Autism and Employment

Well, here we are. I'm finally writing about this. Allow me to tell you a little story about how my 2024 has been so far.

At the start of 2024, I'm job searching. I had been basically since I finished university in the summer of last year, and I was burning out. I was tired. I hated job searching.

(.... still do. maybe a slight spoiler.)

I'm starting to give up, ready to wave the white flag and surrender, struggling to keep going with all the applications, interviews, rejections...

I start this blog again, planning to write about how much I hate it, and share some sympathy for other autistic people struggling to find work and struggling with the whole job-hunting process.

....Then, I got that one email I'd been begging for this whole time. I finally got a job offer. I almost wanted to cry. Finally. Finally, after 8-9 months, I'd gotten that offer I was so desperate for. Not only that, but it was for a full-time job doing something I knew I would enjoy and that I was good at. It was almost... too good to be true...

I start the job on the 1st of May. I'm terrified, horribly nervous, but also so excited that I can finally start my life. No longer am I stuck on this endless hamster wheel of applications, interviews, rejections, applications, interviews, rejections, application, interviews...

I settle in at our office. I enjoy getting the train to work every day. I feel like an adult for once. My opinion and my work is valued. However... something is off.

I wake up every morning with this sense of dread, deep in my stomach. Part of that is just me being forced awake earlier than I was used to, but also it felt very real. Something in my brain was telling me that this wasn't going to last long. That I was about to lose my job.

A few things kept happening that raised red flags. Like the fact they hadn't asked for any payment details from me, even as payday was coming up fast. The fact they kept saying they'd give me a key to the office, but it took them so long, and I had to rely on others to let me in. They said they'd show me how to book holiday, but they never did. I told others about this, and they informed me how this sounded like a terribly disorganised onboarding process, and that something was wrong. They were red flags. This only made this feeling of dread I felt get worse.

It became clear to me quite fast that this company wasn't in the best place. They had to be careful with money. They didn't have much.

Then at the end of May, they sit us down in the meeting room, and tell us that the company is running out of money, and they cannot afford to pay our salaries.

I felt especially bad for one of my coworkers, who just a day or so before had moved house, to move closer to the office, renting out a new place, that they now will struggle to pay for as they won't get paid their salary.

It was not good... But, a lot of us stayed. We thought maybe, if we just held out for a little longer, we'd get some more money in and we could keep going. I was definitely gripping on to every last string of hope, because there's nothing I wanted less than to have to start job searching again. To have to lose the job I worked so hard to get, just a month after starting.

I had to watch the company slowly die in front of my eyes. It started with losing our office (barely a few days after I was finally given the key. That was incredibly disappointing). Then we slowly started getting alerts on all the websites and software we had subscriptions to, like Canva and MailChimp, saying we hadn't paid the bills and would lose access soon... Then we lost access.

Slowly, bit by bit, this company was dying. Employees were dropping like flies. Still, I clung on for dear life, praying that something would happen that would give us the boost we needed to keep going. They kept promising, saying we had investors interested in our company, that we're just waiting for a definitive yes. "it's looking positive," I heard almost every week in our Monday meetings. But week by week it started to look less and less positive.

It got to the end of july, still none of us getting any sort of payment or salary. I was regularly confused, stuck between "it's looking positive, things will get better" and "this is all slowly sinking and it's going to come to an end soon."

I think you can guess how this story ends.

Just a few weeks into August, we're all let go.

As of writing this, I am still waiting to be paid the salaries I'm owed.

I don't want to say I was scammed. It wasn't a scam. It was just... unfortunate, I guess. I often wonder why they even hired me if they knew there was even a possibility that they wouldn't be able to pay me. I'm not sure.

The worst part of this is that it was a job I liked, in a company working with topics I'm passionate about. I feel like I was a little spoiled with this first job. Before, I was applying to basically anything and everything, no matter how interesting the company was or not. Now i find it hard to apply to those companies because just reading about them makes my soul rot into a melted mass of meh on the floor.

No, I don't want to plug some prompt into AI and make it write a blog for a boring B2B company that literally no one is ever going to read and it's purely there for the sake of SEO and marketing. The mere thought makes me want to curl up in a ball and whine and groan and just,,, eugh.

But especially in today's climate, that leaves me with little choice.

But now I'm out of a job again, it means I'm back to searching, so here I am again. The last few months of my life have basically been a complete waste. At least it's some experience I can put on my CV??? but I honestly don't think many companies would see 3 months worth of experience and think that's really worth anything, so does that still really make it worth it? Is it really going to help me? Or am I going to continue spending the next 7-8 months searching for a job again? I really hope not...

I know a lot of autistic people talk about struggling to stay in work because they can't handle the social pressures, or the sensory environment, or whatever. And I can totally understand that, however that is not my experience. I have to be honest, I enjoyed working in an office. Was it tiring having to interact with the other employees sometimes? For sure. But I enjoyed having a working environment. A place to go where my brain was in work mode. A place to go to separate my work from my home and personal life. I need that separation, otherwise I will go insane.

And I did. After we lost our office, I was forced to work from home 5 days a week, and it drove me crazy. I couldn't concentrate at all. I was hardly getting anything done. And all the while I wasn't concentrating, I still felt too guilty to do anything else even vaguely productive that wasn't work-related, so I just sat in this void doing absolutely nothing, having shutdowns because I felt so paralysed, not able to get anything done, not able to do anything.

So yeah, I don't really want to work from home. A rare opinion, I know so many autistic people who only ever want to work from home, but I just don't think I could do it. Hybrid is my ideal working situation. A day or two a week to work from home and be free from the social pressure, the rest in a working environment where I can get my brain in work mode and separate it from my life at home. So I can go home at the end of the day and truly relax.

I didn't struggle with being at work. I enjoyed it, for the most part. I didn't struggle. If anything, I was so happy to finally have some sort of routine and stability back again. Something to do every day. To have a purpose. It made me like myself more. I felt like I had value.

Now, without a job yet again, I'm back to being purposeless, floating my way through every day, with no routine or stability. I hate it.

Then on top of that, add on the absolute hell that is job searching.

I hate job searching with such a visceral passion that no word within the English language can truly express how much I hate it. It fills me with dread, with anger, with absolute disdain for the world.

Back to the hamster wheel analogy - it feels like this endless cycle. You apply to 1000 jobs. Of those jobs you get a response from maybe, 10% of those jobs. Of that 10%, only 20% or so are inviting you for an interview, the rest are just rejecting you outright. Then you have to deal with the interview process. The most nerve-wracking horrible thing to ever do. You have to mask as much as you are physically capable - force eye contact, smile the whole time, sound enthusiastic, sound outgoing, hide your repulsion at the physical touch of a handshake, and lie about yourself in several ways. "Oh me? I looooove chaotic environments. I work sooo well under pressure. I have amazing communication skills and totally don't have a diagnosed condition that literally means I do not have good communications skills."

We will work hard, preparing answers for every possible interview question out there, ready and prepared, only for us to sit in front of them and forget everything we scripted, or they'll throw us a curveball question we didn't prepare for, and suddenly everything crumbles down around us as we struggle to answer, and all the while we try to keep a smile on our face.

Then, after the interview, comes the nervous wait, where your mind starts getting enthusiastic, optimistic, maybe this is finally the time you'll get that yes you've been waiting for, maybe you finally masked well enough to convince these people to employ you.

Then you get an email, and once again, it's another No. And you repeat the cycle again. Stuck in this endless loop of apply, interview, rejected, apply, interview rejected.

It's a tiring process for anybody, but I feel like for autistic people it's all that turned up to 100. We have to work so hard to be presentable to most employers. We know we can't just be ourselves, because who would want to employ that? So we have to mask to the extreme, as much as we can, for anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or so, and come out of it feeling absolutely exhausted, and in the end, all that is for nothing when we get that email saying "unfortunately". I bent over backwards to mask for you and be as presentable and likeable as possible, and you still reject me.

I know it's nothing personal. I know it's just a game of luck, that job wasn't meant for me, etc etc. But it still feels a little hurtful being rejected, especially when you put so much effort into being the perfect person for them.

It's also a little demoralising when you apply to these basic, menial labour jobs working in retail or at a McDonalds or something, and you still get rejected. How terrible does one have to be to get rejected from a McDonalds?

Again, it's just a game of luck half the time, but it's not displayed that way. It's never presented as such, it's presented as a competition, every employer searching for the best employee, so to hear that you're not the best employee for somewhere as basic as a fast food chain, it makes you feel a little worthless.

So let's just say I'm not looking forward to the next few months of my life. I don't anticipate finding a job very quickly. I'm ready (not really) for it to be a long, tiring process again. I honestly feel like I might genuinely end up giving up this time.

The only thing I have to look forward to at this point is finally getting paid for the three months I worked at that job. That'll be nice. A big large sum of money (compared to what I'm used to, at least).

Employment is hard for autistics. If you're autistic and stuck in job-searching hell too, then you have my sympathy. I feel you. Just try and take care of yourself as much as possible, I guess.