When one learns the limits one's handicap places upon oneself, that's one hell of a thing to learn. Learning about it by starting and failing at a business is quite the dark night of the soul. We didn't always know what to call my autism but everyone always knew something was off about me and wondered, nervously, just how deep the rabbit hole of problems this seeming fact would cause for me. Long before I got my official diagnosis at the age of 27, I knew there would be three major questions about what I could achieve in my life. Could I have friends? This seemed doubtful until college, but hasn't been a problem since then. Would it be possible for me to have romantic love and a family of my own. The track record here is largely a train wreck, but my current dating situation seems to offer some hopeful signs. Is it possible for me to hold down a job of some description and become financially independent? Much blood, sweat, and tears have gone into a meaningful attempt to answer this question and I think I have reached a sadly definitive answer of, "no." Maybe in another article, past or future, you'll get something like a detailed account of what exactly about my autism makes me unemployable, but I'm not concerned about that now. All I want to focus on here is the experience of having to make that final acceptance of my unemployability.
I don't know if you can imagine it or not, what it is to be a 33-year-old man who's completely incapable of earning a living. For me, it's mostly a mental experience. Not being and not wishing to claim to be one of the truly unfortunate autistics out there with no resources or support system, I will say that I live very comfortably and will likely be able to do so the rest of my life. We all know there are autistics like me, not to mention far lower-functioning ones as well, without support systems or resources. If I were in their shoes, I don't know that I'd survive it. Either I'd die of the elements or by my own hand. No one tells you you're unemployable as an autistic, unless you're low-functioning enough that there is simply no other conclusion to be reached. This is a conclusion you come to on your own from many years of pounding your head up against a brick wall. You fail over and over again for various reasons and you keep moving to careers that seem to avoid the problems you encountered in the past. Finally though, you've tried everything you could think of and still failed. So many levels of failure are present in a person who is unemployable that the shame is simply overpowering. Imagine looking back on every question you've ever gotten about what you want be when you grow up and answering, "nothing." Make no mistake, when you can't work, that's exactly what you are and you know it in your bones.
There will never come a time in my life when I am self-sufficient. I will always need to rely on resources I inherited, the income of a spouse, or the government dole. However, I am here and may as well make the best of things, which is why I write this blog and at least try to do something useful and worthwhile with my time and talents. Though I suppose I can see no other way that I could've learned that I was completely unemployable than start my company and prove to myself that I could not work for anyone, not even myself, because I simply am too disabled to run a business, I still wish I hadn't done it. Failing at owning the company was a very expensive lesson, and one that will rumble through the remaining time I've left. That lesson teaches me to keep my dreams very small and my ambition nonexistent. Maybe I dream that this blog or my other writing could make some money, but only in the sense that I dream of getting a hot oil massage from Kirsten Dunst. Certainly, I dream of having a wife and family, along with all the joy and wonderful complexity that brings to life. When it comes to dreaming of a career and the freedom that financial independence from that career though? No. Thus ends the professional ambitions of Frank Coffman Bailey. Here endeth the lesson.
-Frank
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