Chapter 20, working in IT. Hi. My name is Calem, and I am autistic. I am 63 years old, and I was diagnosed in July, 2020. I first looked into getting diagnosed back in 2008 because I knew that I was different from everybody else at work. It was at that same time that here in the UK, autism started getting talked about more, and it started getting national headlines and documentaries.

People like Chris Packham, the great nature presenter, came out as having it, and so I started looking into it, too. I did an unofficial online test and I got one of my friends to do it, too. I came out firmly within the scope of being autistic, but my friend did not. So I kind of knew then, but didn't do anything about it.

By then, I had been at the same job for 10 years. It was pretty stereotypical IT. I was working for an insurance company as a database analyst. I was thoroughly enjoying the actual work, tinkering around with databases, making them go faster. It was really enjoyable. So there weren't any great challenges to the work itself, but I noticed that as I got older, I found it increasingly difficult to do what companies expected of me.

Not just that job, either. Now that I think about it, it was never the site of technical things throughout my career. I always breezed through the interviews. It was the personal side of things, management interaction, and so on.

Not only have I got autism, but I strongly suspect I've got Alexithymia as well. So I cannot read a person's face or emotions. I can't read or describe my own emotions very well, either. So that all plays a factor.

Lessons learned looking back. In 2017, I got the opportunity to give it all up, and that's what I did. Everyone was surprised, but by that time, I had two physical illnesses. So I took the opportunity and I've never looked back. I retired.

After that, I went through the torturous process of trying to get an assessment, and I eventually got a diagnosis. After that, I started doing advocacy and other work with the Society of Neurodiversity. Hearing the stories of other people and working with other people, I realized that not only was I not alone in my work difficulties, but the problem of work is rarely the challenges of work.

Rather, it's the challenges of life. It's the bright lights. It's the noises. It's the socializing. So the struggles that exist outside of the working world happen in the working world, too.

In the UK, there's very much a social element to work, so you're expected to go with your colleagues into noisy pubs and thoroughly enjoy yourself. To me, that was absolute hell because of the sensory processing. The same thing goes with trying to maintain conversations with groups of people.

My strength was to leave me alone. Tell me what to do, but leave me alone and I'll show up in a day or so having it completely done. As long as I could wear headphones and isolate myself, I could concentrate and work on things. No problem.

I concentrated on my strengths. I hyper focused. That's something very common to both autism and ADHD, that if you're interested in something, you can hyper focus on that almost to the exclusion of everything else. Working with databases, people would often ask me, how on Earth can you spend your time dealing with that to that sort of detail? The answer is that it was something that I enjoyed. I was interested in it.

I think that ability is something that sets us autistic people apart in terms of the workplace. If it's something that we are interested in, we can go all in on researching and finding solutions. Related to what I said before, the problems for us in the workplace aren't a matter of productivity and getting things done, but rather, about appeasing management and dealing with communication and the social dynamic aspects of work. It's kind of like acting, where what I would do is memorize certain scripts and tone of voice, and that's how I would interact with the management. That's how I made it work.

To go back to being interested in the work I was doing, I think that's the best way to be successful. Build a career out of what you're interested in, as long as you can make it profitable. If you have enough interest in something, then you will naturally want to spend time engaging with that interest.

Even if someone is much younger and still years off from beginning to launch a career, it helps the mind focus. When I was 9 or 10, I was interested in rocks and fossils, and I would go out to the coast and hack away collecting them. That was my thing. To me, that was something.

It's just not about that interest in itself. It's about what that interest does in terms of being able to apply yourself to something and build some kind of identity around it. There's an awful lot of information available now for anyone to go and do research into what interests them.

Truly, you can do anything. There's loads of autistic musicians out there, like Gary Newman and Elizabeth Wiklander. There are authors, filmmakers, bankers, teachers, people in all walks of life on the spectrum doing all different kinds of things. Truly, you can do anything.