Overcoming regrets

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I spent a long time denying AS, and didn't used to see it as something that had any kind of impact on my life. It wasn't until I left my job and looked back on it that I reconsidered that maybe it had been impacting me all this time, without me realising it.

In 2014 I decided to go into teaching. At the time, I thought it was something I could do, something that would give me a stable job with a good salary and get me started in life. I was still denying I had AS, and though it crossed my mind that teaching wasn't the kind of job an AS person would be suitable for, I brushed it off. Sure, I was introverted and slightly odd - but I didn't see that as a barrier to teaching, so I ignored the shadow of niggling doubt in the back of my mind, and did it anyway.

On reflection, I should have listened to that bad feeing. Teacher training turned out to be hell. I was, effectively, afraid of the classroom. I didn't mind the rest of the job - the lesson planning, etc - but I was really scared of actually taking a lesson. My first placement was hell on earth. I knew early on that I was struggling much more than an average student teacher should. In fact, I almost failed. Somehow, I grazed through the first placement, though it was noted in my report that I was a borderline cause for concern.

I almost considered dropping out by this point, but I wanted to see if the second placement could be any better. I was also concerned about the idea of having wasted a year and a lot of money, so I stuck it out, and luckily the second placement turned out to be much better, so I stayed on and finished the year.

Following this placement, I decided to get a job teaching at a secondary school. It was the worst decision I ever made.

The school was an organisational and behavioural nightmare. I won't go into details, but it only took me a few weeks to realise how bad things were going to be. I struggled to teach alone, I struggled with control, I struggled with just about everything. I was going home and breaking down in tears; waking up the next morning and breaking down in tears; and spending my days trying not to break down in the middle of a lesson. From about October I knew that, by the end of the year, I had to get out.

All the way through this, it occasionally crossed my mind that teaching was something I should have known better than to get into. It felt as though everything that was wrong was down to little more than my personality, and that freaked me out. I felt like not a good enough person, I felt like a failure. And I wondered: Could this be because of AS?

It has been about half a year since I left that school and I'm now doing something different. Occasionally I still get nightmares about it, and wake up feeling as though even after all this time, I'm still trying to overcome everything that happened in those two years. I have spent considerably more time pondering AS and trying to answer the question of whether or I believe in my diagnosis, and whether it would have helped to be open about it from the beginning, rather than hiding it and denying it. I feel that I effectively wasted two years of my life, though I supposed I gained one hell of a lot of wisdom about what I actually want in my life.

What do you think? Did AS affect my job experience? Or was it not AS, but simply the fact that I wasn't made for teaching? Should I have been wiser about it from the beginning? Any other thoughts?