Work – Page 3 – …i am my own experience…

or, How Much Are You In Control Of Your Own Path in Life?

I always felt like the path my life was on was very linear and pre-determined… after high school, I went to university. After undergrad, I went to grad school. [Those steps were accepted without question because that was just how it was meant to be.] After grad school, I moved to England. After I moved to England though, it suddenly became unregimented, undetermined, unclear and confusing. Somehow I managed to float through – got somewhere to live so I wasn’t staying with my Dad & Rita for longer than I had to (but even that was quite serendipitous and didn’t require a whole hell of a lot of effort on my part); landed my first job and subsequently my first permanent job (which then evolved on a yearly basis thanks to council restructuring, so it almost felt like every year was a new ‘school year’ for me again)… it wasn’t until I ended up going to that first fostering agency which threw my life into a tailspin. In the interview, I only remember the words “recruiting foster carers” being thrown in casually, not identifying it as the core purpose of my job; if I had, I would not have been keen to take on the role, because I felt that my skills did not match that. I persevered, though it was a nightmare for me, sitting vulnerable in shopping centres and supermarkets, hoping that someone would come and talk to me. I could not have been more miserable. I also felt like my manager wasn’t that happy with me and I feel she engineered my exit because, despite my difficulties, I was not getting any support as to what to do (they just assumed I’d “get on with it”, but how can you if you don’t even know where to begin??). I counted how many days I’d actually worked there, and how they could possibly expect me to recruit a whole caseload of new foster carers in 36 DAYS absolutely baffles me. GOOD RIDDANCE to the lot of them. All the short term jobs which followed led to more changes to my routine… teaching assistant roles, Outreach work with teenagers, then the second fostering agency which went down the same avenue as the first eventually… after that, I had consoled myself by saying that I wasn’t actually a failure at being a social worker – I was only failing to find the right role for me and my abilities and skills. Landing into SEN face first ended up being a blessing in disguise, though I still have little struggles here and there, but I am much more able to handle the demands of this role because it’s far more structured in relation to social care, which was chaotic and reactive rather than planned and regulated.

To a degree, that’s how Paul’s and my relationship progressed too, as I learnt from the examples set by my parents and grandparents: first you date, then you get engaged, then you get married, then you have kids. I never felt comfortable with the idea of having kids before getting married, obviously not because of religious reasons (see first full paragraph on page 2), but because that wasn’t the right order in which to do things… what makes it “right”, I cannot define… but I feel quite rigid in that respect and can’t explain why. Obviously, I don’t have to worry about that, because we clearly dated, got engaged and then got married, but I think I would have panicked a bit if I became pregnant “out of sequence”… but again we were both taking the appropriate steps to ensure that didn’t happen.

I moved to the UK to be a social worker, but I lasted in the career less time than it took for me to complete my higher education combined. I trained to do more therapeutic-type social work; ideally this would have been in a school, focusing more on group and individual work with children and adolescents. When I arrived in Britain, I found that such roles didn’t really exist for a social work degree (needed a counselling qualification separately) and my first job was in a very busy Children & Families team. My levels of anxiety and stress were through the roof when I worked in social care – the unpredictability of every day and the high risk of conflict with service users made me incredibly anxious and stressed, leading to periods of being signed off ill by a GP. Since working in SEN, I’ve only been off work when I’ve been genuinely unwell, because I feel far more relaxed and content in this type of work. I still have intermittent ‘spikes’ of anxiety when a case becomes a bit more challenging or complex, but it’s far less intense than when I was a social worker. SEN is much more structured and predictable, as the Code of Practice is quite prescriptive and I like working within clear bounds.

Many of us will become interested in psychology and the helping professions along the way, either because of our diagnosis or in search of it. We find we want to nurture and help others in their journeys because we know how hard it can be.
Because of a combination of high intelligence, low self-esteem and eagerness to begin our new careers, we sometimes bite off more than we can chew.
One of the key things to realise about female AS is this: Society expects us to handle things well based on our intelligence and appearance of normality. Unfortunately, we often demand the same of ourselves.
Even if we can handle it academically or intellectually, it doesn’t mean we can handle it physically or emotionally. We need extra time, extra patience, and more sensitivity than most people. Full stop.
Of course we must, but we’re not told how in a way that we can actually manage. And unfortunately we find that other people don’t always try to get along with us.
Less tolerance for stress also comes with age, but even that has its positive side. Since our anxiety levels have always been very high, and our nerves have been a taut thread pretty much forever, we will now find we have to do something about it or the thread will snap. That means clearly defining to ourselves and others our needs and our boundaries.

(all italicised bullet points quoted from Rudy Simone – Aspergirls: Empowering Females with Asperger Syndrome) [UK Kindle Edition])