Hi. I'm the sole breadwinner between me and my disabled partner and I have been for the past eight years. In the 12 years since I entered the work force, I've never held a job for longer than two years. I couldn't finish college, I couldn't go to trade school, I jumped around in retail work for a very long time until someone finally helped me get my foot in the door doing phone-based customer service. I thought this was great. I seem to do better when work has a lot of “down time”.
Some background – I'm adult ADHD and possibly on the autism spectrum (both of my brothers are, and the oldest is unable to work at all because of it), and have a lot of difficulty with number sequences. I also have pretty severe major depressive disorder. My only passion is art and writing. I actually have an open offer to apprentice as a tattoo artist, but because this requires me to work without pay for multiple years, it's forever on the table and I might never be able to accept it. I'm also without a vehicle because I can't afford one.
In the past little while, I'm increasingly more aware that even really easy entry level jobs are difficult for me. Right now, my job is stupid easy and should be simple for me not to fuck up, and yet I keep slipping up and I take too much time organizing things after each call. My calls are supposed to be under five minutes and I'm closer to ten now.
When my partner figured out what the job was, he said “OP, this is great, this is the kind of job a monkey could do if they could just talk on the phone. Your position is practically useless.”
Now I don't want to tell him that I keep getting stressed out, and the point of this job is to do this for four months and then bump me up to actual customer service here, which is way more than stupid grunt work and has little to NO down time at all.
Am I just stupid? Am I completely incapable of doing moron work? I know I really need to see a psychologist, but I'm wondering now if I should try to get at least partial disability – maybe working 30 hours or 25 hours a week will be better…?