Unclear

What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?

I am at a crossroads right now, and I don’t know what to do. Historically, because of my mental and physical limitations, I am great at getting jobs because I mask and seem neurotypical to get by…… get severely overwhelmed and stop performing………. and the death spiral begins. I get social anxiety at work, which has only been exacerbated over the last eight years by many different things. But social anxiety and masking are only part of it. Right now I am unsure of how capable I am and need both counseling and a neurology consult.

My brain just does not fire and I do not understand logical processes. I also have to understand what I’m doing to buy in. When I seem to fail at enough things that neurodivergents struggle with and neurotypical people don’t, I tend to beat the hell out of myself because I didn’t know it was ADHD struggling against autism so that even I couldn’t tell what was what and didn’t think of myself as autistic until i watched a shit ton of YouTube videos, got peer reviewed, and now need a confirmation. But don’t underestimate the value of people relating to other people’s stories. I have found myself in multiple videos on autism, stories from multiple people and lectures by doctors and psychologists. It’s overwhelming because now I know why I’ve always felt like an alien.

I am so interested in other people that I’ve stood back and studied group dynamics for years…. since I was a child. What I cannot do is then turn around and see why my reactions are so different. To not really know why people’s interactions with me are confusing because everything makes sense in my brain- except for office politics. I have never been able to figure out those because so much goes on that is hierarchical and you don’t know who is really doing what. Your name comes up in meetings you don’t attend, and people are so full of HR-speak that you cannot find a clear path with a map and a flashlight because no one will tell you the truth…… that they have reached their ability to explain something and now I’m just being obstinate.

No, I am trying desperately to please you and I do not know how because something that makes sense in the moment fails when you walk away. Over time, this becomes truly problematic because it comes across as not being able to work independently….. and I’m not entirely sure this is untrue. I seem to have the most success with writing, but I cannot count on it because the validation from writing comes in believing in myself. The compliments I’ve gotten are astounding, but since I haven’t gotten them on a large enough scale, I cannot bet my future on going viral. What I do know is that by helping myself, I help others. I would be a good Glennon Doyle-type character, if only to end up married to a soccer player. 😉

That depends on other people seeing it first.

I don’t have the ability to do everything, but it’s different when you can hire it out rather than having to be the one where everyone’s expectations are heaped upon you and as a neurodivergent, you have no coping skills on how to mask in unfamiliar situations. It’s not a canned response. You have to be okay with going to your boss and asking for help more than everyone else, and they only have so much time and patience. Their executive function isn’t fucked up, but mine sure is.

Because of the cerebral palsy affecting my movement and my neurodivergence affecting my brain, I feel incapable a hundred percent of the time- until I sit down to write.

So, when you ask me about other career paths I’ve considered, literally all of them. I do not have the echo chamber that says “keep plugging away. Eventually you won’t be in trouble all the time.” I always am. The last time I had job security, I was in a government job where it was almost impossible to get fired and on a college campus where everyone attributed my gaps in functioning to being young. I am a child in an adult’s body because that’s how people treat me. It is hard to break those patterns because you don’t know what’s going on and why you can’t get with the program. It is not built for you. No one in an office has taken me under their wing without getting so frustrated they wanted to fire me that I wasn’t let go within six months. It was always attributed to other things, but in the kitchen my ADHD and lack of masking worked in my favor while also not having the dexterity to move fast and carry heavy shit. Because of my floppy muscles, I couldn’t predict when I could or I couldn’t hang. People saw it as my performance going up and down, and they always do. But it’s never a case of my limitations. It’s that I’m lazy.

In any job, you are defined by who you are…. the popular kids, the geeks, and the mean girls all have to work together. The degrees are not as pronounced but the microaggressions are real. You are marked quickly as a “type,” and if that type is incompetent because they don’t understand what I’m putting down, it’s never a matter that they didn’t explain it where I could pick it up. The hierarchy doesn’t have time to adjust.. they have time to hire someone they feel can actually do the job.

People expect me to be so capable because they’ve seen me “act normal” my whole life. I am fucked and having to catch up. Occupational therapy and seeing if it helps, because I drop so many details that I don’t feel capable and constantly have that message reinforced. I wish I had stayed in academia constantly. The river is slower, and makes the learning curve less steep because I have time to get comfortable in my environment, but even that is tough if I don’t have an office. Cubical farms are death to the ADHD and the autistic.

I cannot solve someone’s problem on the phone while hearing everyone else’s conversations and write down the problem and contact other people on line two. It’s too much stimulation and it’s what was expected of me every single day. I liked night shifts because of it. My body screamed in pain and I didn’t care because I could focus better. I dropped less. If you wonder why mainstreaming is hard on both parties, stuff like this is it. We get overstimulated and can’t function, you get frustrated and angry. Perhaps guilty that we don’t get it, because you know we’re neurodivergent and you’re still at wit’s end. You’re running a business here, man. You’re not a special needs teacher and we get it. We just don’t know how to deal with it and feel constantly horrible about ourselves for things we can’t control. It’s relentless.

When you get into simple jobs that I can do, they generally involve physical activity. I could be in a bakery, more laid back than a restaurant, but I can’ lift 60 pounds of flour. I can’t stock in a grocery store because everything is as heavy there as it would be in a kitchen. Perhaps a courtesy clerk. I don’t have a problem with an entry-level job because I don’t have to be brilliant at my job. I have to be brilliant at writing.

I am one of those people for whom disability would be perfect, but I don’t know whether I want to go that route. It involves giving up a lot, and I don’t know whether it would be worth it in the end. I need to wait until I get finished with the diagnostician and the neurologist. With disability, I have the ability to focus on what I do the most well, the job I actually can handle, with no ability to keep money I make from it. So, I’d rather learn what I need to know and so far behind the eight ball.

That’s because I refused to admit I have limitations before. Not only to everyone, but lying to myself as well. I have the energy to sit at my computer all day and type like a coder, but not the talent for STEM. I have tried to learn programming many times, and I do not have the executive function to understand logic to that degree. It’s like playing the pipe organ. I cannot keep track of what all my limbs are doing, and I cannot keep track of the music while I’m doing it.

I went downstairs to get some tea (maple espresso), and my housemate Magda told me that I was like a mushroom. That I grew where I was planted. She meant that I needed to get out more. I took it as a compliment. I also take trash and turn it into beauty. So rare a pig searched for me, something plentiful yet hard to find.

You can’t use truffles in everything. They have a very specific set of applications, and the rest seem off…… it’s just…… unclear.