The Rest of My Life: The End of Work

            I could have used a lie-in this morning because I slept badly.  I was probably feeling a bit wired out on the new 'I no longer have to go to work' mindset.  When I did get some sleep, it was haunted by some common dreams.  Especially one where I'm tasked to do something which I know how to do... but for some reason it won't work.  I've had dreams on that theme for years.  Trying to operate a checkout in a store, for instance, but I can't seem to find the right keys (this was before scanning!).  Every button I press brings up the wrong number.  Meanwhile, the queue is getting longer and angrier - and they're all looking at me.  Or trying to drive a car, and getting the wrong gears each time and stalling, with horns honking behind me.

            Anxiety dreams. 

            I know what they're rooted in, of course.  Childhood stuff, where I would do things right, only to get told they were wrong.  Or attempting to do something and failing when everyone else could manage it.  Like the '3s' issue I posted about once, where a primary school teacher read the riot act to me in class (a ritual humiliation that's affected me to this day, 60 years later) because I insisted in writing my 3s with a curly top (as most people do) instead of the flat top that she preferred.  Since that time, I've had a thing in my head that even when I'm doing something right and know it, it'll go wrong or someone won't like it and I'll be found out.  It's why, throughout life, even the slightest slight against me has left me in wreckage.  That anxiety is always there, in the subconscious, waiting to be played out in dreams.  I can't remember the details of last night's.  But I know that once I woke from it, I didn't get off properly again.  And then the next thing I knew, I had a pencil sharpener poking into my face as Daisy started fussing for breakfast.  (Pencil sharpener... think about it!  Alright, then... tail-up cat's arse!)

            During my quiet time with my early cuppa, I thought back over all the jobs I've had in fifty years of work.  Cellarman.  Salesman.  Office worker. Driver. Book-keeper. Farm labourer. Shopworker. Civil Servant. Freelance Recruiter.  And then the last twenty years in social care as both a care worker and a domestic.  Some jobs I've walked out of.  Some I've run away from.  Some I've gone sick from and not gone back.  Some I've been made redundant from.  And some I've simply left naturally to go to another. 

            And now... one I've retired from!  The last one. 

            In one interview in more recent years, the interviewer - perusing my CV - remarked "You've had more jobs than years I've been alive."  He was then about 32, so that would have been right at the time. He asked why so many - and I had my answer, given that I'd then recently been diagnosed with autism.  The clue is with the jobs that I've run away from, or gone sick from never to return.  As with so many other aspects of my life, the diagnosis made sense of that, too.  Too many times I'd found myself unable to cope with changes to job role, changes to hours, taking on extra tasks, being expected to do overtime, not fitting in with colleagues, etc.  The one thing that school gave me was a sense of structure and routine: certain hours at school, certain hours at home again - where I generally, even as a child, would shut off alone in my bedroom to simply be away from other people and concentrate on what I wanted to do.  It was a way of life I got used to.  I needed those free, alone hours - and many of them.

            At least three times I've been bullied out of jobs.  Most recently seven years ago, when I went to work in - of all places - a specialist day service for autistic adults.  The woman (a narcissist, as I later discovered to my cost) took me under her wing from the start, said she empathised with autistic people, said she expected that I'd encountered a lot of bullying because of it, etc.  She used that information to build up a plan against me in case she ever needed it.  She finally found a reason when one of her 'favourite' clients took to preferring me as a 1-1 support worker.  Her nose got too firmly put out of joint, and she wasn't standing for it.  She wrong-footed me over something, leading me into a wall-punching meltdown, for which I was reprimanded by the Regional Manager.  "This can't happen again," he warned me at the interview.  "In that case," I said, "You need to deal with the cause of it to ensure that it doesn't happen again."  The long and short of it, though, was that I went sick while she was kept in role.  And the rest you can guess.

            The very worst such episode, though, was 20 years earlier, when I got a clerical job at the local hospital, working with the wife of a friend.  She was the most horrendous bully I've ever encountered - a true scowling, foot-stamping, scripture-quoting martinet who thought nothing of bawling out people above her in the authority chain, mainly because she knew she had the back-up of one of the department's most senior managers, and one of its leading consultants.  I was easy meat for her, being a shy and callow newbie.  I won't go into the full details of what happened.  Suffice it to say I ran away from that job and became so ill with PTSD that I was scared to leave my flat.  And even when I did eventually go out, after about six weeks - and after I'd discovered that she'd left the hospital and moved out of the area - I still used to duck into shop doorways or behind trees if I saw a red car (the colour car she drove) coming along the road towards me.  It was that 'teacher and the number 3' thing all over again.

            There is a tragic adjunct to that story.  I thought hard about mentioning it, but I will.  A few years back, I was looking up something online about bullying in the workplace... when I saw her name come up on a link.  I clicked it to see that she had set up an anti-bullying charity, in her son's name.  She had just fallen pregnant with this son at the time I worked with her.  In fact, one thing that had almost held me to the job was the thought that she would soon be going off on maternity leave.  My sick leave came first, though - such was the impact she had on my mental health.  Anyway... reading further, I saw that she'd set up the charity after that son had tragically committed suicide. Because he was being bullied at school.  It shocked me to my core.  After all she did to me, all I could then think was that no parent should have to go through that.  And I could only empathise with her.  And I could only, too, think that I went through what her son went through - both at school, and then, much later, at her hands.

            All of which gives me further pause for reflection on a few things.  According to figures from extensive research conducted by the UK National Autistic Society, only 16% of autistic people are in full-time employment.  And only 32% of autistic people are in any kind of paid employment at all.

            And the average life expectancy of an autistic person is 54.

            And the main cause of early death for an autistic person... is suicide.  A nine-times greater incidence than for the rest of the population.  The second cause of early death, incidentally, is stress-related cardio-vascular disease.

            All of which makes me feel lucky to be here - and goodness knows, I really shouldn't be - and celebrating my need never to have to work again.

(my image)