Published on 12, July, 2020
Having read comments here over the last couple of days I'm increasingly wondering whether this community/forum is a good fit for me. Whereas I'm not a severe autistic needing 24x7x365 care I also can't identify with the high powered careers and lives many of you seem to have.
To some degree that may be due to having a comorbid schizophrenia/schizo-affective dx.It's a compatibility issue not one where any of you have done anything wrong. I've never had a paid job.I lead a rather basic lifestyle to minimise stress . Stress being my 'green kryptonite'. Even then it's only with quite a lot of support That's because in my case adaptive functioning is significantly < than would reasonably be expected given my level of intelligence. I've not read much at all about others here being in the same boat, which leads me to believe I'm something of an 'outlier'.
Yes, I used to think that I was ambitious but really, knowing what I now know, I think that was actually part of a mask that I'd felt bounced into projecting for years and years, from my earliest schooldays onwards. I needed to shake free of all that to avoid becoming ill and burning out, time after time.
So I might have seemed high-powered. But underneath.... tomato!
Very similar situation here. I'm not ambitious, never have been or will be. And I know that I've found the perfect level and role for me for realistically coping long term, minimising stress, and avoiding total burnout. I did unfortunately let myself get into a horrible status anxiety nervous breakdown scenario about four years ago. Not because of some unfulfilled ambition (I don't have any, certainly not with a capital A) but because I could sense how increasingly atypical I was in not wanting to try and jump that chasm. (one or two past mercifully failed attempts to do so were always accompanied by a feeling of 'who am I actually doing this for?') And in understanding that for me it would be a disaster on several levels if I were to secure a higher 'professional grade' role, and yet that sense of comparison and conformity closing in (largely unspoken but coded into everything around me - and the statistics, when I got unhealthily fixated enough to deep-dive into them to the point of nausea) left me feeling like I was just massively rubbish and ineadequate, and being laughed at by the rest of the world. When in fact, the rest of the world doesn't care, hasn't time to care, and hasn't even thought about these patterns and numbers that I was taking as the basis for their imagined disgust at my continuity in one role.
I've made myself let go of all of that, as it was horrendous to live with that constant paranoia and self-torture. Occasionally, some random unflitered comment from a colleague triggers me to start almost unravelling again, but I know the exhausting path it leads down - the 'scenic' route back to the same place of 'I'm not designed for ultra orthodox conformity (and once I hit a certain momentum with it, I don't stop until I've made myself very ill), so I'm not playing that game and I don't have to - I am free'. I feel like there's nobody on here who won't be able to relate to some dimension of that. To my mind, firemonkey's situation and mine essentially equate. I just happened to find an uncommon niche in which I could eke out a low-stress 9-5 living and still pay bills with my modest but fair wage. It could easily have been different. We're each finding a way to function and stay as stable as we can in a world that's not yet adequately designed for the neurogivergent too.