There’s a triad of things that’ve been going on lately, which have severely impacted how much time I can give to this blog. I don’t like it, but it’s how it is. I explained my health situation last time. Today I’ll talk about my job situation. There will be some context removed, because the major part of the triad of changes is still too painful and difficult for me to talk about.
My financial situation changed in June of this year. I needed to take on a greater share of the costs for the house and food and such.
For context, I hadn’t had a 9-5 job in years at this point. In fact, I was actually in despair about it. Every 9-5 job I had, felt like I’d failed at for one reason or another.
Tries at Employment
Major
For example, I went to college to study Psychology. That was good and interesting, but when it came time to consider grad school, I was pretty much just done with being in school. So I didn’t do that, and that meant I couldn’t become a therapist or do much besides manage people or counsel high schoolers (yeah, figure that one out). Neither of those things really appealed to me, because I hated high school and kind of hated people. So managing them for a living seemed stupid at best.
Minor
Instead, I attempted to make a living in my minor, Information Systems. That’s more or less what you get when you cross a Business Degree with a Computer Science degree. I got an internship job coding a new RFID system for city’s public library. I liked the job and the people. But the internship was never meant to last, and there was no job available for me to move on to in the city proper. I tried to get a job at a local company doing more or less the same thing, and it wasn’t a good fit. They fired me after a while.
I Can Organize Stuff?
After that, I started to really despair. I got a job as a secretary (administrative assistant) at a local special needs service provider. Specifically, an autism clinic. Which was mostly fine, but eventually the bad parts of the job started to get to me. For instance, hauling stinky bags of diapers every day was really revolting. And being on the phone with insurances sparked misanthropy as well as self-hate.
Autism Education
So eventually I left, and did not pick up another full time or even part time job. By that point Chris had found work, and he made enough by himself that it wasn’t necessary to have paying work. So I began to focus on my vocation, which is autism education.
Blog
I’d been doing this blog for a few years at this point, and so I decided to develop that work and share what I’d been learning. Not just to share my thoughts, but also share the best of the education I was giving myself.
Autism, you see, is a very complicated subject. I’d hoped, at one point, to find or make a definition of autism that people could use and rely on. I figured it out a few years later: that is not possible in the current state of things. Autism runs the gamut from people like me, who seem almost normal (but we’re not and have just learned to hide our differences), to people who may never be toilet-trained and probably won’t ever live on their own or go to college.
Autism’s cause is unknown. You cannot point to one thing, like genetics, environmental factors, food allergies, or parenting techniques, and say “yes, this is what causes autism.” The truth is that a lot of things factor into whether someone’s going to meet the diagnostic criteria. And to the average person trying to care for their kid or themselves, what exactly makes them autistic is irrelevant. They need services and support and good information to help with immediate issues, not lengthy scientific explanations that pretty much have to end with, “we think, but we don’t know for sure. Maybe do more research?”
Not a Career (yet?)
In looking back over this blog, I feel I did some valuable work. I read and reviewed over a hundred books, and tried various products to see how they’d work and if they’d be helpful to the community. I summarized and shared a ton of research related to autism and co-occurring conditions. My perspective is valuable, I think, in part because I try to see many perspectives and stay open-minded, but arrive at a single, accurate conclusion.
However. My work did not end up leading to a career (yet?). That’s probably because I didn’t do enough networking. The paradox of a career in autism education is that autistic people struggle with socialization, but it’s mandatory to make the connections needed to find work.
I felt sufficiently overwhelmed by everything that I didn’t reach out enough. And so, while I had occasional jobs, they didn’t make a living.
Making Do
Now my financial situation has changed, and I can’t afford to just do the blog for work. In the months since June, I’ve held four jobs.
I picked up two part time jobs at once, one at UPS, and one at a local church that wanted to hire a sound technician. I have about a decade of experience running sound for a different church, so the second was easy enough.
The UPS job was both good and bad. The hiring process was stunningly fast. I applied and had a start date within an hour. No interview. Just some time spent at the computer. Then there was a week of training, and then I was throwing boxes onto conveyer belts. It was hard work, and my body started to fail after a while.
The bigger problem, though, was that I couldn’t make enough money between those two jobs to make ends meet. It’s not wise to be losing money every month. So I went looking for another job. I found work at a local food factory that mostly does baking mixes. It would make ends meet, at $16/hour for 40 hours a week. There’s a post about that job and why it didn’t work out. Mainly, it didn’t work out because joy goes to die at places like that, and I wasn’t allowed to listen to music or podcasts.
Trial By Inferno
Which leads me to my present job, at the post office. It’s not a career position, it’s a job that can lead to a career position. The work isn’t very hard, or even that physically taxing (besides having to stand for pretty much the entire shift). However, the schedule is volatile, and they may schedule me for up to 84 hours a week. (That’s 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, by the way.)
It will definitely make ends meet. I can even make extra payments on the house and probably buy an entire new wardrobe of clothes if I wanted to. I just have absolutely no idea if I can survive 84 hour weeks.
I’m calling it Trial By Inferno, and hoping I can make it work. If I can, I can get a career position in various parts of the mail system. Including working at my local post office, about 5 minutes away from home.
Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.
realisticautistic 