Published on 12, July, 2020
Since my diagnosis, one woman at work has gone out of her way to seemingly belittle my condition.
She constantly says that I am 'getting away with things' and that as a woman she suffers far more and has far more problems than me. She says that period pains and the menopause would make my autism seem very trivial.
Not being a woman, I do not know how these things are. My attitude in the past has always been that trying to have a battle between conditions as to which is worse is pointless. But perhaps some of the female autistics here could tell me whether their autism has a greater effect on them than their 'womens problems' or vice versa. I certainly do not want to belittle the things that women have to put up with and never would.
I think my work colleague is somehow 'jealous' of the fact I have a support worker and have had my work changed in order to accommodate my autistic tendencies. Could this be the case?
Well, period pain makes me vomit and faint, what has been diagnosed as ASD made me lose the job I really loved, neither causes the issues/damage that comes with the other. As Holly says, stuffing the face with painkillers helps somewhat to deal with the former, stuffing my face with any amount of pills has not helped with the latter. Somehow it's not really possible to weigh them against each other, it totally depends on the situation, what others make of it and how severe it is to start with. Both are considerably worse when facing misunderstanding, especially by people who believe to know exactly what it's like (there's a little difference, with period pain that's mainly women that get away with a paracetamol or two, with ASD it's people that have heard something about it and think that's how it is for everybody while they probably don't even understand that one person). Guess your colleague wouldn't really benefit from a support worker but if she has a job that requires walking around a lot then not having to do too much of this when she's not feeling great would probably help, and so may being a bit nice to her do and not taking it too personal if she reacts the way we tend to react when we feel bad.