ASDKings.com

The Brick. I have this problem. An affliction. An addiction. No matter what, I always see myself as the underdog. I often see people with more than me as people who cheated or privileged nepo babies.

Autistic people bring problem-solving, obsessive focus, deep expertise, creativity, and the ability to see patterns others miss. The problem is that most work environments fail us.   Survival in these places depends less on how good we are at the job, and more on whether the system is willing to bend even a little.

My Story I am a late-diagnosed Autistic man with ADHD and Persistent Demand Avoidance. Before I knew this truth, I assumed I was “weird”. I didn’t need to assume it, people let me know.  Every time I didn’t understand an unwritten social rule, or didn’t get other people’s weird hints because they were scared to say what was on their mind, or any time I expected total honesty from dishonest people, I realised they were running on a different operating system.  This first understanding led me to believe my life would be pain after pain the longer I lived by “be yourself” and “Treat others how you want to be treated”, because that advice always backfired. So I stopped being real…  People didn’t want to be treated how I did and they didn’t want me to be myself because I was “too much”, “too intense”, ““too random” and told “Can you please just act normal for ten minutes?” when I wanted to talk about things that were actually important or interesting.  As a teenager, I bl...

I was 20 years old, waiting alone in a government-funded room filled with kid’s toys and stickers on the wall. My eyes looked through the window blinds, across the field at the city skyline, wondering what my true potential really was. The family trauma specialist came in to empower me in this damaged state with one-liner truisms and canned pop psychology. Any deep thoughts I had were quickly steered by her back into the conversational shallow water where she felt comfortable.  She looked like Harleen Quinzel, too hot to be a therapist, but I took the work seriously and never held back the cringe if I thought it was necessary for growth. I told her I felt like a loser, like I’m behind, and I’m not becoming who I’m meant to be, and that I don’t blame it on the family tragedy that brought me here, I blame it squarely on myself because I believe I control my life. She discouraged me from building agency and asked me to open up about my pain. I did and she rearranged words and phrases...