One billion people worldwide have some type of disability. Our world is slowly making amends for us and finding ways to make everything more accessible, but it is still a wide gap. 85% autistics are unemployed with a college education and there is no number for how many people with a personality disorder are unemployed. Now, take in fact that DID is a personality disorder that can have autism as well as many other disorders. How many people do you estimate are unemployed? Probably around 90%, unfortunately. The job system is made for neurotypicals and has very little wiggle room for accommodations and modifications. Those few people who do manage to secure a job end up with severe burnout because of the lack of accessibility and empathy from their coworkers and workplace. Due to these small injustices, many of us are left in uncomfortable situations where we are forced to create an incident report or leave a job that is unfit. Yes, incident reports can benefit the growth of a company and business; but, when we say we are fine multiple times, it is very frustrating.
Many if us have knowledge in specific topics others would be fascinated to know about. What if you could help someone with that information? My goal in life is to become an advocate for dissociative disorders and mental health. Every day, I study a little more about something that catches my interest, and one day it will change someone’s life.
Have you ever found someone who wants to help you, but they don’t seem to fully grasp your disability or scenario? I find that when it comes to us zebras (people with rare diagnosis) we find ourselves in these scenarios a jarring amount of times. One example I have encountered is when someone wants to understand DID, and they do everything in their power to relate, yet they tell you that you can “control” your alters. Like…. what? These people mean well, however they don’t understand that by making these ignorant comments, they are still damaging their relationship with the system.
So how do we deal with these type of supportive people? What I try to do is to provide them with more information and to guide them onto the correct terminology and analogies for my disorder. If you don’t want to keep correcting them, that is also okay.
I met a friend's toddler who is most likely autistic. He was having a hard time being in the restaurant and his mother did not know how to help. Thankfully, she was receptive to my input and did not take offense as I began to help her out and show her ways to stimulate his senses. The little boy was under-stimulated and wanted to focus on something around him. By the end of the night, I was carrying him around and showing her many ways to keep him interacted and communicative. This night was the best case scenario. Unfortunately, many people take offense when we try and educate them about disorders or mental illness. ASD is not an illness in this scenario, he just has a different way of understanding things.
Imagine, if all the people in the world were as eager to learn as this mother was, how much of a difference would we make in the special education world? How many lives would be changed for the better?
Before starting this business, I was doing a long job search over the span of two years. Personally, I had been having a difficult time finding something both remote and in the medical field. I was looking for something remote so that I am able to be there for my system as well as my family, who is having a hard time. I was also looking for specifically medicine related because my goal is to create a foundation where systems of DID can learn and educate others. In order to do this, I am trying to learn the administrative side of the medical field.
Last summer, I went golfing and the place was very accessible for my needs and I was having fun. The one issue began when they started blowing whistles and it caused a tic attack. Three people came up to me and a manager forced me to make an incident report although I told him I was fine. This interaction led me to wonder how many times someone with a hidden disability has been forced to give out information they did not want to because they had an episode. Does this affect their willingness to join the societal world we live in? Does that, in turn, cause less people to become educated because we are all avoiding situations that make us uncomfortable?
I began to research and to my utter disappointment, there are hardly any articles mentioning the difficulties we go through in public areas. The two linked below were the only ones I found. They mention how having a disability means that you have less chance of being financially stable, having a career, and a bigger chance of being abused. The first article also describes many non-accessible scenarios that different people have to face when out in public (narrow chair, narrow hall, out of reach button). These are legit problems, but they are not hidden disabilities.
After talking to some people who have hidden disabilities, I was told that these businesses make these reports in order to have documentation of what occurred, who is culpable, and what to do next. Although it is great they are making sure they are taking accountability, they also need to use their past reports to make the necessary changes within their businesses.
As an autistic system, we get autistic burnout many times a year. Autistic burnout is exhaustion so severe that it involves the loss of skills (oral, mechanic, etc.) for a period of time. Burnout happens when a neurodiverse person is living life alongside neurotypicals, also known as “Normals.” We may do things such as jobs or school, and the constant movement and upkeep becomes too much for us to handle. Why does it become to much?
Neurotypicals expect us to behave a certain way, and because of this we have coined the term masking. Neurodivergent communities mask when we pretend to be someone we are not such as: following societal norms, making eye contact, being social, dressing appropriately, hiding stims or inappropriate movements, etc. People with DID mask as well, normally hiding the fact that they have multiple personas.
How do we heal from burnout? I have still not figured this part out, but many researchers and autistics say that we are supposed to stop masking, do things we enjoy, and decompress.
As part of my studies, I have been diving into the meaning and differences between disabilities and disorders in a scholarly context. I started reading a book (The Power of Neurodiversity by Thomas Armstrong) that talks about certain disorders in a positive light. In the second chapter, he illustrates how ADHD is seen as a positive attribute in extroverted jobs and a negative attribute in the school system. In the same way, all disorders and disabilities are seen differently depending on where we are, what we need to accomplish, and what the values are. For instance, in the link below, they mention how autism is seen in different cultures. Some see them as bad parenting, some on the other hand don’t even believe it exists. It all depends on the perspective.
Throughout our lives and careers, we need to make connections in order to keep growing. Working with other people is what helps us get our word out and helps us get more knowledge on whatever our topic is. For me, these connections will allow me to reach more people in the world and to provide more education and acceptance on DID.
“We have to welcome, accommodate and support a wider range of ‘normal’; and only then will we benefit from the extraordinary difference these diverse minds can bring.”— Roxanna Hobbs
“In some corner of your life, you know more about something than anyone else on Earth. The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others.”— Kent Nerburn
“There is only one way to look at things until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.”— Pablo Picasso
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