My experience with working a job vs. following my calling and how this relates to autism. As a late diagnosed autistic, I now feel that my original job choice was actually a form of masking that interfered with my ability to engage in my true calling. In this episode, I talk a bit about how that happened and why I think it's so important for autistic people to embrace their special interests, honor their true selves and follow their unique calling
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Episode 5 Transcript:(If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can read the full transcript by viewing this episode at AutisticPOV.com.)
0:06 Welcome to Autistic POV. My name is Barbara Graver and I started this podcast to share a bit of my journey as a late diagnosed autistic. Hi everybody, this is Barbara Graver. Thank you for joining me on this episode of Autistic POV. Today we're going to be talking about work versus calling. 0:31 In other words, a job versus what you were born to do. And the reason I wanted to do this, well, two reasons. The first was that when I did our last episode, the Autistic Reading Roundup, I talked about several books that I'd read, science fiction books, several memoirs. And these were all books written by autistic authors. 0:54 And all of these authors or their characters struggled to find what it is that they were meant to do. And I think that's a struggle that is pretty much universal, certainly not confined to the neurodiverse. But in all the memoirs I read, autistic people had a lot of trouble with work. They had trouble fitting in at work. 1:16 They had trouble finding the right place to work. They had trouble dealing with colleagues. And I certainly have experienced that too all my life. So I think work is a big issue for a lot of autistic people. Certainly has been for me. 1:30 And I think the key to all that is the kind of work that we choose to do. That's my theory. So a job, it's the even exchange. You give a certain amount of yourself and you get compensated. And what you're giving may not be who you are. It may not move you. 1:51 You may not feel passionate about it. You might not enjoy giving it, but you do it to get the compensation. And sometimes this is okay. This can be okay. I've had jobs where it was okay. But I think a calling, on the other hand, is something you would do even if nobody paid you. 2:08 You would still show up because you love it, because you're not just making an exchange. You're sharing something of yourself that you need to share, that you feel called to share, that you want to share, and that you love to share. And I think this is huge. Particularly for me, 2:27 my special interest was always had to do with, I guess you would say communication, which is a little ironic because I'm very bad at face-to-face communication. But I loved communicating through story. I would draw a series of pictures that told stories. I would stay awake all night pretending and constructing these elaborate worlds in my mind and characters. 2:54 And I would escape into that all the time. And I loved it. I would write the stories down. I would illustrate them. I would make little books. I just loved it. And I always had social problems. But when I was younger, 3:08 I was kind of able to fit in with the neighborhood kids because I grew up in the 60s and 70s. So That was when playing pretend was a big deal because we didn't have a lot of the stuff that kids have now. Like we had to create our own worlds. And I was always really good at that. 3:26 I was the idea person when we would. want to create a pretend scenario, I was the one who did it and did it well and had the ideas and kind of kept things going. And so that was an outlet for me. It was a way I could interact with other kids for a time. 3:45 IUnited States of Kennedy
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