Reading my teenage diaries - as an autistic adult

Описание: Reading my teenage diaries was quite the illuminating exercise. I thought it would be a fun idea for a video to look back at a randomly selected diary from my teenage years (when I was living with undiagnosed autism, among other things) and see if I could detect any signs of autism that were missed back then.

Oh boy, there were plenty! I kept diaries from about the age of 11, and believe me, the video would have been a LOT longer had I included everything! Growing up with undiagnosed autism clearly took its toll on my mental health at the time, and although I am much happier today, my wish is that no one else ever has to go through what I did.

Trigger warning: frank discussion of teenage mental health, suicidal thoughts, disordered eating, and more.

Making this video was actually quite hard - to film and to edit, but I found it rather therapeutic in the end, to release all the pain that 16 year old Sam had bottled up inside.

What I didn't expect was that it often felt like I was reading the diary of a completely different person (which was a relief I suppose!) and instead of cringing at myself, I just felt compassion for the person I used to be.

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Credits where credit's due:

Greta Sting Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

This video idea was partly inspired by Mortified: http://getmortified.com/