Published on 12, July, 2020
I've not been diagnosed with Asperger's, but recently I had a long chat with someone with whom I shared so many traits/viewpoints and it turned out he'd been diagnosed.
My problem is that I start off well at every job, but within a year or two things go incredibly wrong, I feel that people gang up on me and I end up walking out. I can't cope with meetings: I can't think of anything to say, if I do say something it's ignored and I get told I project a 'negative attitude'. At breaks no-one talks to me. I feel like a caged bird, desperate to escape, and if anything overruns beyond the time it was supposed to finish, I get very angry and resentful.
I excel at time management, organisation and anything that requires loads of detail, but no matter how hard I try people accuse me of being unapproachable or I get criticised for things that others get away with. I help others as much as I can, but I get told I don't! I give praise and support, but am told I don't! I go out of my way to be friendly to people, but I'm told I don't! It's like it doesn't matter what I do I get picked on for it. My cards are marked, so to speak, because I am incredibly honest all the time and believe in justice, and people don't like the challenge. I find it almost impossible to manage my emotions and become either a blubbering wreck or 'aggressive' because I will defend myself if I feel something is unfair.
I'm getting to the point where I'm likely to walk out of another job because I can't stand what I perceive to be victimisation. Clearly the issue must be me, or the pattern wouldn't have repeated itself three times now. I just can't work with people; they have agendas that I really cannot understand.
Does anyone else experience these kinds of problems at work?
Thirded. Oh, the stories I could tell... I have had a couple of very good jobs, with excellent management, but both short-term for different reasons. The first I got because the interview was exemplary - we were given a copy of the questions to be asked, 15 mins before the interview, which helped me answer well. I kept it because I got good results and they left me to it. The second I got because they valued intelligence in candidates, and kept because working with extremely 'challenging' adults didn't bother me - because they didn't have the 'challenging' behaviours of neurotypicals, and I've been punched, kicked and spat on before, so that's no great challenge to me.
I'm currently eschewing employment, as such. I'm nominally self-employed, subsisting on tax benefits and DLA. They're about to take the latter and threaten the former, at which point I plan on winning the lottery...