I think I may be a minority here but I do think Beckie is autistic. I obviously can’t diagnose and it’s just an opinion, but I’ve been watching her for almost as long as she’s been on YouTube and basically ‘grew up’ with her because she was one of the very very few people I related to and saw myself in (until she went to uni at least), I think her autistic traits were there all along and most of what I related to, just being female no one noticed them in her. I wasn’t diagnosed until my early 20’s myself and if I hadn’t been think I’d probably be in a similar position to her.
Finding out I was autistic was really the thing I needed to be able to say ‘okay, things really are harder for me than others, I’m gonna have to find my own ways to work around that’, and it’s so sad to see Beckie begin to possibly discover she’s autistic and take it as ‘bleh! See I told you things are hard for me! Everyone needs to be nicer to me now!’
Not to take the conversation back to gods, it must be nearly a decade now? But the extreme depression Beckie experienced in university (and vlogged constantly) was, I think, her first experience of major autistic burn out, and I don’t honestly think she’s ever fully recovered from it.
I’d just really love to see Beckie develop some self awareness, real self confidence and settle into who she is, because under it I do think she’s a great person, but she’s never learnt to let anything go or move on from anything, every slight trauma she’s ever experienced has left her with 1001 coping and defence mechanisms (needing validation online, withdrawing socially, seeing negatives even in positives, I could go on…) that’s she’s never bothered to address or deal with.
If she’d really found her niche, which she was close to at points, stayed consistent and learnt to monitor how much and what parts of herself she should put online, I think she could be very on par with the likes of Hannah Witton now, but she couldn’t get over herself enough to actually do it.