Every child has a dream of what they want to be when they grow up.
My answer to this question when I was very young was, a unicorn.
My answer as I began to grow older and find myself at ever-constant odds with life: to not have a damaged brain, to be able to just be normal.
Normal. Able to do the things that I watched the majority of the people doing around me with impunity...making and maintaining friendships, intimate relationships; getting along with their parents, their teachers; finishing things they started; going to a party and having just a few drinks or smoking a little weed and comfortably not needing to overindulge not only in the moment but not needing to continue overindulging every day that followed until an inevitable crash and burn; and, finally...perhaps greatest of all....
The ability to start a job and remain in it.
Pursuing and earning advanced degrees and attaining professional teaching licensure was barely a challenge. Academics always came as natural to me as breathing. Having something with which to busy my mind, my hands, was an area in which I thrived. I have two Master's degrees, in fact. I'm a licensed teacher in one of the highest categories. My second thesis and the theory I created are being used as teaching material at my alma mater.
But actually going out into the working world? I've tried, God knows that I've tried over and over. But this is where my abilities cease. This is where I simply just can't. Can't. No matter how hard I have tried. I am psychologically, neurologically unable to adapt and maintain.
I can't begin to describe how the two decades of this cycle of getting a job, trying to convince myself that it is going to be different this time, putting all of my effort into making it different this time, only to end up so overwhelmed and pushed into a place of ASD meltdown, then burnout, and having to resign and get the hell out of the situation because I'm in such a bad way psychologically that I'm having very dark intrusive thoughts that have me on the verge of needing to be put into in-patient care.
I am industrious. I am a very hard worker. I am passionate, inspired, always busy, task-oriented, eager to contribute to my family income, to be a 50/50 partner with my husband to make things happen. So what ends up happening every single time I've ever tried to hold a job makes me full of such deep self-loathing. I must be lazy. I must be a real piece of do-less garbage.
Especially when my family, and my husband, who haven't always understood, will meet me in moments where I'm sobbing and screaming at home saying I can't go back and I can't do this telling me to knock it off, stop being spoiled, stop being willful, stop doing this on purpose, to get the hell over myself and get back in there because work = money and money = what's necessary to live and... God.
They've meant to be helpful trying to kick me in the tail and get me to snap out of it but it hasn't helped, because I've finally realized, they have finally realized... I cannot. fucking. help it. I am the way that i am. It is the way that it is. And I have to let go. I have to stop fighting something that cannot be overcome.
When I was five years old, I fell six feet off of a rock wall down onto concrete and suffered a traumatic brain injury. My frontal lobe was damaged irreparably. For a long time, this wasn't understood to be what it was. I spend the majority of my life being misdiagnosed with more mental illnesses than I can recall because the presentation of the social and emotional dysregulation as the result of this brain damage took make forms that were mimetic of many mental illnesses.
Every time I saw a professional, I was given a new one. Some parts fit in presentation, some even more than others, but the requisite treatment overall has never been successful because... this isn't that. I wish it was, for the answer would be straightforward, the remedy one applicable in a contextual way, the response predictable. I didn't even show a response to psychiatric medication until I was well past my mid-twenties, when my brain had finally stopped developing.
Now? Medication has proven to be effective to a particular degree. Lithium and Seroquel have served to stabilize my moods that were constantly influx due to perpetual overstimulation by helping screen the stimulation out and giving me an emotional baseline that I'm held to and drawn back to if something does overstimulate me. Ritalin was added in later to further aid in the executive dysfunction to help me with attention, focus, and enabling me to have a heavier weight to hold me down to the baseline.
The medication enables me to function to the best of my ability. But that's the thing: the best of MY ability. This is still in no way comparable to the best of a Neurotypical's ability, which is what the world is created to serve. And this has time and again set me up to fail and blame myself for my failure.
I've always harbored this dream that enough medication will overcome my brain damage and make it so I'll one day wake up and join the Neurotypical world and carry on alongside them without incident. And each attempt was successful for a period of time. Three months. Six months. Nine. Then, I managed to make it for almost three consecutive years in the school system and I really, really thought I had once and for all WON.
But my mangled neurology caught up with me. The whole time, I didn't realize then but I see now in the looking back, from the first day, and each day that followed, I was like a pitcher full of liquid out of which a little more was being poured out each day. There was no way for it to be replenished. And eventually, it would be empty. I would be run entirely out of any abilities to cope any longer, to mask, to make myself fit into the proverbial round-hole world as a Neurodivergent square peg.
The post-pandemic public school classroom was an absolute hellscape of disorganized disarray and more demands put on teachers than we could fulfill with severe admonishments and consequences when failing to do so. This was my absolute worst-case scenario. But I tried to soldier on. God, did I ever try. I'm not lazy; I want to work. I'm not selfish; I know working is what best for my family, and their needs are more important than my own. And I love teaching; I am a passionate, competent professional who lives for my students from a place of love that is very much like that I have for my own children, as all children in my care are no less dear to my heart than my own. I worked hard to get my degrees, to attain my licensure, and I wanted to do the work I trained so hard to do.
But it wasn't that simple, as for me, nothing has ever been at all "simple."
I realize now in this moment of coming to a point of acceptance that in the context of my presenting on the ASD spectrum, my propensity for inflexibility and rigid thinking and perception was incompatible with this. There was no order. There was no ability for me to know what to expect, to have enough time to be organized enough in my own space to have the safety, the control I needed. I need to feel like I am in control of my environment. I need a stable routine to serve as a grounding force. I need a reasonable amount of space and time to take care of myself and take care of my responsibilities in order to function. And I had none of this, and that is actually an understatement: everything that I needed was inverted and I had the extreme opposite of all of it.
I melted down. I burnt out. I had to resign my position.
But yet, I blamed myself. I went all the way back through evaluation, neuro doctors, psychiatrists. I was worked all the way over again to find out what I could do in order to get through this.
More meds were added. The longer I was away from the school system, from the traditional realm of in-person work, the better and better I was feeling. I found employment through an online teaching organization and I could do this and be home, be in control of my schedule, my environment, not have my ASD manifestations triggered.
I mistakenly took this to mean I was ready to go back into the public school system as it seemed I was "all better now."
I took a job as a summer school teacher in the public school and boy did I ever jump in with both feet. I bought and gathered supplies, got organized, focused, ready. I wanted this so bad. With everything in me, I wanted it to work. I wanted to prove to myself, my husband, my family, that I fell down again because of my inherent mental health issues, but look how hard I worked to stand back up again. I was going to show them. I was going to overcome this time. I was going to succeed.
And it only took a period of about 72 hours before I had to face the fact that none of this could be further from the truth.
The chaos was still there, and worse. The disorganization was still there, and worse. The heaped on unreasonable demands were still there...and worse, for they didn't even come with adequate enough time to even plan for me to meet them. It was all in this hellish whirlwind of insanely high, unattainable demands, no responsiveness whatsoever in terms of providing me with the time I'd need to meet them, and chaos, chaos, chaos.
Five different rigid curriculums. Demands for how to use literally every minute of the day. A state testing style assessment to be administered, data to be aggregated across three different levels. I didn't have a badge, wasn't being provided with one, so I couldn't even enter the building without someone letting me in. I didn't have an email so I couldn't use the smartboard to guide students in online work. The printer was broken, so I didn't have the ability to provide them paper work. Though we were supposed to implement these five curriculum sets, not all the materials came in, so there was that. My ability to try to get the students to access the online curriculum was hampered because their account hadn't been set up. I didn't even have time to orient myself with the school building enough to know where to even take the kids. My co-teacher came down with Covid so I didn't even have her support to accomplish anything or have her there to help at all.
Oh, and we had two days to prepare for all of this. Not even two days. About three hours each day, because interspersed was an avalanche of information being dumped on us, more and more. Then a meeting would occur later, and so much of the information had changed. The first day happened, and then the last day was four days later on the last day before students would have arrived. And my co-teacher was sick. Everything we had planned to try to rush to put together was split 50/50 between us so when she wasn't there, it was 100% on me and that was just it. And I didn't even have a straight up uninterrupted day to try to get it together. Worse yet, normally, my saving grace during the year was being able to stay several hours after school to pull it together and take as much time as I needed so I could be organized and ready for the next day. This wasn't the case; they rushed us out of the building and locked it an hour after the day was done.
That was all it took. I broke.
At the end of one of the third disruptive informational meetings, I absolutely fell to pieces. I burst into tears in front of an entire room full of strangers, colleagues whose names I didn't even have the chance to learn, and I mean I just sobbed. "Two days each with three hours to prepare for seven weeks all by myself isn't enough! It's not enough! I can't do this! I can't!" And thank God for the kindness shown to me by the special education teachers who I had gotten to know briefly, whom I'd told I was on the spectrum, because they helped me through it...they knew how to help me through it, just like they devoted their lives to helping autistic kids like me through meltdowns every day.
Everyone else just ignored me.
I resigned.
So here I am. At the end of all of this, because I have decided, yes, this is the end. And perhaps the beginning. It is the end of me trying to force myself to fit into something that I am simply not made to fit. And it is the beginning of me finally accepting who I am, particularly my limitations, as being what they are and to give up trying to force them to be what I want them to be, what I wish they were, because I've neve been able to, and I never will.
It hurts. And it is freeing. My husband and parents are supportive, wholly and finally. I am never going to be able to go back to the public school system. I am never going to be able to go out of the home and into any kind of outside employment. And so, we are going to have to make some adjustments.
We're going to sell our home and move into an apartment so that we can reduce our overhead expenses enough to accommodate me working part-time in a limited capacity for now on. My parents are going to help us through this summer.
And we are just going to adjust our lifestyle accordingly so that I will be able to finally accept the fact that I am limited and I always will be. And avoid any further attempts to push back against this. Because the 72 hours I just went through was me being back where I was in October all over again. It was enough to push me into burnout almost extreme enough that I would have had to go to the hospital. If I hadn't resigned last night and tried to force myself back into that situation today, I have no doubt I would have had an even worse meltdown and subsequent burnout that would have resulted in me being hospitalized right now.
It is what it is. I am what I am. And I'm finally ready, I think, to embrace this. I didn't choose what happened to me when I was a child. I didn't wake up one morning and think, I believe I'll go out and get a TBI and brain damage that's going to make my whole life a struggle. But it happened. It does define me. I am autistic. I have an organic personality disorder and executive dysfunction due to an irreparably damaged frontal lobe.
And I have to live my life accordingly. And so I will. And I hope in time I can be someone who exists to demonstrate to others like me... you can, too.
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