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As a high-functioning autistic (HFA) with Asperger’s Syndrome, facts are what my brain craves. I’m going to start off by throwing some interesting and scary stats at you.
Nearly 80% of HFAs are men. Why? No one knows, but it’s a very harsh reality.
Approximately 50,000 HFAs turn 18 each year and are expected to either enter the workforce or go to school. Keep in mind that the figure of 50,000 is based on the CDC’s number of 1-in-69 Americans being high functioning autistic.
In May of this year, the CDC increased the ratio from 1-in-69 to 1-in-55, which means that realistically it’s more like 60,000 new HFAs turn 18 each year. As an adult with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of high functioning autism, that scares me. Why? Because I work with HFAs high school age and up and I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that our schools and our society do NOT prepare these people for the realities of life. That fact is the subject of another column for another day.
Depending on which study you read, anywhere between 65 and 80% of high functioning autistics can’t work. The main reason is that they lack the social skills to get through a job interview. If they can’t work, they have to live with or rely on family to support them because once they become adults the system that was supposed to help prepare them for life as children forget they exist and leave them to fend for themselves.
Those of us who do make it through the interview find the workplace a difficult place to navigate and we often don’t do well interacting with co-workers and superiors, so we get labeled as difficult and soon get shown the door. Then it’s back to looking for another job ad another terrifying experience for us.
You see, the average HFA takes everything they are told and everything they read as literal and that makes it confusing for us. Our brains are wired differently than that of an ordinary person, also known as a neurotypical or NT. One type of brain isn’t right while the other is wrong; they have a different way of understanding and processing information.
One of the key traits of the high-functioning autistic is a lack of social skills, and let’s be honest, in pretty much any job at any company you have to play the game of office politics and it’s a game that doesn’t come with a rulebook.
The lack of a rulebook is generally what gets us in trouble because we don’t naturally understand the rules, we don’t understand why they exist and the need to play the game at all tends to baffle us.
I mean, if you can’t explain to me why I can’t tell Steve in accounting that his combover is hideous when clearly it is, then why is everyone upset that I said it?
We want to play nice with others, but honestly, we would rather be at our desk/cubicle/office alone where we don’t have to interact with others and where we can simply get our work done in peace, most likely with headphones on so as to deter people from speaking to us.
As men, society tends to define us by our jobs and our career. When you meet someone for the first time in a social situation, “What do you do for a living?” Or some variation of the question typically comes up early in the conversation.
It’s not right, but American society judges men by our jobs and if we’re autistic and can’t work or we try to work and can’t hold down a job, that absolutely kills our self-esteem. When our self-esteem is in the toilet because of our work situation, it trickles down into the rest of our lives and makes us feel like less than a man.
If you’re not a high-functioning autistic, you probably think you can imagine what it would be like, but chances are you would be wrong. You would only be hitting the tip of the iceberg when it comes to those feelings.
It makes you feel emasculated and want to crawl into a hole and hide. Your friends, if you have any, would understand your situation and why you’re not working or not holding down a steady job, but the rest of society won’t.
Before becoming a full-time freelance writer and then an adult autism advocate, blogger and author, I was able to hold down a job for a while, but because of my autistic quirks, I was called Forrest Gump by my boss for four years and while in staff meetings he would ask my co-workers and those who worked under me this question.
“Who do you think is weirder? J.R. or Forrest Gump?”
The correct answer, most likely, is me. At least Forrest didn’t have a purple goatee and a service dog, though in all fairness, at the time I was called Forrest, I had neither of those things.
The bottom line is that our society needs to learn what autism really is and how they can help integrate us into mainstream society and into the workplace. I spend my life trying to educate those on both sides of the spectrum and I could certainly use some help.
If you’re a high functioning autistic or love one, I want to read your comments and stories in the comments section. If you work with one of my kind, I’d like to hear from you about what you see as the challenges and the benefits of having HFAs in the workplace.
Come back next week when we will talk more about autism in the workplace and specifically how neurodiversity benefits companies and how it will be the future normal of the American workplace.
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Photo credit: Pixabay