Working From Home/Being Self Employed.

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If I have to be honest, I would have to say that I don't like working with people or dealing with people. I'm not a people person. I've worked in retail/customer service since I was able to work at 16/17 years old and I've never enjoyed it. Some people have a knack for it, but I don't and it seems like I'll always will be working retail because that's all the experience I have unless I go to school for 4 years to get a degree I never wanted in the first place.

Over the past few years, I been wanting to work from home and be self employed. I always wanted to be able to work from anywhere. Take my laptop to a coffee spot or to the park on a nice day and be able to work without dealing with people. Be able to travel and work at the same time, but I never know how to get started or I find a reason not to start a business or find something that I can work wherever and whenever I want.

I want to be a writer and I would love to work in the entertainment field. Writing for a entertainment blog or writing reviews about movies and events would be a dream come true. I can work pretty much anywhere and get some travelling done at the same time.

Does anyone who have aspergers work from home? How did you get started? What do yo do? How can you help me get started?

I work as a writer doing exactly that kind of thing.

Feel free to send over a message with any questions and I'll do what I can to answer them.

I have worked for over four decades doing many different things to support myself. The list includes buying stuff at thrift stores and selling on ebay, painting houses, writing and more. I think I have had maybe two "real jobs" in my life. If you can identify a need that people have and fill that need, people will pay you for it. Many things people need do not require a lot of human interaction.

I have always made my decisions on what to try to do next by measuring the energy it took to do it. Being with people and presenting yourself as "normal", so as not to freak them out so they will hire you for a task, can require so much energy that it is not worth it. At one point I felt pretty strong and did work that involved constant human interaction and that experience resulted in a huge crash and burn for me. It's all about the energy.

I worked from home for a while as a graphic designer, but I struggled to get new customers and the whole thing wasn't viable financially in the end. Clients such as small charities were really good, but proper commercial clients made me want to shoot myself because of their horrible ideas for leaflets/posters that I had to "bring to life".
Somebody more pro-active and motivated could approach more small businesses and set up a steady customer base, but I just couldn't do it. Too much stress thinking if I'm going to get clients or not next month, some people switched to online services such as Vistaprint, some to print shops offering free design service (absolute horrible-ness with badly resized, low resolution images haha but people still wanted it, so...)

Advertising is a very competitive context. It is understandable that it would be very challenging. There are many other needs to fill. Some are as simple as dog walking or cleaning out a basement. I found the more the task was characterized as undesirable work, the easier it was to obtain the work and the more I could charge. One of the best examples I found was steam cleaning and painting construction equipment. Contractors, I discovered, wanted their equipment to look decent and reflect that their company was substantial. A clean backhoe with a fresh coat of paint accomplished this for them. At the same time they did not want a "perfect paint job". I just had to look decent.

I took money in advance for the paint and renting the steam cleaner. Cleaned the piece of equipment with pressure spray. I came back the next day and spray painted it. It was hard work, but it was quick and it made decent money. This I think is the type of business that lends itself to successful simple work. There was not a lot of human interaction. The time frame permitted by the customer was not very demanding. The quality standard of the expected outcome was not so high that people complained if there was a paint run here or there. It was simple. The problem was that where I was it could not be year around work. I think there are many small areas of work like this that can be filled by someone struggling with energy issues if they have some support and commitment. It worked for me pretty much of the time.