I’ve been putting off this post for a while now, hoping my life would calm down or my routine would change for the better; alas, it has not.
If anything, it’s pushed ahead and refuses to look back or slow down. So, here I am (despite that), to provide my very personal, and perhaps unhelpful, answer to a question floating around the neuro-spicy side of TikTok…
And I’ll tackle it one question at a time, in sequential order, because that feels the most autistic and obvious way to do this. Right? Anyway.
My answer to question one, is that I found a job/career that allows me to permanently work from home, and my current workplace allows me to have a schedule which fits my brain/body’s functioning hours.
See, I’m naturally a night owl, so I often save focus-demanding tasks until nights or weekends so I can find “the zone” for however long it takes. Without emails and slack messages pulling at my attention. And since I live in Central, but work on Pacific time, I can sleep-in until my 10:00/11:00am meetings drag me out of bed. Of course there are some days where I’ve got early calls with folks that live/work on Eastern time, but they are fairly few and far between.
This may sound like a luxury or “nice-to-have” but I can’t over-emphasize how important this change was for me. I’m no longer fighting against my natural sleep cycle to make a living. In fact, most mornings I wake up before my alarm and have enough time to eat before my call begins! Just a year or two back that seemed unimaginable; I always had dozens of alarms set at strange intervals throughout the morning to make sure I made it out of bed with enough time to get to the office. The strange intervals were to keep my body off-guard and resist any snooze-hitting routine that would develop, and even then I’d move them around throughout the year.
Maybe that sounds familiar. Maybe you struggle that hard to get up for work. Maybe you dread falling asleep at night because it means morning “comes sooner.” For me, a half-dozen years of working that way led to awful panic attacks; each one knocked me out of commission for several days at a time, the first day being absolute death spirals of terror, followed by a shakey, uneven recovery. Only after a few years of failed therapy, and a growing handful of expensive medication, did it turn out to be rooted in autism… not the growing list of psychological issues I was being assigned.
I felt guilty during the COVID lockdowns, but it was the first time I really started to recover and function somewhat normally again. When my job tried forcing me back into office in August 2020, despite doctors notes and filing for ADA accommodations, I handed in my resignation and started picking up remote consulting gigs.
If I were forced back into a 9 to 5 office environment, I wouldn’t be part of the 15% of employed autistic adults for long. It’s just not sustainable.
My answer to question two is much simpler: I have no “life” outside of work.
There’s so much importance placed on the idea of maintaining your work-life balance and I kinda get it… in a world where your smartphone keeps you tethered to the desk, most people have to commit to keeping their worlds separate (like on Severance). A lot of coworkers will refuse to put Outlook or Slack on their smartphone, only using their work laptop to check them. Others do install the apps but setup notification settings and focus-modes to limit what chimes when/where.
Kudos to all of you making that split work, but it’s just not possible for me. I barely have enough energy to do one thing per day, so between Monday & Friday, that’s work. And to make that doable it means sleeping in all morning, taking a nap over my lunch break, and taking another (longer) nap after the day ends. If I have to wake up early or skip one of those naps, I pay for it sooner than later.
I’ve tried doing hobby stuff like attending local chess clubs, but I’m so tired by the time its over that driving home is too stressful to bounce back from quickly/easily. And while I sign-up for weekend tournaments involving special interests like speedsolving Rubik’s cubes, by the time the date comes around I usually stay in bed recovering from last week so I can make it through the next one.
My friends are my coworkers. My hobbies are work adjacent . My life is my work, and my work is my life. It’s the only way I can make it work.
And for the last answer: it’s not without meltdowns. Sometimes they happen during work. Sometimes they happen after work. It’s only thanks to my amazing team & awesome colleagues that I can dip-out to deal with that shit and not have something fall through the cracks.
The creative industry is full of neurodiverse people, UX focused disciplines are full of empathetic and understanding allies, and the game industry (at least in my experience) is pretty flexible when it comes to working styles. So I know that I’m incredibly lucky to have the people around me that I do, and I don’t take it for granted for one single second. If I was working anywhere else, for anybody else, with anybody else… I don’t know how long it would be sustainable.
For instance, one of my previous jobs was nearly perfect. They valued my work, I had a great group of people surrounding me, and I loved my boss. But, our business stakeholders and engineering partners would often be at odds with us and each other, so there was a lot of “political” tension and corporate double-speak. I suck at dealing with both.
During the last call of a particularly rough day, yet another non-designer started explaining how to do my job to me… and I snapped. No clue what I said, but I know I was screaming while tears streamed down my face. Lucky for me, my camera was off and I went non-verbal/non-speaking pretty quickly; honestly, I could have been screaming incoherent jibberish and it wouldn’t surprise me. But the next thing I knew, hours had passed and I was waking up a snotty, sweaty mess.
I had to make apologies, inform my boss of what happened, and luckily they all chalked it up to a bad day. But I started job-hunting soon after because I knew that was the tip of the iceberg. It was only a matter of time before it happened again and real damage was done. Once is a mistake, but twice is a trend.
Maybe this all sounds like a bad deal. It definitely doesn’t feel fair when I see the lives other people lead… with families, friends, vacations, and so on… but this is the cost of being independent, for now at least.
I’m working on stuff I care about, with people I care about, for an industry I care about. That’s more than most people can ask for. But who knows how long I can keep this going. Maybe we all end up in the 85% someday, and that 15% is nothing but a flash in the pan*.
*I’m honestly not sure what that phrase means, but I think I used it right. #ActuallyAutistic
