impulsively wrote an entire ted talk on employment and autism and now I don’t know what to do with it lmao
edit: ’My Experience Working Full-Time with The Spicy Autism’ by me under the cut. it’s not a short post. enjoy
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I’m 25 years old, autistic with serious impairment, and I live alone with a full-time job. Some parents, professionals, and sadly, even other autistic people will say it’s not possible to be me. For those who are about to do that right now: if it’s really rocket science that someone can be fairly successful on one of the multiple axes used to decide an autistic person’s level of functioning and their autistic traits can still add up to serious impairment, substantial support needs, or whatever sub-label their diagnostician used, then maybe you should leave it to the rocket scientists. Or better yet, the pediatric specialist who diagnosed me.
Consider also that the specific axis I happen to personally be doing pretty good on means I can pay people and buy tools to help me get around the other axes, if only to such a degree that I haven’t died living somewhat independently. Most advocates and allies know it’s easier to be disabled if you have money. It’s easier to be alive if you have money. That’s the whole reason I want to talk about working as someone with a serious level of impairment, actually.
Bleak as it sounds, luck is a factor in my situation and it would be dishonest not to acknowledge that. There’s something out there that plays to my strengths, that I can get paid enough to live for, and that has accessible opportunities for me. Not even every abled person can say that and I hate when other disabled people use what worked for them as an excuse to be callous to anyone who can’t relate. But autistic advocates and even professional organizations meant to help us with employment approach finding the right job in a way that isn’t what got me somewhat gainfully employed, so maybe my experience will help one other person, and that would be cool.
My current career is not the first job I tried to hold down. I got to a point where I could work at all when I was 18. Some of this was probably just time, or brain development over time. I also did a lot of support groups and transition-y classes with a community organization that my caseworker at human services got me working with because, at that time, I was somewhat thrown out of the nest and couldn’t even get a job. That group also got me working with my state vocational rehab division. The latter actually might have done even more for me than I utilized it for if I didn’t crash and burn in other areas so badly that I lost touch with that caseworker who navigated these services for me. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on vocational rehab at all, but I would recommend looking into it or asking someone to look into it for you if you live somewhere that has services like that.
Once I did get to a point where I could at least navigate the working world, I could handle a year at most working part-time at the jobs I could technically do. Said jobs paid minimum wage, sometimes a little more, and offered no benefits. Don’t get me wrong, I was doing without a lot of things that would have definitely caught up to me if I wasn’t so lucky, but being autistic almost gave me a short-term edge. I depended on the exact same routine every week and I needed every waking moment that I wasn’t at work just to half-ass some kind of survival-level self care. You have to spend money to do a lot of things, and you have to be able to do things to spend money on them. I could even save a little bit of money each paycheck and my level of difficulty with change might have kept me from quitting some jobs until I absolutely had to.
From there, I improvised my way to my current good situation as opportunities became available around me. Splitting rent with family in a major city instead of the more rural area where I grew up became an option. This made it possible to take the bus to more places, so I used that opportunity to go back to school. I got enough financial aid to cover my tuition and books, so I could live on my savings for a while. In my eyes at least, I could pretty much study anything my nearest community college had to offer. It was the first time I really had a choice in what to do with myself, though. All I really knew was that I couldn’t do the jobs I had been doing forever, and what would happen then? I didn’t have much frame of reference for what the alternative would actually be, so I just picked something and my hunch was right somehow.
The reason why this matters is a lot of resources about working as an autistic person revolve around what your interest or passion lies in. This isn’t for no reason. Not all of us can tone down our special interests. I don’t have a social life except for an online server that revolves around the specific manga-slash-anime that’s been my special interest for many years. Sometimes the intensity and focus of my obsession with it makes the people in that server stop talking to me. Imagine how autistic you have to be in order to be too autistic for fandom spaces! The assessments and skills tests I did through vocational rehab were a little less idealistic about it than some resources from within the autistic community, but they still suggested a lot of creative jobs to me, probably because my special interest is a creative work, and/or because I channel my special interest through creative things like fanfiction and voice acting and cosplay. But I’m actually glad I didn’t listen to any of that.
Instead, I followed my hunch to vet tech school. I’ve worked in veterinary medicine for four years now, longer than I’ve lasted at anything, and it still isn’t a passion of mine, try as I might to make it one sometimes. It does play my strengths as an individual, though. It also plays to my limitations, so much that I could balance a shift or two with school when I could not work more than that at previous jobs even without the addition of school. Playing to limitations is probably the most important as someone who has a solid level of limitation. It’s also something I might have just made up, so let’s clarify what it means.
Scrubs, the right ones anyway, are perfect for my debilitating tactile sensitivity and I’m required to wear identical ones every day. One of my textbooks literally tells the allistic people it’s written for to do things the exact same way every time so you don’t miss anything. Human and veterinary hospitals are trying to standardize specific scripts for communication and when to use which ones. I can’t drive yet, and my job is reachable by bus. Those are just a few examples, but this is already so long and what plays to your limitations might not be exactly the same anyway. For those who are worried about it, though, some parts of my job are even easier for me than for my allistic counterparts because of autistic traits that society demonizes.
This wasn’t something I learned until I was already in school, but there’s also a national shortage of veterinary technicians in the United States. In my state as well, the field is also becoming regulated in some capacity when it hasn’t been before. Short-staffing and high turnover are objectively bad things and in healthcare, causes patients to suffer. That said, I think when you’re deprived of the ‘good choices’ for some reason or another, you kind of have to be an opportunist and there’s some level of opportunity when everywhere is short-staffed and everywhere has high turnover. What I’ve observed in practices I’ve worked at is that many will give just about anyone a chance. They keep people for years who don’t do their job well because half a tech is better than no tech and no one else will stay on for that long. If you actually do your job, they will be thrilled. And you found something that plays to your limitations, so that, you can do.
This is coming from someone who does get weeded out by the blatantly ableist job-hunting process where I live. I had a former coworker explicitly tell me “I’m so glad our boss didn’t listen when I told them they shouldn’t hire you because of all the social cues you missed when you dropped of your resumé, you’re actually great,” and that was somewhere I did get the job. Goodwill ghosted me for an entry level position. Prospective employers can tell something is 'off’ and it affects my ability to get hired. If I did life over and wanted to rely a little less on a hunch, I’d probably at least see what career fields are out there that can’t find workers on that macro level, like the national vet tech shortage, because employers who probably would discriminate against me otherwise have to actually consider if they want the weird one or no one.
There’s no way this can possibly catch every autistic person who falls through the cracks. There’s not even a way to share all this information besides just ranting about my personal experience because a lot of parts just fell into place for me that don’t even fall into place for all allistic people or all abled people. But there are also a few things that someone out there might also be able to do deliberately and reap a better life from it. Like I said, if my story improves one person’s quality of life, that would be pretty cool.
