I thought I’d share my current musings. With the hope that it might either find me some answers from those in similar situations or maybe help someone else in a similar situation feel less alone.
I’m unemployed, yay?
The duality of unemployment is exhausting. I can finally do what I want, rest when I need, enjoy my interests again, spend time with friends and family, and so much more. But it’s hard to enjoy any of that because I have no income and my savings are almost all gone and I feel guilty, stressed and anxious that I’m not doing enough. Constantly having all that swirling around in my head is exhausting.
The number one biggest thing that’s looming over me is obviously finding a job. But with ADHD it’s hard to find any motivation to look for jobs when I know that they’re going to leave me feeling even worse than I’m currently feeling.
The thing that sucks the most is that I’m sure I’ll look back and wonder why I didn’t enjoy my time off more.
What jobs I’m applying for
Looking at my résumé or LinkedIn recommendations it would probably seem like I’d be applying for all the Developer roles in the world but actually I really don’t want to go back to roles like that again. (I’ll get more into that soon.) So currently I’m mainly applying for Accessibility Specialist roles because I’m hopeful that they’ll be better for me than Developer roles, all things considered. Though it’s starting to get to the point where I can’t be picky, so I’m also applying to some Developer roles as well.
It’s also annoying that because I know what I want/need from a job I’m already looking at a smaller pool of jobs.
I feel like I’m running out of jobs
Same fooding is something that I do as an autistic person, my lunches for like the past 6 months or longer have been this one tomato and basil flavoured rice packet. Previous to that though it was a spicy Mexican flavoured rice, but I same fooded that one until one day I hated it. This cycle has happened many times for many foods, but I think I can see it happening for jobs.
I feel like I’m constantly specialising more and shrinking the types of jobs I’m willing to do. When I was a kid I just knew I wanted to do something with computers, an impossibly broad scope, the opposite problem that I have now. Then as I got older I fell in love with games so I thought maybe I’d wanna be a Game Developer, I very quickly realised I didn’t but through trying that out I discovered web development, though unfortunately it was bad timing and I forgot about it.
After that I thought maybe I wanted to be a Graphic Designer because I loved visual design. That lead me to trying video editing, and subsequently motion graphics, but I grew to hate how pain staking and tedious they were.
Then I went super broad again and thought computer science would be good, so I went to university. I thought I might want to be a software developer or software designer, but really I had no idea what any of that really entailed. It was finally at this point that I rediscovered web development and really fell in love.
I managed to land my first web development job where I learnt an incredible amount of stuff that I both did and didn’t care about. Loads of full-stack and back-end web development knowledge that I couldn’t care less about, but also mountains of front-end web development knowledge which is what I love the most.
Unfortunately Front-end Web Developer no longer means what it should mean. Really I’m a Front-of-the-Front-end Web Developer, a Design Engineer, or god forbid a Web Designer. But there aren’t many people hiring for roles like that, they just want “front-end” aka React aka full-stack developers. They don’t give a shit if you know anything about CSS or accessibility or performance, they just want to know if you’ve drunk enough of the Facebook or Vercel Koolaid. Which, if you couldn’t already tell, isn’t really my cup of tea.
So I’ve ended up specialising even more into being an Accessibility Specialist, but now I don’t get to build websites anymore… oh well at least I’m not bringing anymore lines of JSX into this world?
The number of places I want to work is shrinking
The shrinking is not just of the roles I want to do but also the places I want to do them at, a similar issue but for different reasons. The number of companies landing on my personal “No Fly List” seems to be growing at an exponential rate. They can pretty much all be categorised under the following:
- Grifters (AI, crypto, etc.)
- Human rights violators (Working with militaries, police forces, etc.)
- Profit at all costs (layoffs, no long term decision making, etc.)
- Worker’s rights violators (Gig economy, union busting, contracting everything, etc.)
- Work life unbalancers (996, agencies, etc.)
- DEI more like DIE (transphobic, queerphobic, ableist, etc.)
Almost every place I used to think would be cool to work at is now one (or more) of the above. Even places like Not-for-profits that seem like they’d be better on most of these issues end up over working the crap out of their workers.
I feel like the last place I can turn to is government roles but they have their own slew of problems. Maybe I should go the self employment route, but I don’t think I could run my own business or freelance because of the inconsistency in salary. I can’t handle the monotony in government thanks to my ADHD but then on the flip side I also can’t handle the inconsistency from self employment thanks to my autism.
I’m a living breathing contradiction to capitalism
I’m disabled by the systems that I have to engage with in order to survive, such as work. But I’m not disabled enough, according to the government, to be able to access the support that I need. I haven’t even applied to the NDIS yet because of the catch-22 it entails. If I apply and get rejected then I’ll likely never be able to access it thanks to a rejection acting as a red flag and reason to re-reject me for any future applications.
I’m queer and trans, more than just being descriptors of my gender and sexuality they also explain that I’m inherently defying the expected narrative and guidelines of society. “Queer is … a kind of political practice of “anti-normativity,” of striving against the norm and the oppressive structures that inscribe it as such.” – Alex Green in “Queer” as in… what, exactly?.
I’m neurodivergent, I question every single thing in my life, I don’t settle of the status quo because I don’t think it being the status quo means anything in terms of it’s validity. My entire existence goes against the status quo so why should I trust it or hold any value in it when it constantly causes harm.
Can I continue?
Can I go back to working a “normal” job? I feel like I have to but I don’t know if I can.
Can I handle burning myself out again? I don’t think so, but I think I’m going to have to.
I shouldn’t have to continue like this, but I likely will.
What I want to do (passion) vs what I’m willing to do (survival) vs what I’m capable of doing (reality). I think there is an impossibly small sliver of an overlap in this Venn diagram, if any at all.
How will I survive? What do I do?
I don’t want to work but I need to work but I don’t know if I can work.
When I was a kid I thought there was many different playbooks for life that I could pick from to end up with roughly the life I wanted. But more and more I’m realising that I don’t have any playbooks to follow because all the playbooks write me out of existence. Not usually in an explicit way but in a Swiss cheese model process of elimination of all possibilities that could include someone like me.
Can I stay myself while also existing in this world?
I know I vehemently do not want to squeeze myself into a box, shave down all my rough edges and polish myself up to meet society’s expectations.
But I’m worried that’s what’s going to happen to me if I do what I have to do to survive in this system. Maybe not straightaway, or all at once but slowly and surely with each seemingly tiny concession it will whittle away at me until I’m some squeaky clean shiny corporate art style version of myself. And I’ll look back at this and think “wow, I was really going through a rebellious phase when I wrote this.” unable to recognise my true self any more.