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…
Tag: employment
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…
Autistics often find themselves judged in the workplace not by their knowledge and skills, but by how well they perform “normalcy” in an office. To appear other than how they are, the Autistics must mask, as in putting on their happy worker faces and mimicking the “neurotypical” people around them,…
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…
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…
It’s the last few days of April, with finals starting in a few days. Student project teams are submitting their final reports, videos, and interactive fiction projects. As with the entire semester, I’ll be swamped with grading for the next two weeks in a mad dash to file grades on…
February 2024 is almost over and I haven’t managed to release a podcast episode with a guest since October 2023, nearly four months ago. The best I could do was a quick podcast on how busy we are, which I recorded in December out of a sense of guilt and…