The Kindness Report #27: “I Think I’ve Found My People”

Adam James had been putting off going to a music festival for years.

Not because he didn’t want to. He loves music deeply – he’s an aspiring drum and bass DJ who performs under the name Adzo, and the thought of being surrounded by it for five days at Boomtown Fair in Hampshire should have been everything. But Adam is autistic and has ADHD, and the idea of navigating all of that alone, in a crowd of strangers, was enough to keep him away year after year.

“I’ve always put it off because I’ve never had anyone to go with,” he said.

This year, at 24, he decided to go anyway. He worked hard and saved all year for the ticket. His dad Andy was worried enough that he had a plan: if things became too overwhelming, he’d drive to Hampshire and bring Adam home.

Adam set up his tent. And then someone asked to borrow his tent mallet.

A Tent Mallet

It was the guys from Bristol, camping nearby. One of them needed a mallet. Adam lent it. A small transaction, completely unremarkable, the kind that happens a hundred times at any festival.

Except they noticed something in the exchange. Adam was alone. Not just at that moment, for the whole week.

They invited him to camp with them.

“I couldn’t live with myself letting him be on his own, so we took him in,” said Ciaran Herniman, one of the group.

That sentence. The simplicity of it. Not “we felt sorry for him” or “we thought it was the right thing to do.” Just: I couldn’t live with myself letting him be on his own. As though the alternative was never really an option.

What He Normally Doesn’t Do

Something happened inside that tent that Adam himself found surprising.

He told them about his autism. He doesn’t normally do that, it’s usually something he keeps to himself, a private fact about how he moves through the world. But around these guys, something felt different.

Ciaran’s response was immediate and exactly right: “We’re all different in our own way. None of us would even think about judging you for that.”

And that was that. The disclosure landed softly, was accepted completely, and life at the festival carried on. Adam had friends to spend the week with. People who made room for him, included him, made sure he wasn’t standing alone at the edge of a crowd watching everyone else have a time.

He sent his dad a message from inside the festival. Andy says he will never forget it.

“I think I’ve found my people.”

The Goodbye

When the festival ended, Adam cried.

Not because it had been hard. Because it had been good, so good that leaving it hurt. He said goodbye to the guys from Bristol and went home carrying something he hadn’t arrived with.

Andy posted on Facebook to thank them. He wrote it for their parents, mostly – strangers who probably had no idea what their sons had done that week. “I’d like to thank these guys from Bristol who befriended my son. You made Adam’s weekend.”

The post spread. Millions of people read it. And what followed was the kind of thing that happens when a story travels to the right people at the right time.

What Came After

Adam is an aspiring DJ. After his story went viral, invitations started arriving – from DJs, from clubs, from people who had seen the video and wanted to give him a stage.

He was booked for gigs. He was invited to join a DJing course through the Pete Tong Academy.

And then Boomtown Fair itself got involved. Luke Mitchell, the festival’s co-founder, said the story had spread through the Boomtown office “with absolute joy.” Adam has now been invited to perform a DJ set at Boomtown in 2027 – the very festival where a group of strangers lent him something to belong to for a week.

He went to his first festival alone. He’ll go back next year as a performer.

The Larger Thing

It would be easy to make this story about what followed – the DJ bookings, the Pete Tong Academy, the Boomtown stage invitation. Those things are wonderful and they deserve to be celebrated.

But the story was already complete before any of that happened. It was complete the moment Ciaran said “we’re all different in our own way” and meant it. It was complete when Adam sent that message to his dad from inside a tent at a festival he almost didn’t go to.

I think I’ve found my people.

That’s the whole thing. A group of guys from Bristol who didn’t know Adam and didn’t have to do anything and did it anyway – made room, made space, made a week feel like belonging. Nobody asked them to. There was no audience for it when it happened. Just a young man with a tent mallet and a group of strangers who looked at him and decided he shouldn’t be alone.

The rest is noise. Beautiful noise, but noise.

The real story is the tent mallet. And what came after it.

Missed previous Kindness Reports? Read them here: The Kindness Report

Seen something kind around you? Tell us about it — we’d love to share it in a future Kindness Report.

Sources:
Sunny Skyz | Good Morning Britain / YouTube | BBC News