Might need to shut down my small biz

DontEatMe said:

I'm confused, masking isn't just a bunch of racing thoughts? It's constant acting, both in the sense of playing a role that makes me not repulsive, and in the sense of taking constant actions

I think you are overthinking it. I do the least amount of masking needed and am happy to cultivate the quiet bloke appearance and say the least I need to.

If I have a resting *** face then too bad. I don't complain about their ugly mugs so why should I accept them complaining about mine.

The interacting I try to keep about the work wherever possible. This plays to my strengths as I know my job inside out and I have scripted my responses through the years to avoid infodumping, instead relying on making my answers as concise as I can.

DontEatMe said:

Check my face, check my body, check my voice, check my choice of words, check my focus, check check check and by the time I've run through my checklist one of those things is starting to slip already so I have to go again.

It sounds like you lack self confidence - the masking physically becomes a second nature thing I found once I got it right so I could "feel" if things were OK or not.

Mindfulness should help you build that confidence based on past experience.

A bit of scripting for the silences helps a lot - either use a deflecting script to change to a different topic, a dismissal script if you are done (eg "if that's all, I'll get right on it) or a prompt to the other party for more info (eg "was there anything else?", "does that answer the question?" or ""are you happy you have the info you need?")

These become very repetetive over time and this makes them easer to use.

In general don't try to be perfect. Be your own version of quirky and own it. So long as it reduces the processing overhead for you it is worth it.

DontEatMe said:

I've read books about people skills, I regularly Google stuff, I constantly think about it, but I still suck and cannot naturally do it

To get good at this you need to role play - a therapist is great for this and can give you lots of hints and tips to do it well.

With practice you don't need to think about it too much - but you need to develop self confidence which is where mindfulness also comes into play.

DontEatMe said:

I stop the masking, and I get negative reactions as I make everyone really uncomfortable

In your shoes I would ask them to articulate what makes them feel uncomfortable as this will either help you focus on area you need to develop or will make them inadvertantly reveal their bias and hopefully once it is uncovered, will do something about it.

Another big skill to learn here is to not care about their opinions. Haters are gonna hate so don't let it get to you. This took me the longest time to master but now I don't care if they feel uncomfortable because I am different - this is their issue.

The minute they try to use this to act against me I will hang them out to dry though. A mix of scripting and research will have me cite discrimination law to them face to face, with a tone to make them worry I would be really dangerous to have as an enemy.

I always give them an out after such a confontation - I bring back some warmth and say something like "of course it won't come to that, will it. We can get along here and accept our differences".

Oddly enough it was management training courses that let me role play a lot of stuff like this, especially conflict resolution and dealing with difficult people sessions.

I'm confused, masking isn't just a bunch of racing thoughts? It's constant acting, both in the sense of playing a role that makes me not repulsive, and in the sense of taking constant actions - checking myself over and over because I quickly revert back to blank face and monotone voice and zoning out unless I'm non-stop badgering myself to do all the socially correct things. Check my face, check my body, check my voice, check my choice of words, check my focus, check check check and by the time I've run through my checklist one of those things is starting to slip already so I have to go again. On top of all that, I'm trying to actually work too.

The times I've tried to just not work so hard at masking, the reaction has been swift and negative. I seem moody even though I'm neutral. Or I ramble on and infodump since I don't really think in words in the first place, so I have to revert back to taking any thought I wish to say out loud and trying to set up a nice, concise sentence about it before I speak. Most of the time, I just can't, so I say nothing and make awkward silences.

I've read books about people skills, I regularly Google stuff, I constantly think about it, but I still suck and cannot naturally do it. If I stop the thoughts, I stop the masking, and I get negative reactions as I make everyone really uncomfortable.

Gamifying is fine for general musical concepts, but for his actual pieces for his exam, he does need to actually play the pieces. I break it all into little sections and give him choices about the work as we go, and I give him breaks between activities. If I bring out a tablet with musical education apps, he gets extremely carried away and I have to literally yank the tablet back off him so he'll stop running off with it and opening other apps, so that's not an option. If I bring out the LEGO bricks to work on rhythms, he also gets carried away with those and we don't get anything done. If I provide fidget toys, he puts them in his mouth and bites them, and no amount of telling him not to/telling him to take it back out of his mouth stops him, so due to choking risk I've had to remove those from the room, and throw some of them away due to damage.

I'm ending the discussion about this student now.This isn't what I made the post for.

I understand. I like to imagine autistic or Neurodivergent are 'enough like me to match with less effort and more mutual conversational benefit', when in fact there are many parents who have tried everything, and young people who are led by their priority of focus, in a way completely unlike the manner to which I am accustomed. A presumed observation of the genteel norms of Middle England.

Is home the only and best place for you to give lessons? Who is your ideal student?

DontEatMe said:

I have one young autistic student

From the description you give, they sound more like ADHD to me.

There are some good tips on teaching ADHD students here:

https://www.positiveaction.net/blog/teaching-students-with-adhd

Gamifying the learning seems a good way forward with younger students with ADHD.

DontEatMe said:

I have never found it easy, my brain has to go on overdrive to do it and I never feel certain that I'm doing it right.

This is where meditation is a great tool to be able to take back control of the racing mind and bring the stress levels down before the spiral.

Mindfulness is where you can take that fear of doing it wrong, look at your experience and work out realistically how often you got it wrong, how you learned from it and in the case you start to mess up again, how well you can react. 

It builds your self confidence in being able to tackle the tasks day after day.

It is this combination that let me be a consultant in fixing broken IT support teams by showing then how they can do the task under pressure, with angry customers and inadequate resources. I could show others these techniques, teach them when to make time to catch their breath and be able to get back into the storm again while keeping their sanity.

As you point out, simply masking and scripting are only part of the way to do this. Without meditation and mindfulness it is not sustainable.

This has been my experienc anyway.

Thanks for being open with how you feel about these things - it isn't easy to admit our vulnerabilities.

I have one young autistic student, and much of the lesson time is spent telling him to stop trying to push buttons on my laptop, stop bashing the keys, stop trying to run into private rooms of my house, stop grabbing things in the hallway and breaking them, stop playing while I'm trying to ask him a question or give a direction...

I keep trying to be kind and patient and understanding, but with no firmer discipline he would absolutely spend the entire 30 minutes doing all this intense sensory-seeking stuff and ignoring me completely. I can give him the same brief, clear instruction 5 times in a row and he'll ignore me and keep making a bunch of noise on the piano, so I have to start using a really firm, almost angry tone before he'll stop and just do what I'm asking. Or I have to start counting to ten. On the one hand, he's the one person I don't have to mask around, but on the other, my senses are absolutely wrecked after working with him each week.

So I would be quite scared to risk building a niche where I didn't have to mask for the kid (though I still have to mask for the parents despite their understanding of their kid's autism), but the students I end up with are majority very noisy and have no impulse control. It's too much for me.

One additional observation; at 42, I am what I classify as 'grey autistic', we were never asked, it was never suggested, we hid it without knowing we had it.

There are younger persons now I classify as 'rainbow autistic', they have been recognised and permitted autistic behaviour in a way that I find both reassuring and enviable. Their parents are matter-of-fact about their autistic status, and want they to excel with all the parental protections we would expect.

Could they be your ideal students?

May I offer one insight? There may well be a market for an autistic tutor. It isn't necessarily a local market norm.

Meandering version: I only passed my driving test with an instructor who has an autistic son.

Some children at my Lego club only feel at ease with an approach I have made with sensitivity to what I would have wanted.

I hope I do not appear patronising, and appreciate my two anecdotal examples are not the same as the incredible effort you have sustained of running your own business for so long. Total respect for doing this. My dad is a self-employed builder and I suspect copes with human interaction via information dumps on niche book learning and fascinating on other people's interests, then total focus on the art of construction.

Short version: are some of our best musicians excluded from learning by exclusively allistic tutors? 

I've already spent my life studying people and memorizing and scripting to make myself palatable to people. I've done it successfully enough to run a sole trader business for 10 years. But it's exactly what's wearing me into the ground. I'm 35 and it's still hard work for me. I have never found it easy, my brain has to go on overdrive to do it and I never feel certain that I'm doing it right. It's like trying to run a program on a computer that can't actually handle it so it overheats and the fan starts whirring like crazy to keep up, that's how I feel. 

And I can't just choose not to mask on this job. Nobody wants their piano teacher to be rocking or fidgeting next to them while they're trying to concentrate on playing something. Nobody wants a teacher who never looks them in the eye, or who has a monotone voice or a flat facial expression. Nobody wants to discover that their teacher is briefly zoning out sometimes from sheer overwhelm.

As long as I'm masking, I keep customers but I lose my mind. But if I stop, I'll lose customers and have no money of my own. But how long until I snap? And in a society that values money and money-making above all else, won't I be more isolated than ever if I don't force myself to keep going? I'm so lost!

DontEatMe said:

I just find it so overwhelming interacting with multiple people per week.

You have identified a key trigger for your autistic trait here. Is this the only trait causing you serious issues in the workplace?

You do need to recover from your burnout first, but once this is achieved, would you consider spending at least some of your time developing techniques for managing these traits so you can endure them better and for longer?

They will never go away but you can learn how to relax more effectively to lower the stress levels that the interactions bring, and you can learn to understand them so where you need to interact you can cope better.

If you can afford it, a psychotherapist is the best tool I can recommend as they can teach you techniques in ways that work for you, but if the budget does not stretch that far then you can self learn techniques like meditation and mindfulness that allow you to manage your level of stress.

Learning about how to interact socially is also a great skill to learn, and if you are a very rules based thinker then reading up on the dynamics of social interaction makes it suddenly less opaque and easier to interact with. You will need to mask and script no doubt but this becomes easier when you have developed a much better understanding of what is happening in any interaction.

It sounds nice and easy on paper but it is months or years worth of part time study to do all this, but the skills will benefit you for a lifetime.

These are just my thoughts on what may help - hopefully something is of use.

Yeah work can be a struggle i wanted to do some sort of music my self but burnout and meltodwns have put a stop to that idea and now it’s just a case of surviving my current job for as long as possible 

Hi and welcome to the community.

I'm sorry to hear of your struggles. 

Alongside ongoing support from your GP, you might find these NAS resources helpful:

NAS - Autistic fatigue and burnout

NAS Professional Practice - Understanding autistic burnout

There's also some great (free) advice here from Dr Megan Neff - a neurodivergent author (who's also a clinician and advocate):

Autistic Burnout Recovery: How to Build a Recovery Plan

I also have this book of hers. It's very user-friendly, including lots of diagrams and worksheets:

The Autistic Burnout Workbook: Your Guide to Your Personal Recovery Plan