The semester has ended. Grades have been recorded. It’s time to take a deep breath and assess how things went. This assessment might seem odd to people who don’t follow The Autistic Me. Teaching tends to be the easiest part of my job. My challenges generally occur outside the classroom.…
The Autistic Me
Susan and I don’t want life to be too interesting. The bland normalcy with which we began 2025 was nice. So… things got interesting. Leigh chose to have back surgery to correct her scoliosis. Leigh had to have staples in her scalp after falling and hitting her head at school,…
Life is rarely perfect, but it can be blandly normal. I admit that 2024 wasn’t easy. It ended badly. At least it wasn’t quite like how eventful 2023 was, with an ICU visit I’d rather not repeat. For now, I am attempting to accept the bland normalcy of life in…
The most frequent question I’ve received after deciding to leave a job has been, “How could walk away without another job?” That’s a good question and reflects real concerns people have. Autistics struggle with employment without any additional challenges. Now that I have severe spinal pain and my Erb’s palsy…
Because I want to contribute to our family, I value work. Even if I weren’t married with children, I would want to be employed and take care of myself financially. However, the emotional need to be productive often runs up against my physical limitations. If I could earn a living sitting…
Autistics often find themselves judged in the workplace not by their knowledge and skills, but by how well they perform “normalcy” in an office. To appear other than how they are, the Autistics must mask, as in putting on their happy worker faces and mimicking the “neurotypical” people around them,…
Good people in relatively good workplaces might still fail to understand or appreciate the traits of an individual Neurodiverse person. Tangent: I have addressed why I prefer to “misuse” Neurodiverse instead of using Neurodivergent. I might shift to “Neurominority” in the future; “Autistic” remains the best way to describe my…
Work-from-home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic was the greatest accommodation for differences ever offered. For those of us with physical differences and Neurodiverse minds, the WFH years allowed us to recharge and work whenever we were personally most productive. We did 40 hours or more of work weekly, but not…
Friends and colleagues often include symbols and acronyms (and symbolic acronyms) within their social media profiles. These letterforms represent shared and self-selected identities. None of them “feel” quite right to me. That’s not a new issue for me, as I have written many times about my ambivalence regarding labels and…
Offering excuses for not keeping up with The Autistic Me frustrates me, but life has a tendency to get in the way of personal projects. I failed to release podcast episodes for most of 2024. I blamed an overloaded teaching schedule and a two- to three-hour commute (each way, 115…