Josh Sauchak – Why he’s so important to me.

This is my first post, I have moved it from the original location but you can still find it here.

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Today I bawled my eyes out, not out of sadness but out of happiness because I finally got to explain to someone what Josh means to Autistic and Aspergers people and I realised during that explanation that he’s my favourite character. Not just in Watch Dogs but in the whole of existence.

Now I feel a little weird writing this because I’ve never felt this way with a character before and if you read this and start to get a little confused please bare with me.

Public Announcement

I’m a fairly quiet person. I don’t talk about my feelings or what I experience because I don’t ever see the point. I am many things, as are we all and I am not perfect. I have never been nor have I ever pretended to be such but the one thing I have always taken pride in is that I do not like to lie, even if I avoid answering questions such as “Are you okay?” I do not lie and say how I’m okay if I’m not because I believe in that. I have spent years building myself and ensuring that those around me know that I shall always speak the truth or say nothing at all. Which is what I plan on doing now. I don’t like to publicly talk about my feelings, I barely speak about them with friends but right now I am at a point where I cannot keep it quiet anymore because it’s destroying me. They know this. I know this and now you reading know this.
We are often shunned into silence, bullied and belittled when we try to talk about our feelings. This leads to a stigma that opening up about such things are weak or attention seeking. I have been bullied. I am still being bullied. Now it’s time to end this, once and for all because I am through being treated this way.

My New Years Resolution

We all know how it goes. The year comes to an end and people start making ‘resolutions’ that are supposed to better their lives. Most of the time they get broken and part of me believes that maybe that is part of the ‘tradition’ of New Years Resolutions, even if it isn’t meant to be. That, however, is an entirely different point.
My New Years Resolution is one I have been working on these last couple of months; I want to be more autistic.

Autism Awareness: the puzzle piece and autism $peaks

The puzzle piece of my tattoo.

During April people preach their false or misguided support for Autism/Aspergers awareness, however, when you wear blue and wave puzzle piece flags around screaming about awareness with the hashtag #LightItUpBlue, you are damaging our cause by supporting an organisation that preys upon the ‘struggles’ of ‘autism parents’. I say ‘struggles’ not to remove the severity of it but to pull attention to where it really matters; the person on the spectrum.

Aspergers: the link to suicide and depression.

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I have brought up how suicide rates have been rising drastically amongst those on the Aspergers spectrum.

I will place a warning here to anybody who is sensitive to these kinds of topics. This is a dark post that will contain ‘triggers’ (they have been tagged).

Josh changed my life: Watch_Dogs 2, still important.

With today being the one year anniversary of Watch_Dogs 2, I felt it only right to make a post about everything that has happened since the release of the game until now and how I feel about these things, as well as Josh. This post will be rather long, so I do apologise for that, I simply have a lot to get out.

The Watch_Dogs GIF – How I did it.

This post isn’t about my Aspergers in any usual way. More of a thank you to Ubisoft again, they give us so much of their time, so I spent the last five days working on the GIF pixel by pixel, in a loving way of giving them my time. In a way, it does tie in with my previous Watch_Dogs posts but it is also based on recent events. It also ties in with Aspergers in a more subtle way.

 

“I can’t do this alone.”

I must give a warning to this post that what you will read ahead won’t follow the same theme my previous posts do. This is about self-hatred, sadness, loneliness and pain, all because I am on the spectrum. This post might be long, I’m sorry.

Conventions and cosplay: easy, right?

This post is about my experiences with conventions and cosplays based on past events.

Back in July I finally got to do my first cosplay after years of wanting to do one but never having the confidence, time or money. I have been to conventions before, small ones near where I live and adored doing them. From conventions based on specific things (like The Warriors convention) or a general mix of games, anime, movies, comics and shows. These conventions have always been rather small though, with the largest one I had been in Bristol in 2016 until recently at Montreal Comic Con 2017.

Struggling with acceptance.

A lot of my posts have been rather positive in the underlying message or they have been directly positive. Sharing how I have accepted myself a little more thanks to Ubisoft and Jonathan Dubsky for the creation and portrayal of Josh Sauchak in Watch Dogs 2. I mentioned how much Josh means to me and how grateful I was. That post received a lot of positivity, hopefully, this one will receive the same amount of attention as it is important, yet sadly, a little negative in comparison.

Helping people and accepting responsibility.

Recently I was appointed a job of watching over a channel in the /r/Watch_Dogs server and I did my best to do so. The channel became extremely important to me as I had never been given the chance to have such responsibility of making sure that the chat stayed clean, the people were happy and no rude comments were made etc…