Is it so much to ask?

Is it?

Really?

It seems so. Just a chance, just an opportunity. Just a level playing field. It seems that that is too much to ask.

I managed to self-sabotage my last real time of employment at around the time I was coming to terms with the reality of being autistic.

That was March 2013. It’s now March 2017, and I haven’t really had a job since. Oh, I have had the odd thing here and there that has provided little bits of income, but never an actual real job. A contract here and a contract there.

It’s almost as though the realisation of being autistic, the accepting it, the believing it all snowballed into some kind of cataclysmic employment event. That certainly rings true to the final moments of that job I had.

Moments where I essentially told my then-boss to stick her job where the sun don’t shine.

But it seems like ever since I have been destined to failure. Destined to miss out on the interview, or to fail the interview or for somehow the employer to see through me and realise I was just not up to scratch.

And so I yell and scream about it not being fair. Because it damn well isn’t fair. I am just as capable as the next person of holding down a job. Sure I will find aspects more challenging, but conversely, I will also find aspects easier than others.

It’s not so much to ask for someone to help me out, is it?

I mean this whole executive function thing just seems to debilitate me. It just seems I am unable to manage the processes of going through the looking for the job and the applying for the job. It has taken me several months recently just to manage to re-do my resume or CV or whatever it is you like to call it.

I’m not even fussy. It’s like I am at the point where I couldn’t give a flying fuck if the job had anything to do with my qualifications and experience. That seems totally irrelevant. I want to be able to be a useful member of this society. Instead of feeling so useless, poverty-stricken and isolated.

One of the things that really rubs salt into the wound is where you see that there are people in jobs who clearly have lower skills than you, lower intelligence you and somehow they can have a job but you can’t.

It really feels at times like the world is against me. Even when there are times that opportunities rise I manage to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, there was an employment project to work at piggeries, I never put myself forward. I chose not to do so because of family commitments. But then a short time later my partner asked me to leave and the whole reasoning for never applying seemed to have flown out the window, but of course, for me, it was too late.

I just don’t understand. I’m willing to work, I’m able to work. I am an intelligent, capable woman, I am ready and able to start work whenever a chance comes my way. But they don’t. They seem to come by everyone else’s way but not mine. It just seems so incredibly and totally unfair.

I know this is something of a sob post, but it is also reality.

And the reality is that as yet another April month of so-called feel good stories about Autism and opportunities, and changing attitudes, still I sit, unable to gainfully participate in the world.

Is it so much to ask? Really?

Just a job, nothing special, just a job that pays some money to pay the bills and feed and clothe me and so on and so forth. It’s not like I am asking to be a CEO or anything.

What is really the problem here, though, is, not me pouring out my heart about it, but that I am not alone, I am not a minority of autistic people. I am in fact the majority. We autistics are passed over again and again and again. More so than every other disability group. And yet, the government, well at least the Australian Government, doesn’t consider us disabled enough to qualify for the Disability Pension.

It’s just so fucking unfair.