Do you work?

A lot of people find working from home is the best thing for them. That would be ideal for me as well. It's been suggested I work with family.

I now work 4 days a week. I used to work 5 and find having an extra day off helps to recover from the working week. Since the pandemic I work from home. This week I had to join work colleagues for a team morning. It started ok but got too much as we were to do a team building type activity. I was very pleased that my managers were prepared for me not coping and were very supportive and I returned home to work from there. They also made me feel valued by giving me the opportunity to email my ideas.

I have discovered that working from home is the only way for me.

Yes, it was interesting and rewarding. Work was sometimes frustrating, however, because in research you are doing novel things all the time and many experiments will inevitably fail. 

I do work, and full-time, but I always had this awareness that I was only capable of sustaining certain forms of work without risk of severe burnout. So I consider myself to be very lucky to have found myself in a job that could not be more perfect for me: a largely records-focussed library job. Lots of routine, a manageable rate of change, a reliable reservoir of knowledge that I top up as things gently evolve. It's 9-5, I don't have to take my work home with me (unless I chose to jump on the PC for a modest bit or voluntary overtime, as I have done on occasion given how much I like the work) and it's in an area where I feel like a reliable small but important cog in a much bigger machine - one that's helping people (literally anyone with access to Google) get free access to good quality research.

I hope this is the job I remain in for the foreseeable future, I need the stability - and the money!- and I would find significant change pretty traumatic at this point. In the meantime, I take each day as it comes and let my energy and focus ebb and flow, maintaining standards that I can stand over at appraisal time with my head held high. 

I do shudder at the thoughth of what might have become of me if I'd succumbed to more of those societal pressures about what trajectory the average man 'should' take in life - aspirational, status-obsessed, a constant restless quest to seek out new challenges every few years, manage other people, resources, all that. The rat race. I'd have probably taken a nervous breakdown, Square peg, round hold. I'm glad to have found one of life's rare square holes and I'm sticking to it! 

Routine is key isn't it? For so many of us on the spectrum. I hope you're enjoying your current work, and it meets your needs. I'm already 26 and haven't had one job yet... Hopefully I'll have more work in the coming years.

Daydreamer said:

My grandparents own a wine farm in Italy, sometimes I've thought about going back there and joining that but I really want to make it on my own.

If your grandparents are knowledgable about your autism and you have a good relationship with them then I would strongly recommend talking to then, reading up on how the business and farming/processing works and see if it looks interesting.

Imagine the Italian climate, food, work ethic - all are quite likely to give a good quality of life.

And the Italians are known as passionate people, so you find your status as an exotic outsider makes you quite a catch.

The fact you would have you grandparents as your employers should give more scope for your stress management to evolve, and I would expect they would love having you around, learning about something they love and teaching you more about life.

Soetimes it takes making a complete change like this to help us find a new normal and discover a new passion.

I’m 50, so I’ve worked full time, self employed, part time and everything in between. These days I’m working part time. I get days off in between most shifts which is good for me. I am looking for a job, or looking to work for myself again. I don’t like to see a great job, and then read the description that says I’ll be working from their other base in the next town as and when needed as part of my role. No I won’t. I need routine and no travel  

Your job sounds really good, and really in depth as well. Probably I'm not even close to your level of skill! But I do work on my writing regularly so maybe I can find a niche of my own soon.

Thanks for the encouragement with this it means a lot! :) 

Wow your work in Brazil sounds amazing! That's really cool that you retired early to do that. I'm glad it's working for you both! :) 

My grandparents own a wine farm in Italy, sometimes I've thought about going back there and joining that but I really want to make it on my own. I just need to find the right field to go in to. I'm thinking writing or helping kids, maybe disabled kids as that's something I understand really well.

I worked for 34 years in IT support and project management, the last 10 which were in management.

It was constant stress and social interaction which pushed me to my limits all the time, but I learned techniques to de-stress that got me through it.

I retired last yeat in my 50s to start a small business in Brazil renovating abandoned apartments and returning half of the ones I do as social housing. I already had connections in Brazil as my wife is from here and I had been doing property development as a hobby for a few years before leaving the UK.

If you want to work then the chances are very high that stress will be an issue so in order to survive I believe you have to learn ways to be able to stop, take control of mind and walk it back from the cliff edge of meltdown. Practice makes it much easier, but doesn't really stop the stress though.

The best solution is to find a job in a subject you love which should make it so much easier to go to each day.

It's funny you mention writing- that's actually my job! I write technical documents for medical devices though, so it's quite niche, and unfortunately it does need some pretty specific stuff on your CV. There definitely are writing jobs out there which don't require that though, and I believe the platform Medium has ways to earn money from your writing as well.

I think starting a job with just a few hours is a great idea- I hope it works out for you!

Thank you Daydreamer - yes I've felt relief with my self diagnosis - to be able to understand why I am how I am. It's also so nice to be accepted by the community when you self diagnose. All my life I've felt I'm very much a failure because I've fallen into a very mundane low paid job when I know that I'm smarter than my job suggests so realising the reason why is a good thing . I have got a private appointment for an assessment lined up in a few weeks time. I am getting nervous about that in case the assessment suggests I'm not autistic. I suppose I should worry about that if and when it happens

That sounds a really interesting but demanding job. I couldn't do that, because of the demanding stuff like conferences but I'm not brainy enough either. Did you enjoy doing that? It sounds interesting work :) 

I worked full-time for 34 years in biomedical research at a university. There were some stressful times - especially presenting work at conferences and in smaller meetings - but, in general, the work played to my autistic strengths. Of course, it requires rather a lot of academic qualifications to get into in the first place, unfortunately.

Working from home must be nice. It’s got to be the best kind of work and the perfect environment because home is most people’s happy and safe space. It’s mine, anyway, has everything I need and love, including my cat Whiskers.

I would love to work from home. I do a lot of writing, and have thought before what if I could do it for a living, writing stories, or news for businesses? But sadly I don’t think my writing is good enough for that. I have this job available at a children’s school but like you found, I think the exhaustion and general negative effect on me would be overwhelming and too much. I envy you with your being able to work from home. I hope it continues to work for you and you enjoy it :)

Working part time sounds like a good start, would give you more time to do things and also more time to rest if you need to. If I do work I'll be starting part time as well, a few hours in the afternoon, which doesn't sound too bad but it's actually exhausting lol but baby steps first.

Yes, I work full time- but I work from home, doing a desk job that's already very autism-friendly, and I'd been working full time for over a decade before I got diagnosed so it was already part of my everyday life.

I've done retail, fast food, and in-person office jobs in the past, and I could never understand why it was so exhausting for me when everyone else seemed fine. It was only during that first lockdown that I realised exactly how hard it was for me to commute five days a week and then spend eight hours in an open-plan office pretending to be 'normal'.

Ideally I'd like to work part time, which would leave me with more energy to get things done around the house, but I'm not sure that's a possibility in my current role and I do need the money! I'm holding out for the four-day work week to become more popular as I think even that would make a difference.

I hope you've found a lot of reassurance in your self diagnosis. I'm glad you did a job that was well suited to you, it sounds ideal actually. I was diagnosed with autism recently and have found it to be so reassuring and positive.

I work as a domestic cleaner but I'm coming up to retirement age now. All of my life I've known that I'm capable of doing much "better" jobs but never quite understood why I've chosen to do such an undemanding job. With better self awareness and understanding I self diagnosed earlier this year so now my choices make more sense. My jobs usually involve working alone. At most of my jobs I get a small amount of social input which suits me. If a particular job is too much for me I can leave and it doesn't completely wreck my income as I have other work settings to go to on other days. 

I'm so sorry about your anxiety. Anxiety is much more debilitating than a lot of people know, it can stop you doing so much! I haven't been shopping in town because of anxiety for over a month now. I hope yours lifts soon and then you can do the things you want to. 

Take it one day at a time.

I haven't actually been in a library for years. I live in a small rural village and we had a library which I visited when I was little but it was closed several years back and then some teenagers set it on fire. It's really hard finding an ideal job when you're autistic, and then getting through the interview is a whole new level of hard.

I haven't in quite a while. Back then it was getting jobs that was difficult, since interviews are such a huge part and even if I can do the job well they're going to go with someone who really impresses them in the interview (and it takes me a while being around people before I can get comfortable enough to seem normal). The last job I had was just admin stuff and I dealt okay. I like sorting things and coming up with systems to do it better. My anxiety got real bad several years ago and I don't know when I'll feel okay to try to work again. 

I think the days of librarian being perfect for autistic people are probably over. Nowadays that involves a lot more dealing with people and organising groups for communities and not so much just the book stuff. If I could have a job that was just organising library books and keeping things in their proper place that would be ideal for me.