[singing] [May the dear Lord bless you] [Have fun, okay. Go ahead. Go ahead.]

It was just autism. [music: k.k. lament] I'm sure you're all very surprised. Hello! My

name is Savannah and it's nice to see you again with this new information I've acquired on my travels. In a video I made last year I said I suspected I had a hint of autism

– oh ho, more than a hint! Detective! It's the whole damned case! When I was there saying

that I didn't really have any intention of going through the formal diagnostic process, I was content just thinking that was probably true, but as we all know, the truth begs to

be officiated in a clinical setting. I was diagnosed in May at age 26. And even though

I went into the diagnosis pretty confident about what the result would be and considered it a formality more than anything, I found myself really emotionally rocked by the certainty.

The whole experience affected me a lot more than I thought it would. I felt first very sad

but then I felt an incredible sense of closure and a moving on with my life from a pain that has affected me profoundly since I was very young. [boioioing noise] Thought I turned

that f***ing thing off. [studio laughter] The sense that has pervaded every aspect of my life up to now is that I am not like other

people. As a young child, a lot of my problems seemed to be a matter of sensitivity. And so

begins the very honest 3000-word essay I sent to the doctors tasked with deciding what –

what was going on. As part of the diagnostic process, I was told to write a four-page minimum

effectively life and times of Savannah Brown, which needed to include a statement from my parents, in which my dad wrote: "As a very young child, Savannah wasn't interested in unnecessary

interaction with others. She would always be the first to grow tired of playtime and head off to do something on her own. Adults often tried to make her smile or laugh in ways that

would typically work on other children, but Savannah wasn't amused. "Damn right I wasn't."

Folks, I was quirky. Cried easily and often about everything. Very emotional. Very clumsy,

embarrassed easily, severe food pickiness, went to the school nurse, like, once a week, begged

to be taken away from every sleepover I ever attended, and I loved dinosaurs and bugs.

This is my behavior chart from the year 2000, which features classics such as "share without

complaining" and "no growling." When I list these traits in this context, it's so clear that

that's what it was. But at the time, and quite literally up until now, all of these things

about me were mysterious. Why is this girl so odd? they all wondered. And I could sense

it, that my family and peers thought that of me – and for the record, I agreed. That sense

of social rejection became especially apparent in middle school; I really struggled socially. I felt like I could never say

the right words to endear myself to people.

My days were a life-or-death swivel between debilitating nervousness and complete confusion. I had no idea what was going on. A few occasions

made it clear to me that I just had no idea

about the social reality that existed around me at all – once I was having what I thought was a friendly, jokey conversation with

a girl in my class, and she concluded the conversation

by pushing me out of her chair. Oh my God, stop

bullying me. I very clearly remember approaching

able to sense that something was wrong. Like

there was a bristling. I eventually figured out I was making my peers uncomfortable. I

was making them uncomfortable with my personality.
This is – I'm surprised by how embarrassing this still is to recount. It was a tough
time. I don't think it's an overexaggeration

to say I found school traumatizing. My
parents, bless them, did not know. I was

a straight-A student who never got in trouble
for anything, so there was no indication anything was wrong. They also didn't know I was
autistic, obviously. They knew I was a little

quirky, but there wouldn't have even been
an inkling that that's what it was; the information

wasn't available; it's not their fault. Unfortunately,
at home the autistic traits were treated as

bad behavior – which, in conjunction with the
social rejection I felt, made it clear to me that I was bad, and these impulses, which only I seemed
to have, were bad, and I would have to fight

against them if I ever wanted to be good. Throw
in the Catholicism, and oh my God! That's a

very interesting person! I decided I could
become good and likable and desirable with the power of intent. I basically curated personality
traits, things that I found attractive

or endearing in other people and then pasted
them on top of myself. I knew this had to be

done. There was no other option. I also
knew that because my real self was, for some

reason, unsuitable for consumption, that I was
alone in this life. Geez. It was just me and this

difference, for which I had no name. That's
pretty heavy for a child. I am making this

funny; it's also sad, and I want to be explicit
about what this does to young people; 

I thought about not being alive anymore
a lot. Not killing myself, but not being alive. But it wasn't because of depression
or anxiety, which I did eventually get diagnosed

with at age 16. This is a common thing:
undiagnosed autistic young people are sometimes incorrectly diagnosed with depression
or anxiety because many of them are not

Doing well. I wanted to die because I was exhausted.
I was *exhausted*. I would go to school and act

in my personal eight-hour-long play and be
exhausted, and then I'd come home to my family

and act in a second, angrier eight-hour-long
play and be exhausted. And even in the moments

I did get alone, which I cherished more
than anything, I was sitting in those moments with the awareness, the absolute truth
that I decided there was something very, very

wrong with me. This was not ideal! Up until
recently, I found all of these things too fucked

up to even mention, but sometimes one finds
that one's darkest secrets are actually just common, well-documented symptoms. The diagnosis
has brought me a great deal of relief in

how explicable it's made these mysteries of
my past. I have felt profoundly, for decades, that I do not make sense, and to
discover that I, in fact, make perfect sense

has been so liberating, it breaks my heart.
Even things that happened to me that I considered like weird flukes: I was groomed online
when I was 15, which is something that's known

to happen to girls with autism. I had an eating
disorder, something else that's common in

undiagnosed autism. The relief exists alongside
the mourning of an imaginary childhood where I could have had an explanation and support
but did not. Of course, one wonders what

could have been different and what pains one
did not have to feel. But also, I've seen accounts

from people who did get diagnosed as children
and they have stories about getting funneled through the most nightmarish special
education programs you could ever imagine—it's like

there's no solution that leaves people unscathed.
Anyway, now I'm very independent, I'm very adaptable

when I need to be. The fact I can mask so well
is massively helpful in some situations, like,

it is happening now. I can come across well,
I can tolerate a lot of mental distress. Eventually

Things got better. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the social turmoil went away once I didn't

have to go to school anymore. I really found a home on the internet. Bit of a godsend.

I was just thinking about this: if I were alive in a time where I was not able to do

this, or, like, type in all lowercase as if my thoughts were getting beamed directly out

of my head, then I think I think it would have been bad. I think I would have had a bad time.

I'm just... I'm really grateful that we're all here and we've all found each other here.

Four years ago I made a video called "Forming real human connection? Sounds fake, but OK." It was about a loneliness I had been feeling

at the time. It was right after my 23rd birthday.

In hindsight, it is an unintentionally textbook listing of symptoms, which a lot of you were privy to; your degrees are in the mail.

But also what I realize now is that the main

thesis of the video kind of isn't true. I talk a lot about my perceived inability to form substantial, meaningful relationships

with people, but when I made that video I was

in a long-term relationship. I'd been in long-term relationships before that. I think what was

happening in my analysis of my own life was – I had a lot of big ideas about what

I thought it meant to be a normal person. To me, being normal meant having this, like, sprawling

friend group and being close to all these people, and if that's not what my life looks like, it means I'm... I'm doing something incorrectly

or I'm not trying hard enough. There's some

kind of deficiency in me that can be fixed with mental effort, and once it's fixed I can join them. This conceit is something that

keeps cropping up post-diagnosis. So much

of what I wanted for my life was structured to match what I thought a life was supposed to look like, rather than what I actually wanted

The difference between what you think you want and what you actually want is so much straining and shame and unhappiness.

At the moment, I do well to have one person. I can form that kind of intimacy I'm after

with just one person. I don't know if that'll change, but for now—I'm still figuring

a lot of stuff out. Other ongoing things: I experience meltdowns. They're triggered in

me most often by high-intensity emotional social situations. I actually feel like I'm retreating into my head, just like, horrible psychic pain... having any level of productive

conversation once the meltdown is happening is totally futile. It's awful. It's grim. It's like I'm possessed by mud. The diagnosis

has been especially helpful in letting me

accept that this just, like, happens to me, I guess? I've found my being "an adult who

throws tantrums" so humiliating, but recognizing this as an actual phenomenon that happens because of my autism and not just

been helpful in finding solutions, but also just being nicer to myself. Okay, this is a lot, but I'd be remiss if

I didn't mention it. If you're related to me,

you mustn't watch this next part. I've been exploring and have discovered that there seems

to be a higher incidence rate of autism among people who have fetishes. There's some research

about it, not a ton, but to me it makes sense: both sort of operate in hyper-fixation, sensory

i'm not an alien i'm just autistic :)

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