Theme
2:49pm February 18, 2012

“If you do not find work in one of your areas of obsession, you will probably be distracted, bored, depressed; you may even find you become physically sick. ”

— 

Rudy Simone, Aspergirls

That’s never been me.  The longest I ever worked was doing stuff, paid minimum wage, at the residential facility I was in as a teen.  It involved painting walls and fences, shoveling large amounts of manure and putting them in a wheelbarrow and dumping them elsewhere, and anything else physical that needed to be done on the grounds. 

Loved it. Never got bored, never felt bad, had finally found something I could do consistently and well and was proud of myself. Probably never could have done it full time, and after my body started falling apart couldn’t do it at all, but for that duration of time I’d found something I was able to do and that was all that mattered to me.  Especially since I’d been worried sick about what I could do as an adult given how unstable were the cognitive skills involved in intellectual work for me.  This was like finding heaven, while it lasted. 

Of course part of my problem was I’d bought into the whole idea that you had to work somehow or the world would fall apart. But that’s another story. Fortunately this author does include descriptions of people who did best with repetitive physical work.  But there’s still this idea going around all over the place, that says that the trick to getting jobs for autistic people is to match our skills (meant to say jobs) to our special interests. That only works when a special interest lines up with a skill that a person can perform consistently under the demands and pressures of the kind of work it involves.  And who can do all that without rapid burnout. And that just isn’t me.  

You have to line a person’s work up with skills, not just interests. And you also have to face the fact that not everyone is capable of competitive employment.  Lining up a job with special interests sounds like one of those things that’s fantastic for those who can manage it, but simplistic at best for the rest of us.  One of those solutions that looks best on paper.  In my case, it was the attempts to find jobs I was interested in that left me exhausted, depressed, and sick, because I couldn’t sustain them.