualities which enable me to put in place the changes. So yes, have a good epiphany, change your life, change the world! 

Very few things in life are permanent. There are exceptions which I demonstrated yesterday by getting a tattoo – quite a permanent sort of thing and something requiring consideration and thought. And, in case you are interested I got flowers (peonies – because I like them – and sunflowers – because I like them too plus my cat’s name is Sunflower so I have spent the ten months that I have had her collecting sunflower things!) The design also has two blue and pink butterflies – blue and pink are the transgender pride flag colours. The butterflies have semi colons for bodies. This is very significant, quite profound and rather beautiful. If you imagine you are an author (not very hard for me to do!) and your life is the book you are writing. You could choose to end the book with a full stop or put in a semicolon and keep going. Given that the main reason for the design was to hide scars form self-harm in the 1990s I think the semi colon is a good thing! Anyway it was very painful, took six hours and the end result is amazing and now I want another one!… 

But Yennski’s new ink was not the main reason for this post. The reason for this post is to reflect on the impermanence of most things in life and to reflect on why it is not OK to have loaded language around impermanence. By this I mean the way whenever a young person – and particularly an autistic or otherwise neurodivergent young person – comes out as being of marginalised sexuality and / or gender they seem to face a barrage of ‘oh you are just confused’ or ‘you are going through a phase…’ Firstly it is actually OK to change your mind about your gender or sexuality. Many people do. I have. I identified as lesbian for many years and am now identifying as Asexual (‘Ace’) This does not render the time I spent as a lesbian as invalid. I guess it WAS a phase but so what? Also one of the main reasons people detransition (i.e. go back to the gender they were assigned at birth after affirming a different gender) is that they face bigotry, often from the same people who say transgender people are going to change their mind as use this to criticise transgender folks! The first time I discovered that statistic was a bit of an eye-opener for me to say the least! 

I want to look at phases though. Imagine if you came to me and said ‘oh Yenn I got a new job!’ And I responded with ‘Lovely. But you know it is just a phase’. Or if you introduced your new partner to me and I said ‘That’s fantastic but it’s just a phase!’ You would understandably be horrified, but employment and relationships are almost always a phase. I only know one person who has had just one partner in their life and one person who has had the same job. So what do we not confront people with new jobs or new partners with the whole ‘it’s just a phase’ thing?

Phases are very loaded indeed. To dismiss someone’s sexuality or gender identity by saying it is ‘just a phase’ is actually a major case of invalidation. Invalidation is where you treat someone like they or their experiences or attitudes don’t matter.  It happens to autistic folks A LOT. And in fact, even if someone changes their mind or actually is confused by their gender identity or sexuality, don’t dismiss and invalidated them, support them. 

So my tattoo is not a phase. I have it for the rest of my life – so it is a good thing it is beautiful and meaningful. Lots of things in my life aren’t permanent and that is OK. Please don’t invalidate autistic and LGBTQIA+ young folks with these attitudes. And in my experience the ‘phase’ argument is almost exclusively used with young people of marginalised sexuality or gender so it is actually transphobic / homophobic / biphobic and ableist and as such not OK at Yennski Central!  

Most people take the toilet for granted. It is a necessary part of life and not really worth much thought. I imagine that most people don’t pay much attention to the toilet in terms of their identity or safety but for many transgender and other gender divergent folks a visit to the toilet can be fraught with stress and even physical danger. 

I am non-binary and I hate going to gendered bathrooms. I am not a man and I am not a woman so the little icon with the pants and the one with the skirt do not include me. I will always use the all gender option but unfortunately the all gender bathroom option in buildings is rare. The next best thing is the accessible (disability) one but if I use that I worry that people will question my right to do so given that I am not a wheelchair user – yup, people can be dicks! If I am in desperate need I will go to the gendered female one as that is less likely to result in being attacked for using the ‘wrong’ toilet but I hate doing this and it impacts on my sense of positive non-binary identity.

Toilets can be dangerous. Many people using the toilet assigned to their affirmed gender get told they are in the ‘wrong’ one by the self-proclaimed and presumably transphobic bathroom police. Nobody has the right to tell someone what toilet to use. And you can’t tell a persons’ gender just by looking at them anyway. I often look quite feminine but I am definitely NOT a woman. I am a proud non-binary person with a slightly feminine presentation. But if I wanted to go to the ‘male’ bathroom there would be nothing wrong with that. It is nobody’s business what toilet someone uses other than the person themselves. Everyone has the right to go to whatever facility they wish. People being indignant about toilet usage  sometimes even results in physical assault of trans people. See, toilets really can be a big issue and make life difficult for trans folks! This is another example of how transphobia is rife and needs to be addressed. Nobody should have to worry about something as basic a right as being able to use the toilet they choose.

Another issue is that some people simply won’t use toilets in public or at work or school for fear of being discriminated  against. They simply don’t go until they are in a safe place. This has an impact on physical health and can cause damage to kidneys not to mention being very uncomfortable.

For me if there is an all gender bathroom I am absolutely delighted but sadly it is the exception and not the rule for such facilities to be available. Building owners struggle to retrofit their premises for all gender bathrooms as they think they need to do major works which possibly they sometimes do but I think a bit of lateral thinking around the use of space might address this. I have heard people say that bathrooms shouldn’t have an assigned gender at all and the signage should just say whether it is stalls or cubicles and let people pick the one they want. I like that idea and it would also address the usage of space issue. 

So some take aways are:

• A person can use whatever toilet they like
• It is not OK to be the toilet police. Who is using which facility is none of anyone else’s business
• All gender bathrooms make Yennski happy
• Consider doing away with the whole idea of gendered toilet signage and instead say whether the facilities are stalls or cubicles and let people pick
• Have some empathy for trans folks and the trouble we so often have in this space.

…And give all of this a thought next time you go to the loo!

When I was a small child I decided that I wanted to be rich and famous. I didn’t really know what that involved but it seemed that wealth and fame were good things to attain. In my young adult years I wanted to be poor and wretched – things which were quite easy to attain! When I was 25, and very poor and not at all famous,  I decided that I wanted to be ‘ordinary.’ I wanted the things I saw people in my family as having which I didn’t – jobs, mortgages, education and social inclusion. I spent the next few years building my capacity for paid work and getting an education in order to satisfy my need to be ordinary. During that journey I did something that changed my life dramatically. I wrote a book which was published. Within a few months of this I was applying for professional jobs – and one of my applications was successful;. 

I settled into being ordinary. It was wonderful. I got to wear suits and drink wine that came in bottles and not a cardboard box! My friends were other professional employees. It was amazing!

I went to a conference on the weekend hosted by My Life My Decisions. It was a great event and I really enjoyed it. Its was also the first time I have been at an event where almost everyone was a fan of my work! It is very affirming to be in a building full of people who love me and find my work helpful. My publisher has a stall and all my books with that publisher were available. They sold out of at least three of my titles and I signed a lot of books and had a lot of people ask me for selfies. I think it was the most famous I have ever been at an event. Wine I was introduced for my talk the MC said ‘you all know Yenn’ and they were right – everyone knew Yenn. As an extrovert and something  of an alpha personality this sort of thing gets me very excited! 

Fame is a weird thing though. For example I am now quite famous in the autism community and to a lesser extent the Queer community. However I am not famous in the supermarket! Sometimes a stranger will introduce themselves and say they like my blog but most of the time I am blissfully anonymous. One of the conference organisers said she had been a bit intimidated to meet ‘famous’ people and she was surprised how well she got along with us. This made me a bit sad. I don’t want anyone thinking I am intimidating or being afraid to talk to me. I want people to feel conformable. My accomplishments are significant but I don’t wander around thinking how wonderful I am! I am filled with things like self doubt and impostor syndrome. When people say I am an ‘expert’ I always feel uncomfortable with that. We are all human. And as an autistic person I am always happy to talk to my neurokin. I have a very shameful past which I think probably tempers my view of myself. I alway smile when people say ‘wow, I got to talk to Yenn for ten minutes!’ I always think ‘I talk to Yenn all the time. It really isn’t all that exciting!’ My profile has  grown gradually over a long period of time. Al lot of the time in the past I did things with a very small audience and nobody had any idea who I was.  

So that’s my thoughts on famous, what about the ‘rich’? Money is strange. It divides people and results in judgement. I have been very poor and I am now financially stable. What I hated about poverty was the lack of choice in things like housing and also the attitudes of others. Money does seem to involve a lot of judging. I am very fortunate to have escaped poverty but as a person with a very serious and unpleasant mental illness I know that one day I may be unable to work any more and I might become impoverished once more. I am so grateful to be where I am at now in relation to financial independence. I own property which is just amazing. I hope I can stay here at Yennski Central for a very long time but if I don’t? Well I will be in a similar situation to a lot of others – and to myself twenty years ago. There is no shame in poverty and when I was poor there was some joy in my life. 

So I guess I got my childhood wish to be rich and famous – although probably not in the way one would expect. And my take away messages about wealth and fame is that they are relative and that we are all valid regardless of how many people know our work or what we earn. I am grateful for what I have but if I didn’t have it? Well that would be OK too.

The image for this blog post was given to me by a stranger. I was speaking at an Autism Expo and I had a trade table with my books. When I finished speaking I went back to my table. There were loads of people at my table. A person walked up, got to the front of the queue and handed me a tiny drawing on a piece of paper ripped from a notebook. I asked ‘Is that me and Mr Kitty?’ The person replied that yes it was and then disappeared. I never saw them again and don’t have their name but their act of kindness and connection with me left a big impression. When I got home I found a frame and some red sparkly paper and framed it. It sits on my microwave and I look at it every day. 

That interaction demonstrates something magical and how people can come into your life, interact with you and make some change and leave an impression. These can be chance and brief encounters or entire relationships lasting many years. Whenever I talk about this topic I think of Polly. Polly Samuel was an autistic author and advocate who I had the privilege of knowing and also of calling a mentor and good friend. Polly remains the biggest catalyst for positive change in my life, ever. Without Polly I doubt I would be an author and advocate.

I met Polly at a course to enable autistic people to give presentations to schools. I actually have no idea why Polly went there as she was an accomplished and experienced speaker already, but there she was and for that I am immensely grateful. We became friends almost as soon as we met. Polly became my mentor. I learned autistic pride through knowing her. I learned to love and value myself as an autistic person and I learned that I had value and worth. It was Polly who encouraged me to write my life story and then who wrote a foreword for the book when I did write it and sent it to her publisher – now one of my publishers which carry I think 10 of my books now and have three more in production. Polly was my friend and mentor and she radically changed my world. Sadly she is no longer with us but I am eternally grateful for her gifts for me – especially the gift of self-worth and the gift of autistic pride.

There are also people who stay with you long term and make a difference. My parents have that role in my life. My parents have been there for me my whole life. You might think that is a given but I have a very fraught early adult life and many parents would have simply given up. I spent over three years in prison in the 1990s and even more in psychiatric hospitals. I used to be immensely self-destructive and sought only negative things. I imagine my parents would have really struggled with my negative path. My mum is autistic and has a fair whack of anxiety so I imagine when I was being self-defeating and self-destructive that anxiety must have been off the chart but she still stayed there with me regardless. 

I appreciate this as the support and love of my parents are probably the main reason I survived that time in my life and was able to make major changes in my life. Our relationship has been very challenging but now it is very good. I am a fan of repairing relationships when they need to be repaired and have worked with both my parents to build a strong relationship based in love, acceptance and respect. My parents and I are now extremely close which is lovely. Recently my dad told me that he called someone out on transphobia. I was so proud of him at that moment and I know that the driving force behind challenging the person was almost certainly his love for me. 

I like to think that when I come into contact with people it is a positive thing and that I can be an influence and catalyst for positive things for others. Of course that doesn’t happen all the time but I do want to make a difference. I think it is a goal we could all have to touch others (metaphorically) with love and kindness and make their world a better place for us having been in it. I like the aim to leave the world a better place when I leave it than it was when I cam in. It is an ongoing goal!  

I am autistic and ADHD. One of the experiences which I think probably relates to both of these differences is that I am by nature highly disorganised. I often find myself wondering what I am doing. I wander around my house having no idea why I am wherever I am! I always say I could get lost in my own house – and it isn’t a big house! I also say I could vague at an Olympic level – and I could! 

I think the reason for the vagueness and disorganisation is almost certainly my experience of executive functioning. Executive function skills are the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully.  The twelve elements of executive functioning are:

• self-restraint, 
• working memory, 
• emotion control, 
• focus, 
• task initiation, 
• planning/prioritisation, 
• organisation,  
• time management, 
• defining and achieving goals, 
• flexibility, 
• observation and 
• stress tolerance. I am actually quite good at some of these and dreadful at others! 

Challenges with executive functioning are a common experience for neurodivergent folks – we often demonstrate capability in some domains of executive function and not at others. I think I probably have issues with seven of the twelve elements!

While getting lost in my own house is quite amusing, challenges with some of these skills can be very difficult especially in the world of work. I can’t remember most things in my job. I forget what is said in meetings, I forget where tasks are up to and I have difficulties putting things together in my mind. This means that I need to practice a range of strategies to manage that. I keep a very regular, accurate and nicely colour-coded task list and update it several times a day. I can’t focus on large screeds of text – which forms part of my job – so put in place some strategies to manage that too. 

A good friend used to get annoyed with me due to these sorts of issues, especially my planning and organisation skills. Eventually she worked out that these issues were just part of what made me Yenn and so it was OK. The main challenge I find with this is that people think I am slack or incompetent and also that I have some choice in the matter! I really cannot do these things and it is not something I can learn. I find that even if it is impossible to ‘fix’ executive functioning issues that it IS possible to put in place effective strategies to address them.

I think the world at large needs to understand executive functioning and how quite a lot of people have difficulties with it. It is not a choice, I am not slack and it does not mean I am incapable of doing things like work and friendships. The more I learn about executive functioning the better I understand myself. It is not a failing and it is not a choice. It is good for neurodivergent folks to understand executive functioning issues and how it affects us as it enables us to understand ourselves and our experience better. And it is REALLY good for neurotypical and allistic folks to understand it as it helps them to understand us and avoid judgement. 

My strategies are helpful in this space and enable me to work in a fairly high level job quite effectively. It is an ongoing challenge though. Understanding  is key as is helping others to understand what it means.   

When I was a child I was always getting in trouble for being ‘rude’, for being too honest and saying inappropriate things. The weird thing was that I had no intention of being rude at all, I was just saying things how they were – in my mind at least. This is one of many areas where autistic people have assumptions levelled at us which are actually not true.

Autistic to my mind is largely a cultural difference. We speak a different language. Have you ever spoken to someone from a different country and their capability to speak English is OK but things get lost in translation? Well that is what things are like for me and other autistics in terms of communication. Things get lost in translation and we are misunderstood. When autistic people get together with other autistic people then these language issues tend to not be a problem. 

It is not like we communicate ‘wrong’ at all, just differently. But try telling that to the parent of a child who has told a stranger that they are fat or that someone should stop smoking because ti will kill them! Our apparent rudeness is often completely unintentional and we have no wish to upset anyone or be rude. The same goes for social skills. We do not socialise wrong, we socialise different. However there is a whole industry of trying to fix autistic people to make us communicate ‘right’ and socialise ‘appropriately.’ 

What actually needs to happen is for allistic people to build their understanding of autistic communication and socialising. So rather than criticising us and trying to somehow fix us they understand us instead. It isn’t that difficult to do this to my mind. I spent many years of my life trying to learn to speak allistic and I did quite well. I have quite good conversational neurotypical! If I can learn to speak neurotypical then I am thinking that neurotypical folks can learn to speak autistic! 

It can be very upsetting to be chastised for being ‘rude’ or socialising ‘wrong’. This is because it usually is not our intent to be difficult. We are just being ourselves and communicating in the way whatever higher power covers autism has intended. We are not wrong, we are different and different is fine. Over the past few years I have embraced my autistic identity and the things which come with it and I am happy to be me. And if I say something which is received negatively I explain that I communicate differently and that my intent was not to offend. And if the person I have inadvertently wronged has an issue? Well I have done my best.

It can help autistic folks to have a good working knowledge of the sorts of things that upset people (‘you are fat’, ‘I don’t like your shoes’ etc) because most of us don’t actually WANT to offend people but we also need to understand that we are not intentionally being rude or that we are being intentionally difficult. This is an area for advocacy and education.  

Content warning: suicide

I am pretty much constantly anxious, I worry about everything from worrying that my emails aren’t sending to stressing about home maintenance. Anxiety is definitely not my friend as extreme anxiety can turn into psychosis which usually results in me taking years to recover and having to take months off work and spend a lot of time in hospital. I have attempted suicide before due to high anxiety. Because of this I get anxious about being anxious!

I want to share some of the things I do to address anxiety – they aren’t always 100% effective but they do help me. The first is simple: medication. I went through most of my life not having any medication for my anxiety. The problem was that whenever I was in hospital and under the care of a psychiatrist, I was psychotic. Psychosis trumps pretty much everything in mental health care. If you are psychotic it is also quite hard to express or articulate what is going on. Because of this I never managed to tall any hospital psychiatrists who were responsible for changing my medication that anxiety was destroying me! Then in 2021 I was in hospital and I was not psychotic. I explained to the doctor that my anxiety about the internet not working had resulted in a suicide attempt. He said ‘I will address your anxiety’ and instantly put me on medication for anxiety which completely changed my life! I still get anxious but nowhere near as badly and since then I have had no psychotic episodes. 

Another strategy is around thinking. A mental health worker once told me that if thoughts were making me anxious I should imagine that they were a person knocking on the door. I couldn’t help them being there but I could decide whether or not to let them in. I took this one step further and imagined that Donald Trump was at the door…and there is no way in the world I would let him into my house! I now just think ‘Eep! Trump’s at the door!’ Which works quite nicely. 

I also practice my own kind of mindfulness by watching relaxing scenery on YouTube. This works well – and my cat enjoys it too!

I don’t like when people say ‘oh don’t worry about that.’ If anxiety listened to logic then psychologists would all be unemployed! Problematic anxiety is of nature illogical.  If I cold just tell myself not to worry then life would be a lot easier and I would have spent a lot less of my time in hospital!

I do some deep breathing when I am really anxious. This helps. Anxiety for me is a very physical thing. I feel tight in my chest and belly and my heart races. So deep breathing is a physical means of addressing anxiety and helps me to slow down. 

I also often tell a friend if I am anxious about something as they can put it into perspective. I DON’T need to die because my internet isn’t working!  

Distraction is a big plus as well. This involves doing something enjoyable to occupy your brain. It works by taking your mind off the anxiety. Distraction is my go to mental health strategy and many other people find it helpful too.

I see a psychologist which helps. A good psychologist can make a big difference. It can take a while to find a good psychologist but a good one is a blessing. Finding one who understands autism and neurodivergence is really important. You can ask around your neurodivergent network to see who is good although being aware that different people may experience the same psychologist differently. 

Anxiety is not my friend. While it is a natural function passed down from our ancient ancestry for me it is more harmful than useful. I am much less anxious than  was but it is still an issue. Strategies are really helpful and you can build your knowledge of what works over time.  

Today I gave a talk for TEDx Canberra. My second TEDx talk in ten years. It went really well and everything about it was good – don’t ask me, ask my speaker coach!! The talk involved a lot of preparation and self-reflection and it got me thinking about how I got to here. ‘Here’ being thirteen published books, a professional job, a large number of awards, hundreds of talks and all sort of other cool things – including two TEDx talks! I have an extraordinary life but I used to have an extraordinary life for very different reasons. I spent three and a half years in prisons and I have spent almost seven years in psychiatric institutions because I have schizophrenia. My life in the 1990s and early 2000s was as far removed from my life now as you could imagine. So, I hear you ask, how did I make that major shift?

A lot of the change related to my motivation and attitudes. When I was in my early twenties I actively sought out negative things and deliberately got in trouble with police so I could be institutionalised. My attitudes and motivation were 100 per cent negative. This changed in late 1999. I decided that a new millennium should equal a new life. I shifted my attitudes and motivation and this helped me to make some very big changes.

I started to seek out positive things. I remember when I was released form prison for the last time in February 2000 I threw out my address book because everyone in there was a drug user or criminal. I knew that if I stayed in the company of criminals that it would be very hard to escape that world.

I started to focus on positive things. I enrolled in university and kept my past a secret as I was ashamed of it. When I was in the throes of negativity I would happily talk about being in prison and self harming and wanted people to see me in those contexts but when I enrolled in university I didn’t want everyone knowing my sordid past.

The other thing I did was make a goal. Around one year after I was released from prison in 2000 I decided I wanted to be ‘ordinary’. To my mind that having a professional job, an education, a mortgage and a suit. I am not saying it was easy to change my life – it absolutely wasn’t. And I definitely don’t blame others for not taking a similar path to me. It was a huge challenge and for many years things could easily have fallen apart. I had a major substance abuse problem between 1995 and 2007, having issues with illicit drugs and alcohol. I lived in crisis accommodation and public housing and many of the neighbours that I counted as friends were petty criminals. Often the only thing standing between reverting to my previous life was my determination to change.

Some tips I can share – which you might already know but it can’t hurt to share them again – are:

• If it feels wrong don’t do it. Simple but effective
• Set positive, attainable goals and don’t give up if they don’t eventuate quickly
• Surround yourself with people who have a sense of self-respect and who like and value you – and themselves 
• Each day is a new day. If you make a mistake then join the club! We are all human. Just move on and resolve to not do it again
• Be honest. This one often comes naturally to autistic folks but allistics can do it too! 
• If you make a mistake own it. Apologise and try not to do it again. 
• Cultivate a sense of pride, self-worth and self-acceptance
• If you make a mistake view it as a learning opportunity 
• Please feel free to draw form my example. My story clearly demonstrates that anyone no matter how desperate can change their life
• Be very wary of the concept of ‘success’. It is very fraught. I never call myself successful. If I have to describe that about me I say ‘accomplished.’
• Know that attitudes can change 
• Know that your motivation and what you aim for tend to be the things you will end up getting.