If anyone is interested in why I quit my job, and also have given up on my attempt to find a professional career this is a big reason why…
“Masking to try and hold a job catches up to [you] in the end…
In the end there is no energy left to try anymore…
trying to work becomes an impossible possibility.
Then you realise you can’t have the life you so desperately want that others take for granted.”
In short, I am autistic.
I am not broken, but I have been broken. By politics, by misunderstanding boundaries, by going above and beyond and then being told I needed more respect, by being loyal to a fault, by overlooking lies and manipulation because “really they’re good people”.
I have been broken by misunderstanding others’ motives, by believing people when they offered love-covered deceit.
I have been broken by being extraordinarily gifted in some areas, by being extraordinarily restricted in others.
Most of all, I have been broken by people who tell the truth with their faces but a lie with their words.
I am autistic.
It is my gift to the world, and the world’s curse on me.
The professional world was not made for outliers like me. The professional world, built by necessity to accommodate the middle-distribution employee, refuses to bend to accommodate me. The longer I stay in it the more broken I become.
Therefore, I refused to be broken any longer.
I refused to take it anymore.
I refused to be misunderstood and taken for granted.
I refused to be seen as the “golden boy”, the “teacher’s pet”.
I refused to continue having my professional abilities reduced to a lie that I was being given special favours, and then being handed the responsibility to change instead of having people stand up for me.
I refused to give in to the expectation that I would bend to accommodate others and then be disappointed and discarded when I ask others to bend a little for me.
So I stood up for myself. People don’t like it when the people-pleasing nice guy grows a titanium spine.
They don’t like it when the compliant worker learns true meekness is not in being a yes-man but in knowing and harnessing his inner power for self-assertion.
I am autistic. and I QUIT!
Only after all that am I free to once again venture out in search of my tribe.
I will find my place.
I will find my people.