I work for the federal government, so I have the neat option of (now that I have my diagnosis and understand what exactly I need from a job) applying for a Reasonable Accommodation. Basically, that means that they try to accommodate my needs in my current job first, which will be impossible because my current job is the antithesis of healthy for me. It's a line inspector position in a factory that smells VERY bad, is ridiculously loud, doesn't allow music (but I listen to it anyway sneakily), has the brightest possible lights, and you can't leave the line if you 'shut down' (this has only happened to me a couple of times there, and I can still *sort of* do my job while I'm shut down, but I'm almost entirely non-verbal and become somewhat dangerously uncoordinated). It's kind of ironic that having such a terrible job for my disability was what finally helped me to understand it. But I digress. The second step in the reasonable accommodation program is to look for available positions within the Agency/Department that I work in and try to move me there. The problem there is I don't want to move very far (my whole family is here and moving to another state is suuuuper stressful especially when I'm in the early stages of burnout already), and I have no idea what kind of openings they have that I could fill at my current salary level (GS-07) in the immediate area.
That all being said, I should go into what I have and what I need from a job. I have a degree (with a kind of bad GPA) in Environmental Studies from an accredited university, experience doing customer service type stuff and my current job (which is kind of niche, so I won't ask for help knowing what else there is in my current field). What I need is the kind of job where if I shut down I can leave/hide for a few minutes to pull myself together, I can stim sometimes, I can listen to music/block out the noises around me, and I don't have to... I don't know how to put this. I have some executive dysfunction, which makes complicated tasks with lots of steps difficult but doable provided the proper instruction, but deciding (for example) on a research project or something like that would be basically impossible. I once stared at the mop in its closet for 10 minutes after being told to mop the floor, freaking out because I had no idea how to begin to do that task and feeling like it was too stupid a question to ask.
To be clear, I'm not really looking for job offers or anything, but I just want to know what kind of jobs are out there that I could go into and not hate every waking second of my life doing them. Because again, executive dysfunction makes job searches really tough for me. Thank you guys, preemptively.
04 Nov 2018, 12:15 am
