Sometimes I just would love my mom to fark off.

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Hi Snivy,

I'm in my early forties and still managing to "transition to adulthood." I think that's a sort of fallacy on a lot of levels. Being responsible for ourselves, looking after our own affairs, etc., is supposedly 'adulthood'. When I was younger it seemed everyone played up being adult as though it was some magical thing that "happened" and solved all the problems of teenage years. It doesn't work like that. I think with AS it can backfire as I know quite a few of us express adulthood as thinking that we have to manage everything on our own and that if we don't we're not responsible adults. I do that anyhow.

Like psychohist said, income is important and liberating. Being able to leave the house when you just can't have a rational relationship with parents is very important. I think both kids and parents often need a period of adjustment. It's difficult for parents to sometimes realise their kids have grown up into adults and to treat them as adults. It's difficult for kids not to resent parents, too. When you have some 'away time' and you can 'prove yourself' by being on your own, it is a lot easier to demand respect from your parents than it is when you are in their home.

I agree with the fast food comment regarding entry-level work. I worked in fast food as first jobs and just being out of my house (it wasn't the healthiest environment) and having my own money made a world of difference in my life. I know an adult who ended up going into management at McDonald's (from behind the counter work) and he now earns over $50k per annum, which is pretty good overall wages. I know of others who started as clerks in bookstores who are now in management. Independence via some form of income is the first step towards "adulthood".

Welcome back Snivy

It might be easier for people to address these questions if there was a clearer sense of what you're having problems with. 'Transition to adulthood' is a big topic, and will vary depending what your mother is taking 'adulthood' to mean, and whether the issue is your own concern or coming from her. If you're meaning independence then work/income and living arrangement are important, so people are picking up on these a lot, but I sense you want to bracket these issues and focus on something else. What else is it you're having trouble doing? Oh, and I second Ominous, many of us never *do* become full 'adults' by certain people's definitions, because full 'adult' is often slang for 'someone on a normal life-trajectory' which is very unlikely for us (a lot of people of all types aren't going to be on what's taken to be a normal life-trajectory because of economic changes too, but that's a different question).

On the work issue: I'm surprised there's aspies in fast food, because smell or sound sensitivities would pretty much rule it out, and it requires dealing with the public, short-term memory processing and multitasking - which we're (stereotypically) bad at. A lot of supposedly low-end, unskilled jobs actually require tacit skills a lot of aspies don't have, or at least are at 'comparative disadvantage' with. Some people may be thinking "any job is better than no job" or "it's just difficult, not impossible", but if someone's not careful, things can go badly wrong - bad sensory fit can cause constant mistakes, accidents and harm to self or others, risk of meltdown (and consequent arguments etc), and generally just doing the job really badly. So we really can't afford the kind of wishful thinking a lot of people have about hard work and attitude getting us over the hurdles - we need to be very careful. Getting fired three days in because one misheard customer orders due to tannoy noise or put the burgers in the chip pan when in pre-meltdown is not going to look good on one's CV. And a lot of us do, in general, need step-by-step guides on how to do things... it's not helping anyone pretending we can just jump into things and pick them up, or that our problems are the same ones everyone has making these kinds of transitions... I really wouldn't advise 'jumping into' things unless you're absolutely desperate (i.e. literally don't have enough money to live on). We generally 'sink' in 'sink or swim' situations, and there's a reason for this: we're concrete thinkers and we don't have the think-on-your-feet problem-solving mindset. Also, doing things we fail at will build up anxiety which will make future attempts harder and harder - I don't think we get stronger by trying, I think we take psychological blows very heavily. The more planned a transition is, the less risk there is of failure, and the easier it will be to specify what goes wrong and why, if it does. I'd guess a vocational advisor should be able to come up with step-by-step instructions for some things, and others will have step-by-step guides online (e.g. it's not hard to find out how to write a CV).

There's lots of sites for good/bad jobs for people with AS, pretty much every autism site has a page on this, for instance http://www.autism.com/ind_choosing_job.asp and http://www.grandin.com/inc/transition.e ... rgers.html and on this site http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt62793.html. The things which seem to work best are either high-end skilled work (playing to special talents or brain functioning) or manual/sorting work with limited human contact (avoiding usual problems). Though it probably varies with specific sensitivities and personality types (Myers-Briggs types can be helpful in finding job specialisms as well). *Especially* sensory issues, because someone who's hypo (under) sensitive may be excellent at a job which someone who's hyper (over) sensitive will either be very bad at or unable to do. If you do a lot of gaming then look up Aspiritech (new company hiring exclusively aspies for games testing) and look into games testing or programming more broadly. I'd also suggest looking into things you can self-train for online, and looking into self-employment / semi-self-employment. And I second the suggestions re vocational education and volunteering. It might or might not help you get a job later, but this kind of thing can be good for giving yourself a purpose (if you need one), and getting time away from your mother.

This is a tangent, but the customer facing jobs that one sees when walking into a McDonald's are not the only jobs there. My own experience was in a cafeteria style restaurant, which was slightly different, but still food service.

I never worked the customer facing counter and cashier jobs - this was decades ago, and there was some sex stereotyping that caused all those jobs to be assigned to women. I started as a busboy, which while it involved walking around in the customer area, did not involve interacting with them. Later, being a dishwasher was almost the perfect aspie job; it was mechanical, basically loading dirty dishes into a big high speed industrial dishwasher and unloading them and stacking them back in the dispensers, and there was almost no human interaction. Being cook did require multitasking, and wasn't as great, though I took the promotion because it paid better.

You're right that some skills are required, but restaurants that take people with no experience, such as fast food places and the one I worked at, do tend to provide training. The routines are pretty straightforward and well defined; I didn't find that I had to learn anything through social osmosis.

I do agree that sensitivities might be an issue for some. I don't think the CV issues are that significant - you aren't required to tell prospective employers about work history that you don't want them to know about.

I do agree with your analysis of some of the other jobs that might be aspie friendly.

When I was young working in fast food it was disgusting with the grease and everything. Back then we wore polyester uniforms and they were skin clinging and horrific. For me, it was better than being in an abusive home environment. A lot of us (not all) are forced to deal with the lesser of two evils in life. A lot of us do that and a lot of us come out the other side in many ways better for it (ie. I have been independent since the age of 17, if my family were "nice" I may have been at home a lot longer or more "sensitive").

I sort of take issue with a lot of things you find "surprising" aspie1968. You're fortunate that you obviously live in a situation where you can "rule out" different options in life. Some of us had no other options but make it, be abused at home or sleep under a bridge. Not a lot of option in that irrespective of "sensitivities". This is where my hard arse comes in. If you are high functioning enough to attend school, play on the computer and manage to learn how to "be" in an NT world (even if it hurts), then do it. Don't sit around whinging about it being difficult and "not an option" because a lot of people don't have those options at all. I have a major chip on my shoulder about this kind of thing so will probably leave this as my last post in this thread.

It will be so great to get past my deadline and actually invest in this thread ...

Meanwhile, side note of sorts on all this discussion about fast food.

I am brilliant at the career I now have, but I was horrible at every last entry level job I tried. I can't do mundane or fast, and it was a serious blow to my self-esteem to have ever attempted it. I have HUGE respect for the people in those jobs, because I KNOW I can't do them. All that said, it is a process most of us have to go through, trying on all those jobs for size, but do remember that failing to get hired by McDonalds, or failing as a waitress, does not mean one will fail as an adult. You chuck each experience up to being part of the learning curve for figuring out what makes you tick, and what you excel at.

Even in my career, the first few years of "paying my dues" with the dull stuff were a huge challenge, and I almost bailed. It wasn't until someone was willing to hand me a project I was theoretically ready for that I took off and soared.

Anyway, it's all a long story, and I'm not even sure if I know how to sort through all that and help provide a road map to figuring out what you can do in a career. So, it's definitely not today's project.

No, you come out traumatised. Hence the chip on your shoulder. People who say they've been made better by suffering are just covering up their own pain.

You've obviously swallowed an entire 'coper' ideology which is thoroughly part of neoliberalism and something *I* have an immense chip on my shoulder about, because of the incalculable misery this ideology is causing, and the way it systematically reproduces the very traumas which caused it to begin with (not to mention that it's wreaked havoc with my own life, but because I *feel* these traumas rather than repressing them, this is not something I can discuss here).



No, it means I'm realistic about my own capabilities, and I haven't been "broken in" by the system.

I know lots of people who have not been "broken in", and the majority are from very rough backgrounds. Also, I know plenty of people from backgrounds at least as bad as yours who don't imagine for a moment they can do every job on the planet or that willpower is enough to pull them through crises, including one friend who has lived rough on the streets but still can't hold down these kinds of jobs (not for not having tried), and several who, due to childhood traumas among other things, seem as far as possible from ever having a job. Many of them are pretty adept at creating their own options, rather than choosing from the ones the system makes available (for someone with a flame in their heart, it is never just one, two, or three). Others remain dependent on whatever support-networks they can throw together.

One also never hears - of course - from the people who couldn't cope and ended up committing suicide, overdosing on heroin, in mental asylums, or locked-up for the best part of their lives - there's an awful lot of them, far too many to ignore. I've no idea if you'd think yourself 'fortunate' relative to them, or just imagine you're better than they are, but they're the other side to the 'sink or swim' story, and their absence is what falsifies the narrative. We don't hear from the swimmers because they're right, we hear from the swimmers because the sinkers can't speak. And as long as the swimmers keep claiming they came out stronger, or that everyone should 'stop whining' and go through the traumas they did, there will be more and more sinkers.

You seem to live in a world where "can't" is a fancy word for "won't", where willpower will rectify every deficit or incapacity, and where nothing bad happens if you take a job you're not competent to do or that is beyond your stress tolerance - no sliced-off fingers from poor motor skills, no poisoned customers because you confused the grease with the bleach when in sensory overload, no jail sentences for kicking your manager because he grabbed you during a meltdown. Presumably your magical coping abilities ward off all these eventualities. They just don't happen because you will them not to happen. How very 'realistic' (<----- sarcasm).

Think of sensory sensitivities in terms of concrete examples if you'd rather: someone with a sound sensitivity works in a noisy environment, can't hear the boss's commands/requests, mis-hears what customers say... gets fired. Someone with a smell sensitivity works in a smelly environment, keeps vomiting on the floor... gets fired. (This is without bringing in the complications with overload and meltdown). It is absolutely no different to hiring a blind person as a delivery driver. If you've somehow avoided being born with any sensitivities strong enough to do this to you, if things are just unpleasant to you and don't cause these kinds of real effects - you're the fortunate one. Stop pretending otherwise.

Look, I'm quite aware desperation drives people to take what are otherwise foolish risks, but recommending such a stance as a course of action to others, as something desirable or beneficial to other people who aren't in the same kind of desperation? Nobody needs that. Recognising one's own needs and limits is not an indulgence, it's an absolute necessity for making sensible choices.

Oh, and that magic word 'life' again... you don't mean life, you mean the system.

*If* you managed to cope in spite of all this, when a lot of us would not have coped, then *you* are the one who is fortunate.



Instead of feeling unjustly treated for your own situation, you seem to wish the same trauma and damage on others - despite the fact that you have no idea what proportion of these people would survive (albeit with immense, highly visible wounds) like you, and what proportion would go under. Just because something bad happened to you is no excuse to be hard-hearted towards other people. Just because you can do something doesn't mean every HFA can. I have no idea why you feel the need to shore up your ego with this kind of resentment, but I sense that it's closely related to the wounds you're trying to pretend were actually 'coming out tougher'. It's not helping you, it's not helping the people you're talking to, and it's not helping prevent the same traumas from happening in the future. Actually it's a vicious circle: it's mobilising whatever power you have to ensure that your own traumas will be repeated over and over. Is this really what you want? Wouldn't it be better to heal?

Yes, you're the new resident expert on everyone else's lives and feelings. We've already established that I think.

I'm really over this guy. Is there a way to block someone so we don't have to read their drivel? This b.s. is enough to keep me from coming back here on a regular basis. Feel free to read through what I said and then how it's been extrapolated into a psychiatric diatribe of egregious proportions. Over it.

I don't want to get entangled in another protracted dispute, but I found what you said offensive, dangerous and absolute anathema to both what I know and what I value. Also, you opened the psychology discussion with your claims that you'd been made stronger/better by bad experiences - if you go onto terrain then don't be surprised if others follow you there.

Also, you can't simultaneously be tough enough to take whatever the world throws at you, and so vulnerable you need protecting from criticism on a forum. Either-or.

*yawn*

I just have one question: why couldn't you leave it alone?

Didn't we already have this fight, slightly different version?

I felt that BOTH of you had valid points based on your own unique experiences and that what existed immediately before my post about my difficult early job experiences was a good balance of information for Snivy to read and select from. BOTH posts were valid, the one about why fast food might not be a realistic job for some Aspies, and the one about sometimes just having to suck it up. BOTH are true to some degree or another, depending upon the unique situation a person is in.

No one has to win here; there is no win to be had. Just different life experiences, and different situations to be faced.

We don't know what Snivy's situation is so why can't the various perspectives simply be provided and left alone? Let her choose what fits?

I posted a long response where I actually retooled my entire post to read the way aspie1968 would have liked it to read in order to fit in with his myopic worldview but it disappeared into the ether. I'm done. From now on I'm going to pretend I'm blind when I see that username. I don't come here to be assigned BS, I come here for friendship and support amongst like-minded people. The choice I MADE in my life and the things I share about MY life belong to me. I appreciate challenging myself to do things I don't feel comfortable doing. It makes ME feel like I am working on my issues. I'd appreciate it if he could stop extrapolating the things I say to fit in with his air-of-superiority, aspie1968-normative agenda.

I hope Snivvy does what works best for her and I hope that she also challenges herself to be the best "Snivvy" she can be whatever that means. Same with everyone else in the world who has challenges. I know too many people who have decided they are limited by issues without trying things and have made the limitations a self-fulfilling prophecy. For me, working in fast food was a better choice and I am glad I made that choice even if it made me uncomfortable. I still do things today that make me uncomfortable, like making sure I have extra time to be in physical contact with my child because he needs that even though I would sometimes rather be alone. Being here at WP helps me to challenge myself and being amongst other spectrum people who haven't laid down and died with their "issues" is PROFOUNDLY inspiring to me as a woman and as a parent.

Don't go sticking it on the internet then, and don't go using it as a cudgel to hit people with when they disagree with your ideology. If you put something in a public forum then it's fair game for interpretation. And if you really believe your experiences belong to your conscious rather than your unconscious, you will never understand a thing about your mind, or anyone else's.



Don't go telling people to 'stop whinigng' then. I wish I could find like-minded people here but I seem to keep finding the very discourses which are destroying difference, repeated almost verbatim from their standard formulations, complete with the usual dismissiveness towards my own perspective. You can't expect that every aspie will be a neoliberal, it's not a position which fits well with what we are.



Fallaciously inferring motives. The only superiority here is in the fact that your arguments have been falsified. In order to falsify opposing arguments, I will deploy the best arguments I can muster.

Also hypocritical, since accusing others of 'whinging' and being privileged displays a clear sense of being superior (as someone who copes, over those who don't).

I don't believe in 'opinions'. Most of what you've said consists of truth-claims. Truth-claims are falsifiable.



The belief that you don't have an agenda, or that it's not normative, is the strongest proof of a concealed, unconscious normative agenda. Why is it only the position which is different from the norm which is marked as normative, and not the position which reproduces dominant forces?

To me, your entire position is ideological. You're portraying conformity to dominant norms as some kind of personal victory over adversity. It might not feel political and normative to you, but it is. This is the agenda which has caused provisions for vulnerable people to be pared back, people to be thrown off benefits and forced into demeaning indoctrination regimes to inculcate the beliefs you display. It's a stance which has pushed real issues of inequality, incapacity and social problems off the agenda, instead portraying social problems as personal problems. To me this is not empowering at all, it's threatening. It's nothing more than a heightened pressure to conform at any cost and an escalated risk of abjection should any of the 'challenges' prove insuperable.



And how do you know that these aren't issues they actually couldn't overcome? Especially since we've just been told a few lines earlier that you don't believe in second-guessing others' self-narratives. Which - whoops - you've just gone and done.

Neoliberalism has conned people into believing they're all-powerful and into not recognising that each of us has different incapacities, different strengths and weaknesses, and a different calling. In fact there are too many people blaming themselves for being unable to do things, or much worse at doing things, that aren't their fault at all. And *I* know a lot of people who *this* is true of.

Also: if your point was to advise Snivy that overcoming challenges can be inspiring or whatever it is you're saying, why didn't you say it directly, instead of going an indirect route, denouncing other people and trying to deny the existence of insuperable difficulties?



That's belittling and insulting.

Taken outside the framework of hatred of difference and desire to be normal, this translates as: people who don't keep on pretending they're just like everyone else; or, people who don't roll over and accept mistreatment as just part of life, reconceiving externally-imposed suffering as some kind of personal triumph of the will.



Because what I hold dear is under attack. I can't just sit back and let someone who believes in an ideology which has done terrible damage to tell me to stop 'whinging'.



Three problems.

Firstly, there is no such thing as a discursively unmediated experience, and people are only able to make sense of their own experiences if they are sufficiently reflexive.

Secondly, the 'sink or swim' narrative involves an elided position which goes missing whenever it's recounted: we never hear from the sinkers, because by definition they aren't around to be heard from. This 'other side' needs to be brought to bear whenever this narrative appears.

Thirdly, the claims Ominous made were *not* situated in a particular experience, but extended to denunciation of other stances. The perspective as such forecloses the possibility of other perspectives. It seems to be sustained by such a status-ranking: the self is empowered in contrast to the disempowered other, who is blamed for not having 'achieved' what the self has.

Last edited by aspie1968 on 15 Apr 2011, 3:55 am, edited 2 times in total.

I didn't read any of that and it feels great.

aspie1968, I understand exactly what you're saying. Actually, I agree with most of what you have been saying. Here lies the problem. The majority does not. The people who run the government and industry do not. IMHO, we have to be in a position of power and affluence to be able to challenge or change anything. This means, and I know you do not like it, is we're going to have to play by their rules until we're in a position to challenge anything.

For now, I believe we have to deal in practicality and we have to be pragmatic.

Let me rephrase that, aspie1698. You MUST learn to leave it alone. You had already effectively made your case regarding the potential issues with the fast food suggestion and, to be honest, knowing what I know from reading other boards here, I was glad you did. Ominous simply shared that a different opinion. It is NOT your job to change anyone's worldview, only to help with the question asked. Your post to Ominous was hurtful and unecessary. That is not allowed here.

Going after me was one thing, as a former moderator we would hope that I'm rarely going to lose my cool the way I did earlier. But almost every member here is vulnerable and the moderation team will not allow posters to knowingly go after each other's sensitive spots. Everytime you post the type of analysis you just did, that is, unfortunately what you are doing.

--- edit to add:

Psychohist, below, has a point. I realize that ominous did say something that tempted your response. But I know ominimous and I understood where that was coming from, so I knew the best thing was to let it slide. The problem is, you didn't pick up on that clue. For all you pride yourself on being able to read motives and personalities, this is one thing you keep missing in this thread: the clue that says, "leave it be." Sometimes you MUST let things be. It's a super important lesson to learn on a message board.

The way you approached me and the way you approached ominimous is not going to change our world views. If that is your goal, it is never, ever going to to work.

I'm sorry for coming on so strong, above, but you post with a seeming arrogance that makes one feel there is no other way to talk to you. Your posting style pushes people into that corner, and that is not a positive way to carry on a conversation.

My funny little post about my first jobs and how poorly they went was actually intended to neutralize the differences between you and ominious at that point, in a non-invasive and indirect manner. I wish you had let it. Sometimes you should sit back see what the other members do to evolve a discussion before jumping in to "win" the argument. Not every last point you can think of needs to appear in a thread ... only the most important ones. And having them come from different voices, instead of your own, actually makes them stronger.

I have consider calling in a moderator to this thread several times, but my preference is for us to resolve it as members. That is the preference of the moderation team, as well. So ... let's get back on track. All of us. If some posts need to be cleared out to do that, so be it. We all have the right to request that. But I'd like those of us involved here to be on the same page before taking that step. And then maybe it won't be needed.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 15 Apr 2011, 1:41 pm, edited 2 times in total.