Fern Brady - Autistic in a Non-Autistic World

this episode contains references to Suicide um if this is something you feel like you can't engage with at the moment then please do skip but I do encourage you to come back as it's a really valuable uh and fascinating conversation I'd learned a lot of uh neurotypical ways of interacting so I knew that when someone says what's your plans for tomorrow they don't mean list every single thing that you're going to do tomorrow they mean I'm asking you to speak about something neutral and say one thing that you might do tomorrow so I'd learned a lot of neurotypical social cues systematically and um I could do them but it's like trying to speak uh a foreign language for 16 hours a day but you're never going to be fluent in it that's what it's like being autistic and trying to mask the imperfect invites you into a very safe place a place where we share without judgment and drink heaps of vulnerability grab yourself a cup this is the vulnerability [Music] house and uh this is a very special vulnerability house because probably I'd say if not top top three accents we've had on the podcast ever wow thank you my pleasure it's just the Scottish accent what are the other ones which been better than this well I don't have any other references but that's why I said potentially top but I haven't actually run through the list actively I'm going to say number one for me yeah thank you better than English definitely definitely without a doubt in this context with you sitting right here definitely we're joined by Fern Brady who is a hugely successful Scottish comedian and I have spent so much time consuming all of Fern's content in the last little while uh reading the book which is just exception we'll talk about oh you read it no I haven't finished it I am reading it currently and I raving about it it's rare oh thanks thanks um strong female Char strong female character yeah I wish I'd called it something else but no I love it cuz I didn't call it that in Earnest and now people think I've called it that like do you know what I mean like seriously but I would my other title was here are my thoughts about autism and feminism and things it's not it's not as um marketable I don't mind it but I it's rare that I've read a book that has made me laugh out loud that much but then also just feel such it's such a range of emotion throughout so congratulations on the book thanks um I think I just mentioned before a very successful Scottish comedian but I think what fascinates me most and what I have incredible admiration and respect for you for is the Journey of been on away from the public eye at age 16 thinking I might be autistic and then being told that you weren't because you have a boyfriend and you make eye contact yeah if you're cute it's easy to get a boyfriend like you can you can really get away with acting quite eccentrically for a long time uh so that's one of the that's one of the most common misconceptions with uh autistic women I find um I'm just quite insulting this idea that uh that autistic people don't date um yeah but yeah uh I'm so glad you read the book I I actually wrote A lot of it in Melbourne you know I was doing the last time I was in Melbourne was 2022 um and I didn't go I mean I'm not one for going out anyway but I didn't go out very much because I just sat on the floor of my hotel writing the book so it was a really happy memory for me and it wasn't for another 20 years after you first told you're not autistic that you were darkos 20 years later yeah but I'd had people from my audience telling me yeah oh really like that shows yeah in a nice way um I was doing a show a few years ago and a lot of my show was talking about oh I really feel like an alien and I don't seem to fit in with other girls um and then this lovely woman came up at the end and she said your whole set is a description of an autistic woman and go and read this book called asber girls um and then I read it and I went through all the usual things of why do I need a label I don't need a diagnosis and then I went through a phase of thinking I can probably just I can probably just fix this and I think I can learn social cues like a language um and you can kind of learn patterns as to you can sort of learn stuff but it's never going to be intuitive and also it's actually incredibly bad for autistic people to do that because that's called masking so I was doing a lot of stuff to make people feel more comfortable with me and then when I got diagnosed I realized how bad that was like when we arrived you was saying oh I'm sorry I shook your hand and I was like no I was so happy that we shook hands cuz the number of times even when people know I'm autistic I have to hug people and for me like I love hugging friends long-term friends or my partner I'm an affectionate person but for me to hug a stranger that I've never met is so overwhelming and so intimate and the way touch because I process touch differently sounds so [ __ ] precious but and then this is this is why I didn't want to get diagnosed for years cuz I don't see myself as a diva I don't like to make any kind of Demands at gigs um but when people touch me lightly it feels like bugs on my skin for 8 hours and I never was able to articulate that until I started getting the correct therapy after diagnosis and my therapist was like she was like I speak to autistic people that have this all the time and I thought you're just supposed to be okay with it and then go home and feel awful and wiped out yeah it's I I think there's a you know there's a common thing that people people who like hugging and they'll of insist on the hug because they're hugger you know if people says sorry I'm a hugger it's like well I haven't consented you've just decided that we because you're that's your that's what you like doing but if you like it doesn't bother me obviously as much as it bothers an autistic person but I can imagine that's just like very um you're very close you're very close to them when you hug yeah very close Hannah gadsby has good material on it I think where it's not acceptable for you to say I'm not a hugger um respon that's the tricky thing is that the other thing is is I've got a pretty good idea of what a lot of people think about the increase in diagnosis of autistic people and I know that people will say things like oh she's just using this as an excuse or they're using it as an excuse to be difficult so um even last week I was doing I was filming a standup set here and then someone on the crew kep just just like lightly struck in my arms a lady oh a lot of women do it cuz it's seen as like of com comforting and maternal and to me it feels unbearable and I but so I said oh is it okay if you don't do that cuz I'm autistic and I just tried it out holy [ __ ] that didn't go down well really what she she looked so hurt um but I did I've been told that I'm supposed to start at least trying a bit to advocate for myself but even just talking like this advocating for myself it sounds so comfortable it's so not it's so like alien to the kind of background that I came from I mean it might it probably has a lot to do with how the person is receiving it and what sort of Education they have because I think like the three of us uh you know we obviously knew that you're autistic um but I also have like a very Baseline understanding of autism very Baseline um but if you said that to me I'll be like oh of course like I understand like I I would feel very very uncomfortable because I've made you feel very uncomfortable but if someone doesn't have the Baseline understanding which hopefully is changing then maybe they're going to take it personally like a like a personal like you don't want them touching you yeah it's it's a tricky thing to get right but I'm optimistic at the moment I think that autism rights and stuff and autism awareness is where Maybe gay rights were in the 60s and um I'm always nervous to use this as a comparison but I see a lot of parallels with it there's a there's a growing um group of uh autistic people online who are raising awareness of uh issues that affect the autistic Community amazing um and one reason I love being in Australia actually is you have so many amazing artistic comedians um and they're open about their autism whereas in the UK it still feels like not many people talk about it as much a bit tooo Yeah like yeah and almost it's all something I've started to get frustrated with is the perception that getting an Autism diagnosis is seen as this leftwing like blue haired thing to do so yeah the view that that getting a in life autism diagnoses is some sort of Lefty attention seeking thing that grinds my gears I would love for people to see it with a degree of neutrality rather than seeing autism as a superpower that's the other that's unbelievably patronizing that's the other thing that goes about I'd rather people view it as the difference between an Android phone and an iPhone which that's not some other autism Advocate said that and to me that makes a lot more sense interesting can youtrap can you explain a bit more like what so for example like if you've ever had have you ever had um a Macbook but then your phone is Android trying to get the two to communicate as difficult as possible but it's not as easy as when you get all Apple products together and there's actually been a study that found uh because a lot of people autism's been framed as deficit based for so long so a lot of people talk about by the way I'm not making eye contact with you guys the whole time CU that's it's easier for me to concentrate of course so um a lot of people talk about autistic people don't empathize very much and we don't communicate well this isn't true we find it harder to communicate with non-autistic people but when they put autistic people in groups together we communicate just fine and they done studies into this and um for ages actually I would meet the number of times where I've met a guy and been like oh my God I have to date this guy I fancy him so much and then someone's like yeah he's one of yours and you're like all right okay constantly constantly drawn back to the to the autistic guys all the time or or like I'll meet um a new friend and be like why is it so easy to communicate with this person and then down the line they get diagnosed too so that happens a lot um but I wish I'd know known more about this when I was younger rather than constantly trying to fix myself cuz I worked really hard to uh not be autistic really really hard before I got diagnosed like by the time I got diagnosed I was pretty sure I had it um so it wasn't like a big moment of realization and so you're from Little Town in Scotland called Bathgate yeah first off the singer leis Capaldi is from there so is Susan boo oh so that really helped put it on the map and they are so and Susan's autistic as well so I can't watch Susan's Britain's Got Talent interview anymore without feeling upset because um I don't know if you remember she she got big because she did this audition and she's behaving eccentrically in it she like Wiggles her hips suggestively at Simon C she talks in a voice that to me identifies her as an autistic Susan's really really well spoken yeah um but where where from people have a more Regional accent and when I was younger I had an accent that was different to everyone in school which can sometimes be an autistic thing but Susan's Britain's Got Talent audition to me really exemplifies how cruel non-autistic people can be um because autistic people get bullied all the time and when you don't know you're autistic you're so much more vulnerable to it and that clip of her Britain's Got Talent audition I would urge people to watch it to see how how um because they're laughing at her and then what she sings well so she's valid to you it's so interesting you say that cuz I didn't I didn't know she was autistic but um my girlfriend and I we we watched recently that audition Susan Bo came up in conversation and she was like wasn't that audition actually really [ __ ] up yeah like the way because of the way that the producers would have leaned on the eccentricities yeah to lower people's expectations of what she was capable of but when you actually watch it and think about it not even knowing about the autism but just watching is like to present someone in the most eccentric different way purely to tell the story is so unfair but I see Echoes of that audition and TV programs that I was on before I was diagnosed because there's something this doesn't apply to all autistic people but for myself I feel that I move and speak in a way that is just of enough that non-autistic people pick up on it and I want to back this up with a study to show that this isn't insecurity on my part there was a study done where non-autistic people spoke to autistic people and when they without knowing that they were autistic they consistently rated them as less intelligent less attractive less trustworthy because the way they interpret or facial movement and tone and everything is so different so I've seen programs that I've been on or I've watched back things I've been on where there's been people laughing at me when I've spoke on a program MH but see when I was on Taskmaster I had like the best time on it and when I watched myself back it was like the first time I like accepted that I'm that way on camera [ __ ] why did you make me cry sorry I started to do there disgusting I didn't know I didn't know you could have got I could feel it coming up and then I was like this isn't happening yeah I just pushed years of emotion down but there's like well-intentioned drives to have autistic people represented on shows and it doesn't always work out like there's this TV show called the good doctor that I don't know if you've ever seen a trailer of it it's about a Doctor Who's autistic it's played by a non-autistic person which doesn't sit right with me and um he just goes around offending all his colleagues they keep him on because he's a damn good sergeant and watch a trailer of it it's so it's so so offensive um so there's there are like these well-intentioned moves to represent autistic people and stuff but so much more often it happens organically although I got to say I love that show love on the Spectrum but I've seen some interesting debates around it recently that it it's kind of infantilizing because they'll be like plinky plunk and play this like innocent music and see Fair hates people touching her lightly and she loves the feel of leaves crunching under her feet like I don't know I don't know what I make about that it's interesting yeah I what you mean on balance I know that the people that make that program have really good intentions and they also are very careful to give people breaks when they're getting overwhelmed mhm I I [ __ ] cried like a baby when I watched that show yes it's so good yeah yeah especially the parents I always cry out the parents incredible out there oh my God I have so many questions so my wife and I Penny someone we love dearly has been diagnosed with autism in the last couple of years yeah and one of the main things I've come to understand or realize is that neurotypical people and I can only speak for this country Australia we have no there is so little understanding of autism we just don't know we really don't know anything about it and what I hope happens today is that we're able to broaden our understanding and be a little bit more educated through your journey because um I just think it's it's so incredibly we have so many people walking around the community who are autistic and the more we all know the better their life will be so thank you for being here first of all it's so we're so excited that you're here uh this is the vulnerability house um so we do have a you do have a question to answer or some cards um to pick up in a second I just kind of hope that the conversation it may not but I hope the conversation comes back to autism because I just there's so much for us to learn from you today so hopefully one of the cards is do you have any significant diagnosis as you'd like to talk about recently um so if you'd like to maybe pick up the top three cards okay and read them out and maybe choose one that you would like to answer o What Fear would you like to be free of uh in a film about your life what challenges would the main character have to overcome how would your Ambitions change if you only had one year to live right this one I've got a good answer for this so which one which which question was that the last one how would your Ambitions change if you only had one year to live yeah so I'm a bit obsessed with uh constantly reminding yourself that you're going to die not in a morbid way but uh when I was younger one of the some autistic people there's a stereotype that were really into Star Trek and love Star Trek or a lot of autistic people love Doctor Who I'm obsessed with a old HBO show called 6 feet under that must have been on in 2004 and it's all it's actually all based on like Buddhist principles of meditating on it forces you to meditate on your own death a TV show setting a funeral home every episode someone dies and then all the characters are constantly like grappling with the best way to live your life and thinking about death so I've always tried to be quite good about reminding myself that I'm going to die and then around when did I get when did I get my book deal maybe 2021 right I wasn't feeling very well I was feeling really tired a lot and then I my my hands were tingling and I I was really really unusually exhausted and I thought oh this is a bit strange went to the doctor the doctor sent me for a brain scan cuz they were like oh your age we're going to we want to rule out Ms and then he phoned me the night of the scan and was like we've found a little growth in your brain so I like didn't even listen to the rest of what the guy was saying I was like howling crying went through of my boyfriend I'm again marriage and I was like do you want to get married immediately thing yeah I was like we should have we should marry we should marry on my deathbed um and Shian yeah so the doctor was like you got to come back in the morning because um we think this could be a brain tumor and he said I'm so sorry to phone you about this late at night so I like laid awake on it this is always how I do an impression of me sleeping like a m my cofin oh yeah arms crossed over your chest like laid wake and I thought of all my like any regrets that I have um and i' I'd been thinking how I was going to approach write in my book and then I just immediately thought okay well if I'm going to die because I might have a brain tumor I'm going to write the book in a way cuz I'll be gone anyway so I'm just going to write it without any embarrassment and that was what led me to put I put the the by far the most shameful aspect of my autism in it i' Dre other late diagnosed autism books and enjoyed them but I felt people were holding back or it felt like people weren't talking about some of the more taboo aspects of it um so I just had this night of being like okay I know how I'm going to do the book when's the doctor in the morning this dramatic [ __ ] of a doctor is like he's like oh we think you've got a p rist and it's not a your but I just phoned you last night to say that cuz cuz we thought it might be and then it's I do have this little it's just like this little lump that I get monitored every few years but all the only reason my hands were tingling was I had a vitamin D deficiency I don't know if it's showing up on screen how white I am uh and I've been wearing like Factor 50 sunscreen since I was 18 in British weather so that was all it was so I have had but I felt lucky it sounds so St I felt luy because I had one night of get having that feeling without having to actually I feel like we should all it sounds awful but I feel like we should all have that to bring out things that we need to or go to that doctor go to that dramatic [ __ ] of a doctor did your publisher like ask the doctor to make that call just to improve the book oh maybe oh maybe she did yeah that would be just like her classic publisher move yeah yeah no um so so then I just kept hold of that feeling all through writing the book because we are going to die anyway um it doesn't like it might be ages away but uh within this span of History we're going to die reasonably soon yes um so you should just say what you want to see no I love it's so true it's a real it's a real like of course like I'm sorry you had to go through that for that night but it's a real gift creatively like it's real like um yeah to be able to write without fear is pretty amazing well I've tried to walk other people through thinking that way like my dad is always complaining about his job uh and and like well you know you'll be retired so you and then you'll be dead so you should think what you want to do but a lot of people don't really like you saying you're going to be dead soon um they seem to take it differently it's quite confronting yeah well well for me it's a it's um you should think that way cuz that is how it's going to be it's funny actually because I I I don't really like thinking about it but it's it's so interesting it probably speaks a lot to what my priorities are but when you frame it in terms of like it helped you with your work I go like oh that is that I can see how that would really be helpful like writing from a truly truthful place and having no fear of what people will say or how you'll be humil ated or embarrassed is so liberating yeah I mean the downside was the book came out and then way more people read it than I thought so so what are the things that you wrote about in the book that you may not have written about meltdowns meltdowns yeah I mean it's so embarrassing uh and that was the one that was the number one thing that pushed me to get diagnosed because that was the one thing I couldn't seem to fix because I'd learned I'd learned a lot of uh neurotypical ways of interacting so I knew that when someone says what's your plans for tomorrow they don't mean list every single thing that you're going to do tomorrow they mean I'm asking you to speak about something neutral and say one thing that you might do tomorrow so I'd learned a lot of neurotypical social cues systematically and um I could kind of uh I could do them but the best description I've heard of trying to keep this up is it's like trying to speak uh a foreign language for 16 hours a day but you're never going to be fluent in it that's what it's like being autistic and trying to mask um it must be exhausting well yeah so I didn't understand the connection so I would do all that during the day and then I remember I would be on TV sets and I would feel really um like tight and tense in my body um and the lights on a TV set are often the fluorescent like this is my dream light and setup you've got some natural light here you've got a we soft light in the corner it's um that's very nice to hear we would usually have this really really bright and we've we've toned it down yeah so touching well it wasn't my idea but I'll take the phrase oh oh my God I can't believe you did that that's so cool we we've tried to make this like the fern Brady like dream spot yeah oh I was like they'll try and make me cry on this podcast and it won't work but that's genuinely touched me we won't try and make you cry Oh I thought it was one of those look if you wanto we'll take it yeah we'll definitely take it oh that's really nice but yeah so I would I would I would be on set so I would be doing jobs and I would feel really physically uncomfortable feel like I was trying to hold things in and uh then I would get home and just even if I was in the house on my own I'd end up like punching a wall and I think well that's weird cuz I don't feel angry I just feel pressured and a lot of people describe it having a meltdown it's like shaking a bottle of fizzy Coke and then you open it when you get home um and it was when I got diagnosed I actually found out off my mom that when I first went to school at parents night the teachers would be like oh fa's so quiet she's so well behaved she just sits and stares out the window she doesn't seem to be tuned into what's going on in class but she's so quiet and my parents were like this cannot be the same child because I was coming home and just like roaring screaming like having these violent tantrums and I mean that pattern then went on until I was an adult and this is so common of autistic girls especially um they learn how to cover it up in school because it's not acceptable to kick off in school do do you mind um I'd be interested to know what the meltdowns looked like like what what they would how they would present they look like you're angry they sometimes so embarrassing you like it's like you get stuck in a loop and you say the same thing over and over again and before I even got got diagnosed my boyfriend I've been going out with the same guy for like 12 years this Connor yeah um he'd said to me no I'd said to him oh I think I've got asbar J which is what they they used to call it and now it's just like esd1 or whatever uh and then he went and read up on it and then the next time I was having a meltdown he came and like gave me a tight hug because he'd been reading up on things to do when like your autistic kid has a meltdown and he was using the tactics on me cuz he was at his W end like what is going on and I'd had other partners before that I think must have picked up on it a bit like I remember going out with someone that was like you love to tell the same story over and over again and you tell it in the same format every time obviously that was like great because I then went into stand up yeah that was before that was before I went into stand up otherwise I'd be like yes you just at one of my t i mean it's a very funny story but you keep saying it every night every night or like I uh um yeah this guy I went out with at Uni I remember just kicking off because we were meant to go out somewhere for my birthday and I was very like at this time we will go here and then at this time we will go to this bar and then that didn't happen and he was like why do you care let's just like we're just out with our friends because I didn't didn't know that I had this attachment to routine and certainty and knowing when everything's going to happen um and I used to think that I had a really hard time going on holiday with Connor and my boyfriend and then he was like I'm just going to try something for our next holiday I want you to decide what we're going to do and then we'll have a day where we go off and do our own things um and then we started doing it more that way and then it was amazing whereas before I just holidays were so stressful to me because my routine was totally disrupted um and I just sort of thought I guess I'm just a [ __ ] uh cuz my family has always been like F A Nightmare on holidays and she kicks off but it's because the whole idea of Mo most people love a holiday because of the disruption to your routine um and so you tour a lot you do a lot of touring now know manage on tour yeah yes okay so like every time I come back to Melbourne it gets better and better because things are the same so like I was in the same hotel for 3 years I got to the same place for breakfast most days um whereas I used to feel embarrassed about that I would go to the same place for breakfast and have the same order to the extent that like the waiters would pick up on it and kind of thought it was kind of funny and then I'd start going to a different C coffee shop and try and rotate coffee shops to be more normal that's it'd be such a sense of comfort amazing I had such a hard time the first year I came to Australia I couldn't work out why because I was with such a nice group of comics but everyone loved going out and socializing all the time and really noisy bars so I kept forcing myself to go out to them because I am a sociable person I like socializing but I've realized since then I kind of need to socialize in my own way so it's something as simple as just two or three people at a time and going to a cafe that isn't noisy just little things like that uh whereas the first year I came here I was really pushing myself to do a lot of social stuff that I found hard and I kept looking around and thinking well no one else is finding this hard and people were like oh F's complaining all the time and I just felt bad whereas now I know how to go about it yeah can can I ask you about the role of choice in all this like because I was curious to know if choice is an impairing thing or a daunting thing for me I think it's better if someone's giv you a choice it's best if they say you can do this or this rather than an open-ended thing do want remember the thing with the headphones at the start yeah yeah yeah yeah that would have gone on forever well we gave you the option to wear headphones or not yeah and then I was like what do you want me to do what is going to be the more normal thing to do so yeah um yeah I'm still learning about it all the time it's crazy how much new stuff I learn about autism all the time and you were I I thought it was really interesting how you're talking about the your concerns about a label about getting a label and what that might be how is that how did that play out for you once you did get as you said the label so one way I protect myself from I basically have a very low expectation slash no expectations of non-autistic people knowing anything about autism at all yeah um so I know other people who have been diagnosed since like a lot for a lot longer than me and they're much better at advocating for themselves whereas for example if I'm in my hair and makeup done on a TV set I would be uncomfortable telling them when you powder my face a lot or when you cover me in Hairspray that feels really unbearable so instead you just have to tell White Lies and I hate lying to people but my the doctor that diagnosed me said just say to people oh hairspray gives me a headache or I'm allergic to this face powder and frame it in ways that people understand but I kind I do think it shouldn't be that way I would love it if it wasn't that way but it's tricky to I understand why it's important to advocate for yourself but at the same time I'm really ambitious in terms of what I want to do in comedy and the number one thing in comedy when you're on a TV set is never be seen as a diva and to me asking for things like that seems precious it strikes me as a lot of pressure to put on someone who's trying to navigate the world themselves to then also have to advocate for yeah I mean yeah for a world that isn't set up for the way your brain operates like it's a it like there's two levels of pressure going on there but if you think like if I'm meeting so many different people in a day trying to explain to um I don't know the tech in a regional Arts Center can we not have the lights really bright on stage because I'll just say something like I have a sore head but cuz I'm not going to be like oh I have sensory issues with light because I just it's just the kind of background that I come from I just know the way it's going to be received MH um so that's frustrating God you imagine particularly going to all these different venues and dealing know we've done we did a live show for the podcast and you going to all these different venues every time you go to a new venue it's like a new tech and it's a new venue manager or whatever and some of you know most of them are really really great but of course there are people who've been working there for 40 years and this is the way you do it and if you request anything different they'll be they'll look at you like you're really uh inconveniencing them yeah no I mean I've I've got lovely Texs um but and also at the same time comedy is a million times better than when I was working in an office that was really I felt like I was having to keep myself maintained all day yeah okay um because you're constantly monitoring your posture uh your tone of voice your facial expression um even the way you eat if you eat in a strange way that'll get picked up on in an office uh so yeah comedy is so much better and there's a high tolerance for eccentricity in comedy MH as well that's a good thing can we can we just go back to Ryan's question before which was just around the meltdowns cuz your book you described them as you were saying you're always just smashing stuff up even just talking about them here is embarrassing well well we don't have to I just it's just such a big part of your experience the reason I felt like I had to was because I couldn't find any information uh I was going on websites like the national autistic Society in the UK I was going on their website and who's constantly having to refer to guides for parents of autistic children even though all autistic children grow up to become autistic adults and they continue to have meltdowns but it's so secretive so I was only able to find information about meltdowns from uh like I say a lot of these new autism Advocates that are popping up and setting up podcasts talking about autism in detail because there's not very much professional support I mean when you get your diagnosis and this is why I've got a bit of an issue with there's there's a I don't know if it's like this here but a lot of people talk about autism and ADHD and the same breath and there are overlaps like a lot of autistic people have that and ADHD but when you get diagnosed with ADHD you get a prescription right when you get diagnosed with autism you get a reading list and you're they're like good luck at parties see you later send you off um there's there's not any support so I got diagnosed and I was still having meltdowns and I had to develop cuz autistic people are good at creating systems for Stuff um that's what so many autistic people thrive in Silicon Valley and all those workspaces are set up actually to be more autism friendly anyway um I started tracking my meltdowns for a year after I got diagnosed to try and find out the ters um and I managed to reduce them that way so found things like having a bad night's sleep um things like drinking alcohol really affect me um like a lot of autistic people react really strongly to drugs and alcohol or even medications MH um so so many autistic people get misdiagnosed for years with all these mental illnesses and they probably do have depression and anxiety from being undiagnosed but they get put on these medications that are too strong for them or that they shouldn't be on at all like I was on proac from when I was 16 till I was 21 and it made me more comfortable for other people it made me very B in and very kind of sedate it didn't help me um and I've never been on medication since then and I'm I don't I don't want to get in bother up to other autistic people whether they want to take meds some autistic people feel like they have to but for me get in a sensory diet made for myself was so much better and I've got a friend who has autistic kids a friend in comedy and he' said for years before I got diagnosed when I thought I probably had it he said you need to go to an occupational therapist and get a thing called a sensory diet made and that's where they work out your sensory needs so for example I have problems with light and touch and sound so I do things like when I'm on public transport I wear noise canceling headphones mhm or I try and do quite a lot of exercise because um that it just gets a lot of the it just really helps me to move about a lot it gets a lot of nervous energy out yeah um but yeah I mean I only just got the sensory diet made for me recently and I got diagnosed in 2021 2020 cuz like as uh as far as being a comedian I'm not a comedian stand up comedian but it's uh you got I I've I've been to a lot of gigs like particularly where there's like a lot of people on the bill and often you know between the the acts like the MC might kind of like introduce you know Fern Brady and then music blasts and lights go crazy it's almost like the worst like that was that challenging being in those sorts of environments people ask me a lot about the lights and sound at gigs but honestly I was thinking about the other day maybe because that I know that that's going to happen every night that's fine um I went to watch a comedian the other night cuz I so rarely get to go and watch Comedy and when I was in the audience I remembered I find it so much easier to do the gig than to sit in a gig and put up with like people rustling crisp packets talking on their phones like I get so distracted if someone touches the back of my Shir my brain interprets it as a threat if someone just had long legs and their knees kept bumping the back of my chair that's so much more stressful or like the plane rides between the gigs people touching the back of your plane seat all of that is worse than the bit before you go on stage yeah yeah interesting um because yeah because the you don't know what's coming it's like a surprise it's unpredictable yeah yeah no the the the bit where I do my job and say the same thing every night and try and work out a system for it that's the best but oh of course the system of getting the jokes right and getting the order right oh that's fascinating cuz autistic people we go around all day thinking how could I have made that social situation better and what could I have said differently and then stand up as a process of refining the perfect thing to say to someone again and again and again and it's just very very satisfying one of the things I'd love to chat to you about is friendship oh yeah yeah because I feel like what I've learned in the last couple of years is that certainly what I have observed and it might not be the case for you this could be just very specific to to this example but it's like the disability to me seems to be an inability to know what friendships are to really want friendships but to find them so unbelievably hard to to have I guess or or to make friends or maintain friendships is that yeah I talked about that in the book although when I was writing the book I was going through a phase where my boyfriend pointed out that I'd started viewing friendships like uh like the Friends TV series and I'd developed a very idealistic form of friendship where's my Joey yeah yeah um but friendship's something I've been thinking about and talking about a lot because a lot of people expect their romantic partner especially men are quite bad for this uh they they get a wife and then they forget to have male friendships don't they obviously not you guys cuz you are old p theying a I presume you're friends or do you not know each other oh yeah well these two are brothers brother brothers whoa what he kept that quiet he did didn't we It's usually the big reveal at the end big family photo oh cool no we all I would say we love each other dearly would be oh that's lovely yeah so a lot of um men end up letting their wives organize their social wives and then partner becomes everything to them um and I'd say I tend to be that way in relationships too and have to remember to like don't don't expect to get all your emotional needs from your partner you but with female friendships sometimes my boyfriend's heard the way me and my friends voice message each other on WhatsApp and he's like you guys talk about everything it's mad how you just talk about stuff so emotionally whereas he he had his best friend have a breakup and I was like oh why did they break up and he said I don't know I'm going to ask him when we go on our walking holiday and I was like okay if you were a woman the way it would work is you would talk about it immediately and then the walking holiday will be used to repeat the main point of why the ex is a bastard why the best friend always knew that he wasn't good for you do you know what I mean I have that issue all the time where I like jam my and she'll say you if a friend of ours has just had a child or something had like the new new parents I'll get home from hanging out with this guy for a whole day and jam will be like how's how's the baby going and I'll be like oh we didn't really talk about it actually yeah yeah one of my absolute best friends lives in New York and when he comes out here and we have like a couple of days together I don't think we actually discuss anything like it's just I I couldn't tell you what he's done at work recently or like it's just screaming footy between drinking beers you read me like a book no um yeah I don't know it just doesn't happen even though I'm quite a vulnerable deep talker like I love this stuff but it just doesn't seem to happen with a lot of my male friends MH yeah it's weird I often find as well a lot of cuz I have a lot of my old friends and from just from doing comedy CU there's so many guys and they do tend to they keep emotional chats to their female friends or their partners and then uh between men it's just I don't know what you talk about I don't know what you talk about we about either external stuff or what's happening right now it seems like what's happening in the moment what we're doing it's like don't St from whatever the activity is but yeah about friendships in relation to autism I sometimes uh forget to socialize and I have to remind myself almost like a hygiene measure like brushing your teeth I think oh you haven't spoken to anyone in a couple of weeks because I get so um focused on work I get such tunnel vision with it like one of my friends said recently cuz he was like oh do you want to meet up should we go for a walk in the park and I said I can't I've got a new show tonight and I'm going to Australia and he was like that's in three months time like you're not busy until then but for some reason the way my brain thinks about it is well I just have to work solidly and then I can see my friends in June and that's been something I've had to get out of do you mind me asking about friendships uh as a child when you didn't know yeah that was a lot harder yeah what was it like well like when I was at Nursery sorry what what's Nursery what age is that what are we talking I think you guys call it preschool four when I was four okay I I remember getting dropped off at nursery and I just it was like I was struck Dum I could not not speak to people couldn't get words out at all so I would have to just go to Nursery I couldn't even ask to go to the toilet so I just piss myself cuz I just like look at people and think I don't know how I'm meant to speak to anyone um and I would look at people playing and sort of think how I don't know how to join in here um and then when I went to Primary School I would just go and chat to this tree in the playground um and my mom showed me a drawing that did where we were meant to like do a drawing of our first day at school and it's just me standing next to a tree with like my back to the viewer it's it's so go gosh um and the only way I made friends at primary school would be like little kids forcing their friendship on me so a little kid would come over and be like be my friend now and then once someone tried to be friends with me I would just like clamp onto them okay um and actually I what over uh little autistic girls end up becoming friends with the most popular girl in class and then that girl ends up um being a shield for them and they can just they get but they are um where what they like in like understand in the social situations the best friend makes up for it and my best friend at high school actually was I'm sure in in the yearbook she was like one of the most popular girls in the year gosh we bumped into the head girl I don't know if you people have head girls serious girl you people [ __ ] you SC it works no I I don't know why where that came from so I didn't I didn't sleep very well I no I totally know what you meant yeah so um so years after I left school me and my best mate from school we bumped into someone from school who said to my friend oh Lauren I bet you're a comedian now and she said no fairness actually and this girl just looked so shocked because I just did not I really like didn't speak that much at school or I was seen as just a weirdo so your memory of school was it was extremely difficult it was so academically it was fine but I mean I would happily have just I think if I could have been homeschooled then I would have had to see my parents even more uh I wasn't get on them but if if they're could have been a way of me doing my school work on my own I would have loved that because the environment of school was so so stressful both primary and secondary school um I had teachers ask why I was in hiding in the toilet cubicles and eating my lunch and the toilet cubicles this is another thing that when I wrote the book thought it was so specific to me and I've since found out that loads of autistic people do this because the fluorescent lighting of school the noise like the all the social demands when you move from primary to high school are so difficult um that it's just very overwhelming that transition must be so hard Primary School to to Secondary School must be so difficult yeah in tons of uh girls especially uh when they transition from primary to Secondary School autistic girls that's when they have a lot of trouble um and there's this well-worn path of undiagnosed autistic girls it doesn't have to be this way where they're like kind of cool and quirky in primary school and like when I was at primary I would would be really bossy and I would make up games and I would give little talks behind the bends to girls and being weird was seen as a cool thing and then when you turn into a teenager that's like the last thing you want to be everyone looks at what everyone else is doing and falls in line whereas I kept being weird and I kept dressing really strangely and that wasn't seen as a good thing and then I ended up in a cams unit when I was 16 which is like um it's a child's psychiatric unit and you go to school there instead of okay going to school uh so I was in there for a couple of months and I believe that I was in there with other undiagnosed autistic girls okay but we were treated we were always treated as if we've done something wrong you described your secondary school as a bin fire was it it was like being in a it was like being in a president honestly it was so rough there would be like people I remember one time a boy sprayed the aant in his mouth at the back of the classroom and then like set fire to it and was like and then the teacher was just like literal B fire yeah the teacher was like pipe down at the back or I've got this really Vivid wow like a lot of the teachers as well you just think if I met those people in a pub I would not talk to them they were like a lot of them had definitely had breakdowns and it wasn't being addressed so many of them were so such strange people um and also I went to a Catholic School in Scotland now I don't know if Catholic schools in Australia have some degree of prestige associated with them but Catholic schools in Scotland are from when I believe they're from when Irish immigration happened right so my great-grandparents were Irish and the Irish were seen as these like poor immigrants they all kept themselves to themselves and we got given separate schools and for ages there was a real lack of social Mobility amongst Irish Catholics in Scotland um so the priority in my school was maintaining Catholicism and teaching religion there was no focus on education it would be so annoyed if I said that but there really wasn't um uh it was all just about let's maintain this division between Catholics and Protestants because that's quite a big thing where I'm from all right like everything was Catholics are this Protestants are that um because my family came over from uh Ireland my great grandparents and then they it was like they just perfectly preserve this old-fashioned Irish culture where you go to church all the time it's like a non-negotiable sex is a massive taboo um you're constantly told things like Protestants are evil um random things like my dad told me Catholics don't have nice Gardens because we're busy going to church it's just it's like so hard to explain but it's just this all-encompassing thing you get you would get taught to recognize Protestants by their names so all the Protestants are called like Douglas Fraser all the Catholics are called Ryan um Kelly like everyone has certain names and it just is this huge thing gosh um when you you were talking then about the cams unit and that that you were there with a lot of girls who had just basically been told they're bad is that how it was FR is no we weren't told we were bad we were all in there because we'd been unable to keep going to school a lot of us had attempted suicide I think that was what got me in there i' stopped I stopped going to school not in a and I remember it being I couldn't really work out why I'd stopped going to school because I was very a goody two shoes and I was very into my school work and I wanted to get straight A but I remember just sitting in class one day thinking this is too much like I have to leave and also at lunchtime I wasn't seeing my friends anymore I would just sit in the library on my own um so I stopped going to school and then I took an overdose and then that was their cue to be like we're going to put you in the unit okay so as far as I know that was what other girls were doing a lot of them were self Haring but the way we were treated by the staff now as an adult I did some support work with um in like a hostel for people that had come out of prison but a lot of them had mental health problems yeah and I saw the same thing in the staff I think it's just the nature of the power Dynamic um just the way the staff were with us it wasn't therapeutic and it wasn't effective and and I wish my autism had been picked up in the unit because I was was doing a lot of things that were Telltale autistic things so I addressed the staff as if they were my peers because autistic people don't recognize hierarchy yeah um you have to earn you have to earn uh respect for like the I don't know doing good stuff something like that um I would ask questions that were seen as really dodgy because I didn't know what were the right questions to ask yeah so a lot of autistic people are just trying to find out facts and clarify stuff and create certainty and very often this has seen as nitpicking being difficult being like intrusive in a creepy way so there was one time I got in massive trouble in the unit and bear in mind all I wanted to do in this unit was study for my exams and get into uni I just wanted to get straight A and get into uni um and there was this nurse this male nurse in the unit and I said oh have you have you had twins recently cuz I saw there were two car seats in the back of his car um and everyone just went weird all the staff went weird and people were all making these faces at each other that I couldn't interpret and then the next thing I got hauled into the head nurse's office and she was like uh you're asking intrusive questions of the staff and you know not to do this um because I'd also tried to make small talk with a teacher in class and I asked what school he taught at before he was in the unit and this was all seen as like really dodgy trying to find out stuff about them god wow it's [ __ ] honestly but I'm finding that confusing so that must have been so confusing mind I remembered at that point thinking okay I've not done anything to get in trouble you're all treating me like I've done something really bad and it was so embarrassing having all the staff ever a go at you because my identity up till then had been well I'm just quiet and hard working and I don't get into trouble and then after that I was like you know what [ __ ] the lot of you I started like smoking outside in the brakes started smoking weeds when I went back to normal school um because my parents had also treated me being put in the Cam's unit as this shameful thing and just never spoke about it and my brothers never brought it up either even cuz I've got two younger brothers so every day this taxi was coming to pick me up and take me into the unit and then I would get dropped off at the end of the day and no one mentioned it whereas for me obviously it was this massive change in my life that i' been taken out of school and put in a mental unit and then you would come home and you're just sit and eating dinner normally but I'm really close to my um my brothers um especially my youngest brother he said recently he was like we were terrified cuz Mom and Dad hadn't mentioned it at all he said all we knew was that you'd stopped going to school and just started getting picked up every day um and I mean unfortunately that's how a lot of Catholic families operate I mean not just Catholics I guess that's how a lot of families operate as never mention uncomfortable things and just go away yeah yeah when you um so being in like School obviously being so hard and friendships um in a meltdown for example if you're having a meltdown whether whether you're at school or as an adult I would never have one at school oh cuz you keep it all until you get home gotcha because the goal is present as normal as possible at school keep your head down and then the pressure just builds up and builds up I get you so because I guess I'm I'm often thinking like if I witness if I'm just in public and I see like a kid have a meltdown an autistic could have a meltdown yeah uh or even if like I might not know them but even if I did know them or if I if I happen to get to know someone and then I discover that they're autistic and they have a meltdown in my presence I guess I'm just interested to know what's the best way what what should I do oh um don't shout at them because that will make it worse uh try and get them to a quiet place try and get them to somewhere where they can calm down and regulate uh there's grounding techniques you can do like breathing or some people have um stem toys someone from my audience brought me one the other week stem toy oh like a stem stem oh like I'm fet I'm fidgeting with this hair tie just now ah gotcha yeah um yeah it's like a squeezy ball or something yeah but um actually I had done so I said I didn't have meltdowns at school I had a meltdown in an airport in somewhere in Canada I was going to the Montreal festival and I didn't think that would happened to me but it was like a perfect storm of um didn't have any sleep on the plane uh I'd had some sort of sleeping tablet that like messed with me uh and then I got stopped by border security over I'd filed out some Co for R and it was like loads and loads of stuff and I was like oh I just started like crying uncontrollably in in front of this guy um and then it's almost like you have to become the parent to yourself so I just took myself off in a toilet cubicle and I got a bottle of water and just St there to calm down but if you know what's happening and what to do about it it's so much better but I really feel for parents of autistic kids because I've heard stories of someone's kid has a meltdown in public and then other parents are looking at them really judgmentally and that happened a lot with me like my mom would always say oh you've always been a bad child uh there was one time we were having a fight when I was 16 and she was like ever since you were two and we were in Edinburgh airport and I'd had a melt because of the smell of perfume the fluorescent lights the uncertainty like everything um but I mean I guess I can't BL my mom cuz she didn't know that was autistic then but I have noticed some airports are getting better because people now can wear uh those lanyards and some airports have um quiet rooms that you can go off really yeah yeah and I've been looking out for them at Aussie airports um I didn't know that this would be life-changing for families in Australia if you own an airport in Australia please this is not a hard thing to fix yeah and if you wear a sunflower lanyard at least in the UK you can go through the priority q but I haven't I'm something I'm conscious of cuz I've got what they used to call aspers I've got ASD level one I don't want the people with like the next up level to think I'm taking the piss and just trying to you know I mean I just yeah like I I know that sometimes there's tensions where people are like oh there's all these people with what you used to call high functioning autism there's a whole debate around why not to say that and they're going on about their autism and what about my kid who has so many more needs but the lady that did the through an autistic academic did a sensitivity reads from my book this amazing woman called Joanne Lindberg she said had someone say that to her and she was like I have so much more in common with your autistic son who has additional support needs and we should think more of like the common ground that we have and um I do think it's important for people like me to talk about stuff that's affecting other autistic people I mean only last week there was another case of a black autistic person in America got killed by the police because they phoned 999 while he was was having some sort of meltdown and the police killed him that's that's happened so many times because being black and autistic is extra dangerous yeah because it's not what people think of when they think of autism and it's not what's been presented to us in the media um do you remember that guy that all came out during black lives matter and I reference him in my book cuz it's so G that guy people said it was a black guy got killed by the police so clearly presented as autistic to me um and he used to play violins for rescue kittens this all came out after his death heard this well the the police suffocated him he was walking do you know why I think they did it he was wearing his headphones and he was walking through the street and dancing and just having a nice time and that was seen as odd behavior um and he was in a tsel with the police and he died and during the tsel he advocated for himself and he said uh I'm just different and and he tried to like explain it to them oh God so I wish more people knew about stuff like that when they try and say oh everyone's getting diagnosed these days there's there's all this stuff going on before when you were um talking about the cams unit you mentioned that you had an overdose yeah but you mentioned in a very quick flippant not so much flippant but a very quick way would you mind going a bit deeper into I do I do tend to and I mean I have friends that like us as well uh talk about their suicide attempts in quite a flippant way but I suppose it's because by the time you've had them I don't know the bit before it is so much work there's so many other things that feel so much worse so yeah to um autistic people are uh nine times more likely than the general population to attempt suicide um it's like massively elevated risk um so I've had it a few times but I'd say when I took an overdose when I was a teenager it was a lot more I didn't want to die I just wanted to not be in the situation I was in anymore which was having to go to a school that I didn't want to go to every day and I was obsessed with getting straight is and getting into like the perfect univers Unity just I was very old or nothing about success um and I was just tired of thinking about it all the time the combination of thinking about that um and then all the other teenage Stuff Plus I was on a massively high dose of Prozac that I shouldn't have been on um because I don't know if you know like Prozac does have a risk of um suicide attempts okay didn't know that uh I think as I said before autistic people can react differently to medications I mean even like I barely drink but if I have two glasses of wine my eyes will be rolling about my head cuz I'm such a lightweight so I was just on all this stuff that didn't suit my body um and then after I took the overdose things got better because I got put in the cams unit and I didn't love being in the cams unit but it meant I wasn't in school and as I said in the book my parents could have put me in the garden shed with my textbooks and it would have had broadly the same m effect because it was such a relief to not just have to deal with all this sensory overwhelm every day mhm did you and sorry if I picked up on this the wrong way there but did you say You' attempted suicide a few times before um there was one when I was little okay uh really little um because I cuz I got a bad report at school and my parents were really angry with me so that's like a wild dis disproportionate reaction I used to feel silly about and then I've since read about the circumstances around which other autistic people um commit suicide and it's very like similar yeah okay sometimes it's not always the same reason but all or nothing thinking and thinking things are the end of the world MH um and then yeah I've done it three times but not since being in comedy i' say things got so much better when I started comedy oh wow comedy gave me so much more freedom and um gave me a life where I was able to be myself without being punished for it whereas when I was at school and at Uni my life was really suffocating yeah sounds it the other thing that I'm interested in your thoughts and is people will sometimes say I've heard a lot of people say well we're all on the Spectrum a bit we're all a bit on the Spectrum yeah AR we we're not you're Autistic or you're not yeah that's that was something that was that someone saying that to me actually delayed my diagnosis um said oh we're all on the Spectrum and do you really want uh to have that on your record and to have that label um so that then delayed me getting diagnosed for another two years the way I understand people saying we're all on the spectrum is I've been told that neurotypical people have a tendency to speak in generalizations uh neurotypical people see the big picture autistic people see detail first think of the bigger picture later that's a really handy way to think of it actually um so when people say we're all on the Spectrum I guess it's another way of them saying hey don't feel alone but for autistic people the way we hear it is it's minimizing this whole Secret World of struggling with sensory issues um and trying to cover it up and never really knowing what people mean when they say stuff and being in a constant state of cognitive dissonance because neurotypical people tend to not always mean what they say or say what they mean yeah sorry I'm just peppering you with questions is that a an interview it's kind of the point I remember hearing the apologies about the microphones to be honest the brothers things through me even more because it was just such a quiet reveal and then you looked almost slightly arst that you were brothers or something I'm the weirdest part is I'm their dad F what yeah it's really strange I was thinking you're their cousin actually yeah no just um proud father oh that's proud father yep I remember hearing a writer I think it was Christopher Hitchens talk about how where a lot of neurotypical people are unaware of how many cognitive dissonances they hold at every Point uh unknowingly um and is the is cognitive dissonance a very unpleasant or difficult thing for you to hold on to like is it does that add anxiety to what you're feeling so I was just reading the other day someone autistic online was saying we're not bad at reading social cues it's more that the way neurotypical people talk we know that they don't necessarily mean what they're saying so for example one of the hardest things to get used to is people say how are you and you've not to say how you are you have to say fine that's the so often I get this sense when I'm playing at small talk because it does feel like a game that you have to get right I get I do get the sense that I'm in like an absurd uh theater performance um because every time someone uh says to me oh hope you had a great weekend I want to say well I work every weekend so I was just working uh like and you can't do that because it's jarring for people um so you you have to work within this system of trying to rub along and remember the right answer to stuff but when when I was younger I was so but I would say the maddest stuff all the time because I didn't know yeah um I didn't know I was autistic so I would just the number of comedians that have said to me when they first met me I just came out with this thing like I've got this lovely friend that I met when I was doing a competition called so you think you're funny that a lot of new comedians do um and he said that I said to him your weight really goes up and down a lot doesn't it and I was like you're like KY Ali from cheers and he like really struggled with Benji and I just was coming out with that stuff yeah or just the number of times I've been someone will tell me something I've said and I know I don't disagree I'm like yeah I did say that but from my perspective I meant something different so my friend Lou she hated me the first time I met her that this comedian Lou Sanders because I was staring at her hands and I said hey you have big hands and she was like um okay thanks but I was I was excited because I'd started to notice lots of female comedians had big hands and I thought what's the connection here but I suppose from their perspective someone just come up and like insulted a part of your body whereas for me my view of the world was just focusing on all these big hands yeah the day first big well that was like the 10th pair of large female comedian hands i' seen so I was like maybe there should be a study on us like M are massive when just listening to you speak I just feel like and and with my experience it just it feels like people withd they're honest and they even even the like like the small talk thing not being a to do small talk yeah you just say what you're thinking and you respond to the situation around you whereas you know typical people play we play a part like we act like play characters yeah we play characters and and the small talk thing I was vastly aware of that when I met you this morning I didn't want to do small talk oh yeah you were great no but I wasn't cuz I said oh so how many times have you been to Australia do you like being in Australia what's your I do yeah I know but but I just feel like the neuro Divergent way of doing things it really makes more sense a lot more sense well we yeah we have I've seen other autistic people say um to neurotypicals honesty is like a magic trick because when I started in comedy I was constantly getting called oh she's so honest she's so fearless and I was thinking no this isn't it's not Fearless I'm I'm such a scaredy cat um so I found that very baffling um because I mean for me it's more of an effort to to try and do things you guys way um and I do make a big effort in it um I the the thing that popped into my head then was a uh there's a book written by the I think he's a neuroscientist Sam Harris that talks about um I love Sam Harris's uh meditation it's great isn't it such a good app some of my friends won't use it because they're like oh he's got problematic views and I'm like yeah but it's not like if you play The Meditation tape backward yeah cuz it's my favorite guided meditation yeah I've done it a bit as well I absolutely love it yeah he has a book on lying uh and he's tries to take on a philosophy and he writes about uh trying to never tell a lie as a person and he talks about the when you commit to not telling a lie there's a weight that comes off your shoulders that you didn't realize how many lies you were telling and every day in every little lie and he argues that every little lie has a cognitive weight on people that allows this space to live a more H you've got more energy from other stuff in your life and it just seems that the way you've spoken today it's such a it's like putting a magnifying glass on that idea that's interesting because that makes sense with the relief that I feel when I do stand up like I've heard some standups say oh who I am on stages is a character and I always find those ones a bit I think no you're trying to ask you're you're trying to not own that you have those views because for me the way I am on stage is I'm most I'm the most myself on stage that's why I called my show I gave you milk to drink cuz there's a Corinthians quote uh I gave you milk to drink cuz you weren't ready for solid food so I was trying to say all my previous shows have not been the most honest and this I'm going to try and be the most honest do when when you CU I'm so interested in the moment where you were diagnosed and were you already doing stand-up comedy you already I've been doing standup since 2010 okay gotcha okay so cuz we so I've worked in not never in standup but I've worked in comedy and done comedy things for for a while and uh I was really reluctant to start doing this podcast when we started it cuz I was really nervous about people like about being vulnerable and talking about myself and like serious things because I was worried that people would not see me as a funny person anymore and think that I was taking myself too seriously so I was just wondering and I think I had that was the book oh you did I thought the book was going to be Niche cuz I was the way I was think I was like no one I work with is going to read it so I'm just going to say whatever I'm going to put like the most [ __ ] up stuff in the book because like at that point I hadn't read one of my best mates books so I was like well he's not going to read my book so and comedians aren't interested in enough in me to read my book it's just going to be read Maybe by some autistic people and then I remember like the week it came out I actually had to start putting uh locks on my Instagram and shutting myself out Instagram because I got no exaggeration I've had like hundreds of messages from people being like it's freaking me out that your life is like my life and even I was gigging in America last year and this woman came up and she was like your life is my life and then she went but I did foot porn instead of stripping and I was like okay and I really wish I could have that as a quot so i' I've met people from all different backgrounds sorry sorry what was the first part of that quote I did what foot porn instead of strapping yeah she was uh yeah and that was that was some women from uh from New York told me that but I've had that experience repeated loads people from all different backgrounds and men as well I was worried that men would be put off by the title and not read it but it's been the response has just totally surpassed anything I've done in comedy but I thought it was going I was like this is going to end things for me this book is going to end my career as I know it I mean interested in stripping as in well the three of yous managed not to ask me about it and uh I think that's admirable until now okay but I had a lot of fun talking about it in the book no I trust you no the reason I asked is because I feel like surely that's noise and lights and I I know it was your part-time job when you were at for like two and a half years one of the longest jobs I've kept actually and I was so bad at it oh it's really telling that I've made more money from Comedy than I did from a job that's supposedly easy to do or seen as this you know sex work I think people who haven't done it see it as this last resort like if all else fails I'm going to go into this and it's like it's hard you have to be really good at making men think you're interested in them and if I I can't fake that I really can't I literally would have men throw money in my face and walk out wow because I would inadvertently say an offensive thing to them it's good way to get the money off them yeah but imagine being like Oh okay I want to go to the strip club and then the stripper put you off strip clubs completely to the point that you store them out it's a really I mean it's a fascinating considering everything you've talked about with how you um live in the world it yeah exactly that it seems like a really be a really interesting film character an autistic stripper hey funny you say that so um partly the way I got into writing the book was I was writing a script about I mean just I don't know if you can picture the way Scottish strip clubs are they're like like imagine have you seen the film Hustlers I haven't seen it now well Jennifer Lopez play are strapping in it she's really hot yeah uh imagine Hustler as if everyone was ugly excellent I was more thinking about the sensory overload but that's that's no the lighting's great the lighting's dark so you can't see how ugly everyone is no the lighting the lighting's like a dimmer switch turned down so it's almost off uh but yeah so then I started writing my book about autism and I started reading how many um sex workers also happen to be Autistic or ADHD which is such a I never would have thought that would come up I read this blog by an autistic stripper and she she said she loves it because the conversations are the same every night oh yeah uh people say you're too nice to work here MH uh do you have a boyfriend I don't really want to dance thank you like it's just the same things every night so then you can create a system SAR to stand up of working out what is the perfect thing to say um so yeah I really had fun writing about stripping in the book I did one chapter that's like here's all the fun times and one chapter like here was all the bad times because it's not one thing or the other mhm I think I mean it's a very it's it's a very interesting story in relation to autism I think I think that's sort of like the really sort of fascinating part about it and I really wanted would get push back from people being like well I've got an autistic daughter are you saying this is what they should get into the whole time I was writing the book I had to push voices out of my head of people being like are you saying all autistic people are like this and then actually it's only been so I think the book just came out here this year but it's been out for a year in the UK and the paperback just came out and it was only when the paperback came out that I did have a couple of people messaging being like you're making autistic people sound like we make a series of bad decisions and I was like no no no this is me this is me with autism uh because the thing is I'd read a ton of late diagnosed autistic women's books before they were all great but a lot of them with the exception of Hanah godsby actually were they'd had very sheltered up brings and which is great because it means they were cushioned from the worst of what can happen and you have to understand the autistic people are very vulnerable were over represented homeless po populations were over represented in psychiatric hospitals so we can fall through the cracks and I was only seeing one type of autism represented whereas for me my teens in my 20s it was just one chaotic event after another mhm and I mean now it's like very smooth sailing by comparison so I just felt it was important to show that side of it oh it's just been such an enlightening conversation it is so so wonderful to meet you you too and we wish you all the best for your tour um and the book is wonderful so the tour is pretty much all around Australia is um I gave you milk to drink and we will have a link to tickets in the show notes it's so nice to meet you f yeah you too lovely so lovely oh and the Netflix the Netflix show my Netflix show oh yeah um yeah if you have a look on um Fern's Instagram page you'll see Netflix promotion with her dead which I just love so much I just thought it'd be funny to make a trailer of my dad reacting to Good News the way always does with total indifference and then and then I've got the Netflix thing playing at the end like that's really good he basically finishes by saying I won't watch it cuz I don't have Netflix brilliant um thank you so much for joining us it's been an absolute pleasure thanks very much thank [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Imperfects

Views: 41,884

Keywords: the imperfects, podcast, hugh van cuylenburg, ryan shelton, josh van cuylenburg, vulnerability, mental health, comedy, growth, self help, the resilience project, interview, psychology, health, anxiety, depression, funny, neurodivergent, autism, feminism, masking, advocating, communication, cruelty, validity, representation, shame, embarrassment, meltdowns, socialising, routine, labelling, triggers, friendship, school, suicide, self-harm, spectrum, resilience, cognitive dissonance, honesty, vulnerabilitea hosue

Id: -DLkVQj8N34

Length: 86min 3sec (5163 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2024