Last updated on November 26, 2023
Podcast 0009; Season 01, Episode 09; May 15, 2018
This week, I have struggled to get going on several projects. I am preparing for academic conferences knowing that these events will not advance my career. My goal was to secure a new professorship for 2018-19 and use these conference papers to advance towards tenure.
Now, I am investing a great deal of time and energy into projects without dividends.
It is hard to motivate myself knowing that my job search has ended and that I need this blog and podcast to turn into something more. If I am unable to promote what I am writing and producing, then I have failed completely. The words you are reading are all I have, now. They are my job.
Transcript (lightly edited)
Welcome to The Autistic Me Podcast. I’m Christopher Scott Wyatt.
I’m autistic and I’m unemployed.
Only 14 percent of autistic adults are employed in their communities. A third of autistic adults are considered college and career capable, but less than half of that group are employed full or part-time.
A 2017 Drexel University study found that employment rates for autistic adults are lower than for any other disabled community. Only 58 percent of autistic adults were employed at some point after high school. That compares to 74 percent of the intellectually disabled and 91 percent of those with other mental health or neurological challenges.
Employed at some point. That’s what I’ve been — briefly employed at various times since high school.
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I recently discovered a book that doesn’t really make me feel better. The Autism Job Club is both depressing and hopeful. Released earlier this year, the book by Michael S. Bernick and Richard Holden explores autism and employment. The introduces members of the Bay Area Autism Job Club, a group of autistics who meet monthly as a support group.
Most of the autistics in the Bay Area Autism Job Club are well-educated. They are intelligent and creative. They should be gainfully employed, it would seem.
But, like me, many are “freelancers” struggling to find that magical formula that provides a steady income and secure future.
Without my wife’s jobs and the security they have provided, we’d have nothing. Her employers have provided insurance and retirement plans. She is how we are able to care for two wonderful children.
She reminds me that I contribute by being the parent on call. I am the transportation and the supplemental education provider.
I’d still like to have a career.
When I’m asked what I do, I will answer that I am a writer, and that is true. But, only a few freelance writers are able to make a career of writing. Since 2006, I have contributed a monthly column to an advertising supplement. That has been my only steady income for the last 11 years.
Since January 2003, I have been employed full-time in a potentially permanent job for all of one year. One single, miserable, year.
That job, teaching at a small, private university, is what brought my wife and me to Southwestern Pennsylvania in 2011. By 2012, I asked to be released from my three-year contract, leaving me unemployed and my wife and I far from family back in California.
In the six years since leaving that position, I have taught as a visiting professor and as an adjunct professor. Those were temporary jobs, a reality of higher education — especially in the humanities.
The longest I have held any significant job is three years. I worked for three years at the University of Southern California as a mainframe computer consultant and I taught for three years as a graduate assistant at the University of Minnesota. Both of those jobs were student employment at universities, part-time work to help pay for my studies.
After completing my bachelor’s degrees in journalism and English in 1990, I was certain that I would be a high school teacher. But, I never completed my clear credential in California. I did my student teaching and accepted a temporary position at my former high school. And then another temp-to-hire position was offered, which I accepted. To this day, I wish I had remained at my former high school and cleared my credential while teaching there.
Taking the second teaching job, in the midst of labor strife and other problems, was a mistake. I’ve always felt like a failure for not obtaining a clear credential to teach high school.
But I loved teaching. I thought I could ignore everything else, but I was wrong.
It wasn’t the coursework for the teaching credential or the exams that presented a problem. It was my inability to be quiet when I saw abuses of students or the system. It was the same inability to remain silent and my compulsion to answer honestly when questioned that led to my exit from my one and only tenure-track professorship.
Rigid ethics proved to be a problem in the real estate and financial industries, too.
The only full-time, long-term work I’ve had was created for me by my wife and her family. We had two retail businesses, neither of which thrived. We worked hard, especially my wife, and did all we could to beat the odds.
Along the way, I had continued to substitute teach in local schools and taught part-time at a local community college. I enrolled in three different master’s programs before 1999, but struggled in each setting.
In 2004, we decided I would again try to return to teaching full-time, this time at the college or university level. I enrolled in a master’s degree program at a California State University and taught courses. As followers of The Autistic Me know, I managed to complete a master’s degree, a doctorate, and recently a Master of Fine Arts. Each degree was meant to be a step towards becoming a professor.
Despite outstanding student evaluations, solid peer reviews, conference papers and publications, I did not secure another tenure-track teaching post.
Now, 14 years after we began this journey through higher education, I am unemployed with no prospects. It has been almost three decades since my undergraduate studies.
We have a family, and I have no safety net.
Unemployment would be depressing without the university degrees and crushed dreams of teaching. However, knowing I have qualifications for various types of work and still cannot navigate workplaces leaves me angry, bitter, and disappointed in myself for not being able to obtain a job and remain employed.
I tell myself it isn’t the autism’s fault. It’s my fault for not training myself better. It’s not the autistic me, it’s me. I am the failure and I am entirely to blame.
I dreamed of being a writer and a teacher. This blog and podcast are part of my effort to write something, anything, that people will read. It is part of my effort to prove I can and should have a job. When I check the traffic data for my blogs, it is to reaffirm that I am a writer.
I hope those of you reading and listening to The Autistic Me find yourselves learning something along the way.
You’ve been listening to The Autistic Me, Christopher Scott Wyatt.
Thank you.
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