My case - opinions appreciated

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Hi,

This is perhaps more fitting for the "Work and finding a job" section, but this is my first post so let's put it here.

I am about to ask my therapist for an autism spectrum test. I did an online test and got 35 out of 50, with 16 being the average NT result, and 32 and above signaling autism spectrum, so I am beginning to believe there is something about it.

When I first read people's posts on this forum, it felt a bit like returning home. I face difficulties in daily social situations and it was always necessary to put a special effort in social contacts. Now, at 34, I feel exhausted from life and just wish I could retreat to some deserted island and read for the rest of my life.

But here is what makes things complicated. Although social situations are tough for me, I hate being alone. I grew up in a Mediterranean country and I am used to keeping in constant touch with close friends. Here in the West people are less forgiving and my situation got much worse, with severe depression and social phobia. I am on antidepressants and anxiety medication which worked for a while but now it is just not doing anything for me. When I am alone, which is 99% of the time, I feel abandoned and miserable.

By external standards, I am a highly functioning individual. I am finishing my PhD at an enormously prestigious university. For years and years I've been trying to convince myself that I can fit in eventually, with occasional meltdowns which were masked by satisfaction brought by professional success. Now that I'm getting at the job market I am facing the cruel reality that academia is not a safe haven for socially awkward people any more, and that it requires communication skills on the level of media or entertainment business, and my autistic traits are greatly frown upon (I'd say worse than in some other fields, as I represent everything academia hates about itself). No need to mention how much this stresses me out. I am terrible at networking and I blow up every interview.

What should I do? Should I change career? But at my age I realize that teaching and research are my only real skills, although the academic environment is toxic and it makes my life miserable. Should I just abandon everything and find some simpler job, have less money, but be happier? Of course, I don't have the courage to do such a thing and throw away years of study. I have even contemplated suicide...

What you should do depends on the balance between your needs/goals, your expectation of success, and how much you can take.

I started burning out in college, have continued falling like a shooting star, and have given up on my educational and professional goals. My plans are SSI, a simple part-time job, and a life devoted to my hobbies/interests. Such life decisions are based on the facts that I'm content with poverty, rank my health higher than all other life factors, and don't care a whit for professional success, seeking instead only to understand; I began at university but can further my understanding mostly on my own at this point.

I'm a nurse which I find to be a miserable profession. Many times I've walked away from it and taken lesser paying jobs (McDonald's, taxi driver, Universal Studios Hollywood, etc). In the end I always went back to nursing because I needed the money to pay the rent and the others just kept me scratching from paycheck to paycheck. I accomplished nothing while not a nurse. With the nursing I was able to buy musical equipment even though I was miserable.

I've never found the happy medium between my chosen profession and what I want to accomplish. Nursing was nothing but pain, misery and suffering but it paid the bills. No happy medium.

Thanks for this, I think that is the term I was looking for - burnout. I've been suffering from it for awhile now, if I could only have a break of quiet, stress-free couple of months, to recover my nerves, I think I could go back in the game renewed. But I don't have that luxury.


I have been also considering nursing and even work with pets, but I am also afraid that it may contain perhaps even greater challenges than I can imagine. The tragedy is that even the best profession can end up being a nightmare when you're surrounded by wrong people. But nursing is difficult by itself.

it seems only the lucky can get renumerative jobs that are perfectly suited for their constitution. the rest have to toil and slog in jobs that pay the bills, barely.

There's a long and very enlightening thread here where lots of people talk about their experiences of burning out.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt153352.html

I sometimes wonder if it has something to do with social privilege. I see people around me who are way more selfish and less empathetic than I am, and they still go through life much more easily because they have family connections and money to get them through life and don't end up with zero self-confidence like me now.


Thanks, I am looking at it right now. It strikes me how many things I have in common with people here which my NT environment never understood ("man up!" - "stop complaining" - "don't be so self-obsessed" etc.). If I knew it on time - that the social issues are not retractable - I would have chosen a completely different career path in my life. I would make a perfect pastry chef or cook or animal caregiver, IT, service industry, or something maritime - I love sea so much - and would gladly forget about academia. Oh well...