Life is rarely perfect, but it can be blandly normal. I admit that 2024 wasn’t easy. It ended badly. At least it wasn’t quite like how eventful 2023 was, with an ICU visit I’d rather not repeat. For now, I am attempting to accept the bland normalcy of life in…
Category: Health
From diagnoses to “treatments” and everything in between, posts about health and autistic life.
The most frequent question I’ve received after deciding to leave a job has been, “How could walk away without another job?” That’s a good question and reflects real concerns people have. Autistics struggle with employment without any additional challenges. Now that I have severe spinal pain and my Erb’s palsy…
Because I want to contribute to our family, I value work. Even if I weren’t married with children, I would want to be employed and take care of myself financially. However, the emotional need to be productive often runs up against my physical limitations. If I could earn a living sitting…
Good people in relatively good workplaces might still fail to understand or appreciate the traits of an individual Neurodiverse person. Tangent: I have addressed why I prefer to “misuse” Neurodiverse instead of using Neurodivergent. I might shift to “Neurominority” in the future; “Autistic” remains the best way to describe my…
Work-from-home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic was the greatest accommodation for differences ever offered. For those of us with physical differences and Neurodiverse minds, the WFH years allowed us to recharge and work whenever we were personally most productive. We did 40 hours or more of work weekly, but not…
Offering excuses for not keeping up with The Autistic Me frustrates me, but life has a tendency to get in the way of personal projects. I failed to release podcast episodes for most of 2024. I blamed an overloaded teaching schedule and a two- to three-hour commute (each way, 115…
August 9, 2024, was my final day as an instructor at Texas A&M University. The university is considered one of the best in Texas, and I was honored to teach there, but I was unhappy and unhealthy. Those two probably go together, with some uncertainty as to which is the…
I whimpered my way to the end of summer. Summer Term II ended on August 9, 2024, and a few days later, I developed a headache and sinus congestion. I assumed the headache resulted from severe allergies, which would be expected for this time of year. After reading that the…
Taking on too much at work or in school is something I hear other autistics admit to doing. Add the ADHD many of us have and it’s a potential disaster in the making. We take on more than we can realistically manage, trying to prove our value while setting ourselves…
Podcast 0113; Season 7, Episode 6; 17 May 2024 Note: Originally recorded 14 June 2023 About Bliss Road: In this sometimes funny, often devastating memoir, Martha Engber describes the arduous journey toward discovering the invisible roadblock that ran her life off course: her psychological distress is the result of being…