What were your biggest challenges in school/at work and why

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Hi,

I wonder if some of you could share what your biggest challenges at school and work were and why you found those incidents stressful? What could you have done differently at school/work to have mitigated the problem?

The hardest problem I deal with is having to stay focused on work that bores me. I am not the sort of Aspie that enjoys repetitive work. If I had my way, I would only do the work that got me excited. Generally I enjoy work that involves learning some new skill. Once I've reached an adequate level for my interest, I want to go off and do something else. This means I develop a broad range of skills, but I never become very good at any of them.

My job has evolved over time and my boss often expects me to talk to or e-mail clients. I hate doing this and I'm not quite sure if it's possible to get my job focused more on doing the work I enjoy and less on having to deal with people.

I try to convince myself that I can get excited by some detail of the work I am doing by honing my skills in one very narrow aspect of the job, but generally it's hard to control what interests me. Sometimes you just have to accept that you will have to do some boring stuff and that maybe you can do something interesting when you get off work.

Black/white thinking was my number one block to success in the workplace. I had to really work hard to open my mind. The next block was ToM (or lack thereof) I was always a super hard worker and very smart. I assumed everyone else should be too so that caused me grief as I felt most of my coworkers were slackers. (again it took a lot of re-programming)

Today my issue is "not seeing the big picture". Actually this has always been in my performance reivews but was working on the other two over the past decades. Now I am gonna tackle this one..

Well first of all, at school and now the same challenge in college which I'm afraid I have never overcome is communicating with girls. I don't know if you count this as a school problem but it's the only place I've ever came into contact with them.

I've gotten worse at talking to people in general, but the girls part has always been an impossible challenge. It has driven me absolutely insane over the years not being able to do this, while going through puberty that's made me incredibly interested and obsessed with women.

Overall learning has always been one of the biggest challenges as well. Not once has a teacher ever truly understood me, thus never knowing how to help me properly. I failed my exams at school because of lack of support. Although I did re-take my English exams and got my D moved to a C .

Maths? The absolute biggest subject failure of my life . I've spent many, many years trying to figure out why there is letters in "Algebra" whatever the hell that is. Also my teacher lied: "I promise all of you will get a C!"
I got a G , and by the end of years of painful struggle, I could not care less.

The biggest challenge for me at work is deciphering what my co-workers are saying. They use many colloquialisms that I'm not always familiar with. Most of the time my problems occur with those who are younger than me. I simply am not familiar with the terms they are using yet.

I also have problems understanding when my co-workers are joking about something or not. My boss in particular likes to tease people but I've noticed that others pick up on this fact a lot faster than me. As my boss and I have worked together longer I've noticed that he is now quick to tell me that he's 'joking' about something, whereas with other people he wont say anything.

For me in school there was no help or understanding (back in the 60's/70's) but the same problem has followed me throughout, not being able to read between the lines. If someone is vague about direction or instruction I won't get what they want from me. In school it affected LA and History, I thought most of the time the teacher was talking another language. But other subjects like Math and Science I had no problems. So I came to the conclusion that it was when I need to compare opinions or give an opinion that I came unstuck, not seeing the bigger picture, I was fine working with memorizing dates etc.

Work wise for the most part I was lucky that one of my interests turned into a career in the computer industry. This used a lot of my strengths and I did very well. though there were no females in the area I choose it didn't bother me at all as I truely loved what I was doing.

The issues with vagueness and not understanding the bigger picture will always be with me. I have spent many, many hours trying to figure what others meant by there statements or instructions as it was not aparent to me. These days I am up front about needing direct instruction on things and if I don't understand it I tell the person that I do not understand what they want. I find it mostly affects me in my personal life nowdays.

In school my biggest problem was communicating with my peers. I was always that weird kid in school. Some people would even try to approach me and genuinely try and become friends, but I had no idea how to act or what to say. They would interpret this as me not wanting to be friends, so they would leave me alone. Because of this I gained very few strong, lasting friendships in school.

At work I'm usually able to socialize better, but still don't really make any real friends. When a few people at work will be going out for drinks afterwards I will come up with an excuse not to join them, because I'm terrified of being stuck in a social situation I can't control. People at work seem to respect me because I usually excel at whatever I set out to learn, but I seem to have no interest in advancement of any kind. Becoming a supervisor would involve more interaction with employees, conference calls with the main office, etc., and the thought of it scares me.

Getting along with my peers aws my biggest challenge. They didn't want anything to do with me, because I was different from the rest of the girls. I was also more interested in things that were much older.

Bullies, writing, and math

Simply sitting in the classroom with other students and enduring long school days. I would have been much better of if I had been allowed to pursue independent studies and get a dual enrollment degree through a community college but with my town's public high school's stamp of approval. Unfortunately the town had ended the dual enrollment program a few years earlier, because they believed that the high school social experience was an integral part of our development. //sigh//. I was *done* with high school after eleventh grade and would have preferred to spend my senior year in community college. I just wasn't into the senior social scene and couldn't bring myself to get excited about senior activities. My OCD got really bad and in December I wanted to drop out and get a GED.

Understanding verbal directions.

* Getting my supervisor to understand that I cannot sit in a meeting with an uncontrolled ADHD or ADD person and not feel overwhelmed. It's impossible for me to even begin to feel productive in such an environment.

* Getting people to understand that I desperately need at least 10 minutes to recharge after 3 hours of intense collaboration. I don't care how close we are to being finished. In fact, I no longer care about anything at this point.

* Getting people to email me lists of tasks. If I am given a list of tasks verbally, I cannot remember past the first or second task. I would write it down, but by the time I've been given this list, I'm so overwhelmed by the amount of information I've received verbally that I need to refocus.

* Sitting through a meeting that has no agenda without getting frustrated and wanting to scream due to the lack of coordination and the feeling that we are not accomplishing anything.

* Sitting through a meeting that does have an agenda, but where the attendees are constantly off task, therefore we are not accomplishing anything, and the meeting drags on forever.

* Being detail oriented. No one seems to care about the details but me. However, they are extremely, extremely important to me. My supervisors and coworkers get upset with me because I focus way more energy on the details of a project than they desire, thus delaying my work.

At school, I have developed a tremendous fear of being evaluated. I attend every class and make meticulous notes, but end up having test/essay writing anxiety so severe that it often prevernts be from writing them or completing them on time. When I do them, I push myself really hard...this semester I had an average in the 90s. It is for this reason that I am currently taking a semester long break from school, I am in counselling to confront these stresses and many others.

At work: it was always the people. My summer jobs consisted of people who were less educated than me and were perhaps intimidated by the fact that I was in university. They were dull, uninteresting, often cranky, and impossible to relate to. I could socialize with them fine...but only during the first one or two weeks. They made things difficult and some of them even bullied me.

I also have severe difficulties with multitasking. I cannot do a task (i.e. pouring a cup of coffee) while someone is talking to me or giving me instructions and expect to take in the information. I just can't do it, and I have been accused of not listening or being disrespectful when I am not purposely doing that. It is a legitimite processing issue that I feel I always have to explain to people.

My biggest challenges at work and school have been my sensory and executive functioning issues. It's very difficult to differentiate between the two sometimes, because both of them resulted in exhaustion. When I had to stay in school during lunches, I often got headaches and could then barely process new information in class or when studying at home. Having to switch between classes quickly and having to keep track of many things at once also exhausts me at the end of the day. In a perfect world, I would sit in my room, have my food delivered to me, and do the same thing for days at a time. But that would probably not be possible in my lifetime.

This is going to be a really long post, so I'm going to break it into different categories and post each of them separately. Hopefully that will dilute the impact of the amount of words I'm about to use. (BTW, as I mention in the post, my receptive issues are still worse than expressive, so I have as much trouble with long posts as anyone, I just can't control the lengths of my posts and trying to do so is an exercises in frustration.)

(OWWWWW GOOD GRIEF WHY ARE THERE STROBING ADS ON THIS SITE OF ALL SITES?!?!) Sorry about that. I really hope that doesn't give me a migraine. I know he says not to use adblocking services but I am very close to using one for my own health, which to me trumps site donations or whatever WP gets out of these ads. For cripes sake.

Anyway, back on topic. It's hard to pick just one, because there were several extreme problems I had, and different ones became more extreme at different points in my "education". So I'll just have to write about as many of them as I can manage.

1. Receptive Language Problems

So... receptive language was one of the earliest problems I had with school. Like... well, like more autistic people than I was aware of until I read the longer version of the DSM part on autism and actually comprehended it... I had severe receptive language issues and my apparent expressive language was light-years ahead of my receptive language. It worked like this: I could repeat words. I could repeat big words and small words, what constitutes a "big word" means nothing to someone who doesn't understand any of the words in the first place. I could form words into sentences based on what I heard other people saying, I learned the pattern and structure, I could hold conversations of a sort. I could often pass as understanding the words I and others used, but the truth was that I could do all that before I could understand what language was even for, or that it was meaningful in any way. I slowly over time had meaning seep into me through a certain kind of context-pattern more than through the usual way children learn language. (Most children have excellent receptive language before they even have any expressive language.)

Anyway, this obviously created a lot of problems in school. I could pick up on tone more than I could pick up on the meaning of words. I would understand words here and there (after awhile), but not enough to understand what was going on fully. So I became very observant of things most autistic children who have language are too busy dealing with language to notice. I noticed tone, I noticed the way people moved, that kind of thing. I didn't notice the same things about tone and body movement that most nonautistic people notice, but I noticed a lot and it all sorted itself into patterns in my head.

{Side-note: BTW much later in life I learned that even people who acquire very severe receptive aphasia can often fake understanding so well that the true extent of their trouble understanding language is only obvious if you go out of your way to test it in certain ways. Read this article for more information. While developmental receptive language disorders are different from acquired aphasia, many of the things described about people with severe receptive aphasia in that article are true of me when I'm not in language mode, and/or before I learned receptive language. What's really funny is that a friend who is very savvy about politics, an area I'm not good at at all, used to turn on CSPAN and test my ability to use non-word cues to understand the different politicians by having me watch them for awhile then having me go back into language mode and tell her what I perceived. It almost always matched up to what she knew through political knowledge. And that article is all about how people with aphasia respond to politicians.}

The problem is, even doing all that as skillfully as I could left a lot of gaps in my understanding of things. Not only did I usually not understand the lessons, but... odd things happened sometimes. For instance, at a time when I didn't really know what a "report" was or anything like that, my third grade class was supposed to present a report on a painter, and have a costume that represented something about their paintings. We were given books about each painter showing a lot of their paintings. Now I never went home and wrote the report because I didn't understand I was supposed to. But I did understand that we were being divided into pairs to do this. And I understood that my partner was looking through a book on Manet's paintings and putting together a hat, and that there were a lot of hats in Manet's paintings. So I looked through the book of paintings and saw a lot of nudes. And... no, I didn't strip naked. (Although I still did that occasionally up to the age of 15.) But I started cutting out orange construction paper and making a "nude suit" out of it. And then I followed my partner up to the front of the classroom. I can't remember whether I actually said anything out loud (if I did, it would have of course been a repetition of something someone else had said, possibly spliced together), or whether I just let my partner do the talking. But the situation was utterly ridiculous.

And I often got myself into weird binds like that through not understanding words. Teachers would tell me I wasn't listening. Or else I would finally get to a point where I could understand the words, only to have the words cut out on me rapidly. It was quite frustrating. And yet I didn't even know I had a problem. I just thought that this was naturally the way life was (I won't say "I thought everyone was like that", which is what most people say -- I honestly never gave a thought to what other people were like) so I never thought to mention it really except occasionally almost by accident. (And my ability to mention things was also impaired because if you grow up with expressive language ahead of receptive, then you also have expressive language troubles stemming from the receptive ones.)

My psychiatrist understood more about this than anyone else though. He was the one who diagnosed me with autism. I was fourteen years old. He spent years telling me stories over and over again. His stories all centered around people who had not understood language, and who suddenly had an "aha" type moment when the purpose of language made sense to them. He never really considered how telling these stories to me in language as if they would help me understand language, might have been seriously missing the point. But basically... one of the stories he told the most often was the famous Helen Keller at the water pump story. He also had had a lot of patients who were autistic, and many of them had had an "aha" moment with language as well. But honestly? I never had an "aha" moment. What I had was a lot of gradual time of language seeping into my brain and slowly, slowly making more and more sense. Except this wasn't just forward progress. Often I would learn it existed, then forget it existed, then learn it existed, then forget it existed, etc. In fact, even though I now have as stable language as I've ever had in my life, I still most of my day most days, don't understand language and don't know it exists. That's just my baseline, that's where I start, and then I climb up into language when I need to use it (whether it's always possible to climb up is a whole different story, but after I'm done up there, I either let go and fall back down to languagelessness, or else I fall by accident).

For more information on learning and losing and learning and losing things that way, see http://web.archive.org/web/200301221414 ... idging.htm and particularly the quote: