Autistic and me

As I mentioned in my previous post, after reading ‘The Luck Factor’, a book by Dr Richard Wiseman, I realised that my attitude towards opportunities isn’t great. I tend to think my endeavours won’t be very lucky, so I don’t take the necessary steps to really get them off the ground, even when it’s something small.

A good example is what happened a few years ago when I’d been blogging for about a year. I wrote a post or two about how John and I played board games. Shortly afterwards, I got an email from a marketing person representing a different game, asking how much I would charge for a sponsored post.
I didn’t have many readers, so I assumed that once I shared my statistics with them, they would lose interest. As a result, I simply didn’t reply. Not even with, “Hi, I’d be happy to do it for free — just send the game my way.”

Most people would probably say I should have been more confident. But I wonder how much of it was simply me being logical. I used to be very good at maths and even studied probability at the Open University when I was planning to become a maths teacher (before I realised I was autistic).
The thing is, the likelihood of success as a content creator is small. Probably higher than the likelihood of winning the lottery, but still small. So why would it happen to me? I’m quite average, really, if you think about it.

Until now.

I obsessively believe in my patterns, and I’m looking for ways to find people who will connect with my art. There must be some of them out there. It seems very unlikely (you see, probability again) that I’m the only person in the entire universe who likes staring at patterns.
And yet…

I never expected my YouTube channel to be an instant success. I know this is something new. The colours may not look great if someone has a blue light filter switched on, and if it’s a long-form video people may not even realise that the image is going to move, or that they might enjoy it. Also people need time to get used to new stimuli.

When I started my channel, I tried to assess how things might go. I thought that if I had 500 subscribers after a year, it would mean things were going well. If I had 50, it would mean it wasn’t great.
And how many do I have?

Eighteen.

And three of them are my friends (I didn’t realise I had so many friends!).
So again, I didn’t expect much, but I got even less.

But something is different this time.

When I was around 25, I was studying IT part-time and struggling to find a job because unemployment was around 25%. At some point, my mum had a tarot reading from a local medium — nobody famous, just someone from the area.

The woman told her that I would move abroad and become a famous artist.
As I said, I’m far from famous, but I do make art. So I am an artist.

I didn’t believe the prediction at the time. I wasn’t planning to move abroad and I wasn’t making art. But I knew that if my mum had wanted to invent a story to cheer me up, she would probably have told me I was going to have a successful corporate career.

So now I’m wondering: is it possible the tarot reading was right? I don’t know. But it does make me work harder towards my goals. Maybe this time the probability of success will be on my side.

If you think you may enjoy staring at moving patterns check out my channel here: @staringatpatterns