My Career Choices

My first career choice, that I remember, was to be a writer. I remember reading a book when I was about eight, it was a diary of a working class girl. What I remember most is that she got shingles and was sent away to a special boarding school and was feed lots of fruit. This girl always dreamed of being a writer. Her mother bought her an enormous pile of foolscap and she had kept a diary from that day on. (I’m not sure if the book I was reading was a fictional diary or a real one). Today I can’t remember the title of the book or the name of the author. Reading it though was the first time I realised that being a writer was a career option.

I always fantasised about that large wad of paper and filling it with my stories. And nearly thirty years later that fantasy has sort of come true. I spend most of my time at the moment writing, and I have notebooks full of my thoughts and dreams. I’m not writing fiction, even though that’s what I wanted to write, but I have found something I can write about, myself! I am the ultimate introvert, I am my own subject matter. Whilst it’s fulfilling, learning about myself and my condition (autism), I sometimes wonder what kind of writer I’d have been if I hadn’t been autistic.

After my ‘A’ Levels I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was in crisis. My home life was difficult and I was very confused about who I was and where I was going. If I’d known I was autistic I would not have felt such alarm at going out into the world. I’d have known my strengths and weaknesses and made decisions based on this knowledge. But I was in the dark, and was desperate to leave home. My English teacher tried to convince my mother that English was what I should be studying at university, but my mum thought Art was a better subject for me.

So I did a foundation course in Art and Design, because I trusted my mum was right, even though I’d never had desires in that direction until she talked about it. Looking back I don’t think I’d have been happy whatever I had chosen. Without a diagnosis I wasn’t in a position to make any informed decisions and I was also deeply unhappy without knowing why.

The first degree I did was in Visual Culture. There is really only one career path from this, which would be in academia and I simply wasn’t committed enough to the subject. I did start out on the Fine Art course but transferred after my first year. I was having a lot of difficulty finding suitable subject matter and a style I could paint in. I love landscapes but I can’t do them. I have visual perception problems that make it difficult for me to generalise what I see, rather than painting my impressions I would always try to paint every leaf and every blade of grass. If someone had taught me to paint like the Pre-Raphaelites I might have stayed! I always tended towards realism because copying detail is something I’m good at. So I tended to draw people or man made environments even though I really wanted to do landscape. I couldn’t find a subject matter that matched both my enthusiasm and my technical abilities.

I think if I went back to it now I would be able to find my way round these issues knowing what I do about autism. On the fine art course I was doing the teachers were very hot on us finding other painters whose work we connected with and using them as influences in our own work. Being autistic in an NT world though, I didn’t have this connection and it just became another aspect of my work I had to fake.

My next career move was to study accountancy. People always said how strange it seemed that considering my creative credentials. It was a purely practical decision. I had moved back home, and things were still difficult. I wanted my own place and a decent job to support myself. Accountancy was something I thought I’d be good at and would provide a decent income. And it did enable me to live independently without support. But I was desperately unhappy. I still didn’t know why I felt so different from the people around me. I was though, beginning to realise where my weaknesses and strengths lay. I liked accountancy because I was good at detail and because I was dealing with numbers rather than unpredictable people. My autism leant itself to a job in accountancy where details and repetitive tasks were plentiful but my soul was crying out something more fulfilling.

I left accountancy and did a degree in writing and film studies. I had been doing a part time course in creative writing for a few years and I spent a lot of time writing poetry in private and even sent some of them off to competitions and magazines. I think I had one poem published in a poetry journal and I once was a runner up in a competition. I wanted to see if I would be able to earn a living as a freelance writer. My plan didn’t really work out though. What this course taught me was what I wasn’t good at; journalism, short stories, dialogue, grammar and a few other things. I can trace most of my difficulty in these areas to autism. In journalism you have to have the audience in mind and I can’t imagine myself in someone else’s shoes, I can’t imagine myself as one of the common people, in short stories I’m not able to describe the relationships between people, for my problems with dialogue I refer you to what I’ve written about conversation and for my problems with grammar see what I’ve written about language. I took film studies because at that time at the university I chose you couldn’t do writing as a single honours degree. Although I enjoyed film making, I don’t feel I have the social skills to make it in the film industry.

After I finished my second degree I didn’t have any firm ideas about what I wanted to do next, I was till lost and still looking for my niche. I had always had an interest in spiritual matters, and I was reading a lot of new age literature looking for a solution to my problems. I did lots of meditation exercises looking for some direction. I thought maybe my problem was that all my career choices had been based on what I wanted and maybe I should be thinking of work that involved helping others. In one meditation I saw myself with a pink feather duster walking towards a large manor house. Later I saw an advert for a tutor to an autistic boy, the post was live in and also involved some house work. When I looked up on the internet the village where they lived I saw a drawing of the manor house I had seen in my meditation. I thought, this is where I am supposed to go next.

It was a difficult job and I’m no longer an ABA tutor. But it was definitely a good move. If I hadn’t done it, I would never have found out I was on the spectrum and discovering I’m autistic has been the biggest life changing event so far. I am slowly becoming comfortable in my own skin. I don’t criticise myself like I used to because I know why I do the things I do and why I can’t do the things I wish I could. And I can finally begin to think about what work I could do that will make me happy and that matches my abilities.