It’s below freezing!
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I used to be pretty lonely in my final formative years. Eventually I learned to mask properly and managed to hang around people and get a few dates (from the internet), but I didn’t really pick the people - I’d just go along with whoever was willing to put up with me. One day I traveled across the state to be with a girl. Then the following month she did the same to spend the weekend at my place - and never went back. We never talked about going serious (and I wasn’t interested), but I never sent her away and she just continued in my life, taking more and more of me over time - I didn’t want her there, but I just accepted whatever she did. Started calling her my wife even though I now resented her. Had to say “I love you” to avoid getting into fights and dealing with drama. And I resigned myself to being miserable forever. And she was unhappy too, because I obviously didn’t give her any affection. Eventually someone else did and that made her finally give up on me and set me free, after 13 years.
It’s been 5 months now. I’ve moved to a different city, met new people, started new activities…
Last night as I was laying in bed thinking about my day and my recent interactions with people, I realized I had a smile on my face. Completely alone, in the dark, not masking a smile to anyone: I was naturally smiling at how my day had been.
I’m 38 years old and I think I just learned a new emotion: pure and natural Joy.
So proud of you 💖
Congratulations! Im glad you were able to smile after such a short time.
Good job! Everyone deserves to hear this. Especially you.
Had a week-full of events. Driving hours to help a family member purchase a car, TWICE on two different days, then going out to drop off SO for therapy, twice.
Today we’re inviting friends over for dinner, one with requirements for food and sleep (early), while the others won’t be here until after thay time.
Gonna be interesting!
A little nervous, though. Yesterday was exhausting.
Work has doubled down on ignoring the policy and procedures around accommodations and I’m so tired.
I’m new to being “disabled” as in, new to having others perceive me as disabled and it fucking sucks. I knew ableism was real and dehumanizing but I didn’t expect this kind of dehumanizing behavior from people I’ve worked with for years.
The policy and procedure follow the provincial Human Rights code which puts a huge emphasis on collaboration between the person seeking accomodations and the employer. They refused to discuss my requests with me and gave me a “plan” that excluded many of my requests and watered down the rest to the point where they are actively harmful. (i.e. instead of providing certain things by default, I am to ask for them each time.) Bevause they understand my medical documentation better than I do apparently 🙄
Can you imagine telling someone that they don’t understand the accommodation paperwork that they worked with their medical team to fill out? The audacity is stunning.
I don’t want to leave because I like my job but part of me wants to ditch them and see how well they do without this insert slur here.
(I have a very specialized skill set that is rare locally and part of what led to burnout was trying to fill all the gaps).
Maybe its time to quietly consult with a lawyer / get a government agency involved?
Sounds pretty terrible on a cultural level, but maybe you can at least get those accomodations.
Yes, I’m doing that. I contacted my union and met with them last Friday. The guy has been off this week but I sent him all the relevant correspondence and told my employer I want him in any future meetings.
I also asked them for someone to facilitate the meetings prior to contacting the union and they shrugged and went “I don’t know what resources are available.” despite them being specifically spelled out in the policy… so now I’m bringing the union to do just that instead of their internal resource 🤷♀️ They are not amused lol.
The problem is if having the union apply pressure doesn’t set them straight and we file a grievance I’m going to have to change departments or something. My job requires a high level of trust and I can’t do it if they don’t trust me. So while there might not be retaliation in the strictest sense, it’s not going to work unless they realize they fucked up and adjust their attitude. Luckily my old boss who rules and who is similarly aghast at their behavior is short staffed… There are many reasons I don’t want to make that move but it’s my safety net I guess.
Sounds like a tough position to be in; I guess the other side of it is if you just let it slide, you (and your work) is going to deteiorate as you burn out?
I can’t help but be a little jealous about your union rep. I had a shitty retail job and I’d close the store at get home at 11am and at 5am, the manager was doing inventory and texting pictures to my phone about things he found unsatisfactory or asking me about a transaction.
When he fired me he told me, “The worst thing that every happened to us (that is, our relationship which had started collegially) was when you told me not to contact you on your days off.” Fuck that guy so hard.
Sounds like a tough position to be in; I guess the other side of it is if you just let it slide, you (and your work) is going to deteiorate as you burn out?
At this point it’s not even about me as an individual. I’m big mad about how harmful and ableist the process is.
I was hoping there was a misunderstanding and we could just quietly fix it, but now it’s clear they aren’t just uneducated but actively opposing my rights. So even if they realize “whoops I guess we weren’t following the policy we will do that now”, formal complaints are being made to the accessibility office and hopefully someone there gets the fear of god put into them and everybody gets training or something. The Human Rights tribunal ordered a judgment of $20,000 against a company for failing to follow the appropriate procedure even though the accomodation being requested could have been reasonably denied. It doesn’t matter to the tribunal if the request is reasonable or not, a company has a duty to take certain steps to assess it first and if they fail to do that, they fail their duty.
But no, I can’t keep working there without accomodations. The big sticking point is that a want of list of areas I am responsible for. I’ve made it clear the list can change, but I just need something written I can refer to to make decisions based on. Right now it’s a flip of a fucking coin to know if they want me to jump in and help with something or not, and it’s not practical to always ask first nor do they like when I ask because I should just know 😭 So I end up working stupid hours trying to fight all these fires and then get told off for doing so and told off for not doing it the next time. (Yes, this is the main accomodation they are fighting which makes no fucking sense.)
I’m grateful for the union even if they haven’t been that helpful in more routine things in the past. Technically my profession is excluded from labour laws so being part of a union is extra helpful. Employers don’t need to follow labour laws but they do need to follow the collective agreement. Also luckily accomodation are based on human rights laws and not labour laws lol.
The laws are such that I must go through my union before suing the company (suing is a simplification of the process for this type of complaint but easier to write out) so I’d be doing this even if they sucked, but the guy I talked to was very helpful in that it was validating to know I wasn’t alone in my understanding that their behavior is unacceptable.
Sorry to hear about your bad experiences. I’ve got 4 years of retail and 5 of restaurants experience so I’ve also been there lol.
Oh, so you also have a case of Autistic Justice happening where something is fundamentally wrong with the world and you are not going to let it slide. That’s why I can’t work in social work anymore, it’s field full of injustice (and stupidity).
Do your accomodations fall under disability regulations? Would you be able to request them without a diagnosis? It’s interesting to me that being respected as a human being at work is only a legal right extended to people with disabilities in the US.
Oh, so you also have a case of Autistic Justice happening
Always 😅
where something is fundamentally wrong with the world and you are not going to let it slide.
Not exactly, because one thing I developed over the years is a decent sense of what I can and cannot control, and I try and let go of things I can’t control. There is a clear path to getting my accommodations, and a route for me to register a complaint about the process, but I can’t force them to treat me like a human being going forward (so I might need a new job because I can’t work like that) and I can’t force the org to do anything about the complaint. But at least I’ve done my part and made it clear that I think this is not okay. It would feel like failing others if I let it go, especially because I have a tonne of relative power. I’m well established in my field, I will be okay.
I could not imagine working in social work. It’s fundamentally opposed to the structure of (especially north american) society, there is no winning, just mitigating some damage.
Do your accomodations fall under disability regulations? Would you be able to request them without a diagnosis? It’s interesting to me that being respected as a human being at work is only a legal right extended to people with disabilities in the US.
They fall under human rights legislation, which is the basis for parts of other legislation that deals with accessibility such as occupational health and safety laws (which reinforce the need for appropriate safety gear, and psychological safety) and the general accessibility laws.
If a workplace isn’t following OH&S laws you can file a complaint with the Ministry of Labour and they have a process to resolve your individual complaint. You have the right to refuse unsafe work and can continue to do so until the MOL tells you it is not a violation so that needs to be ruled on pretty quickly. They will send an inspector out pretty quick which may result in an order and then trigger a bigger investigation if needed.
The accessibility laws themselves are more about practices any org has to follow so there isn’t really enforcement at the individual level. You can file a complaint and the company can be fined or ordered to do something, but it’s about the failure to abide by accessibility requirements overall and not based on an individual instance. The laws set a baseline so it’s expected that if they fail an individual it’s because they don’t have the required process in place to accomodate anyone else who may need it.
As an individual, if you want your case resolved it goes to the Human Rights Tribunal (after your union if you are unionized).
My workplace policy allows for accommodation requests that aren’t based on protected grounds and those don’t require documentation. But they are also under no real obligation. They can just say no and they don’t have to say why.
Protected grounds in my province are:
- Age
- Ancestry, colour, race
- Citizenship
- Ethnic origin
- Place of origin
- Creed
- Disability
- Family status
- Marital status (including single status)
- Gender identity, gender expression
- Receipt of public assistance (in housing only)
- Record of offences (in employment only)
- Sex (including pregnancy and breastfeeding)
- Sexual orientation
It doesn’t mean you can never discriminate based on these, but it has to be for a bonafide reason. Like, you need to do extra steps to keep your driver’s licence after a certain age, but that’s considered reasonable based on how common impairments are in the population at that age.
One of the reason documentation is needed for disability accomodations is that you don’t have to disclose the diagnosis, they instead ask for the limitations. So they don’t know it’s autism. They have my limitation documents from my primary care provider and a list of recommended accomodations explaining how these help with the limitations. They are allowed to suggest alternatives, but they need to be appropriate and they also need to ask, not just say “nah you don’t need that we will do this instead”.
I get that you are saying about disability being the only way they are required to respect you but I’d counter that they can still be disrespectful even if they ensure the building is accessable for users of mobility devices lol. One way ontario and the other canadian jurisdictions are ahead of the US is that we don’t have at-will employment (although they only need to give two weeks notice to end employment for any reasons so it’s not that much better). The other thing is psychological safety is regonized under OH&S so you do have recourse if you are being bullied. It’s not a super easy process, but at least it’s there.
Oh, people are just casually ableist like. A lot. It sucks! Even disabled people can be either to others with different disabilities or themselves.
My husband has cerebral palsy and just…it’s wild how he’s treated. Or how they assume I’m his nurse and they berate me for choices he’s made (he can buy new shoes, stop yelling at me for “making” him go outside with shit shoes) and mmmm.
Omg I would absolutely lose my shit if people piled on that sexist expectation on top of the ableism. Male partners are not (or should not be) helpless children that need a surrogate mommy 🤬
Trying to force your partner to do something they don’t want to is a recipe for disaster.
Eta: the experience of diagnosis has forced me to confront how ableist I have been in the past, I’m grateful for it opening my eyes to that at least.
Oh yeah! I’m his wife, not his mother. Also the man has two college degrees, he can choose to wear what he wants!
And yeah, I try to be less ableist but it still bites me sometimes!
Saturday! So meal prep day as we got more of the things to meal prep with. Still acting like we’re going on the trip, I’ve started packing things into the. Hm. I’ll call it a trunk. The sheets are in there, some of the other things are.
I had a nightmare someone tried to kidnap the cat, and now I’m fucking scared to leave. I trust the guy whose coming to check the cat, but. But. Brain. :<
It’ll be okay! :) You feline friend will not care about the other dude, and be glad to see you home regardless.
Good luck!
Kitten will hide from the guy. I’m mostly worried about her finding something to tear apart while gone and hurting herself, her being kidnapped (catnapped?) is…vanishingly small, but nightmares are mean.
I went through some big emotions yesterday, part of my lifelong frustration with the psychiatric establishment. One day this week, a psychiatrist said she couldn’t give me ADHD meds because my depressive inventory score was high, which just points to the pathological medicalization of everything–my depression is situational. And then a few days later, I was asking a psychologist how she is going to test for ADHD in her office when my biggest problem is task initiation at home. She was dismissive and said her tests would pick up on attention deficit, but, again, it would come down to a “score,” but she tacked on that she would also consider my self report…
It’s maddening because I depend on these people and they just seem so obviously stupid.
In other news, I’m falling in love with the digital piano someone dropped off for me to store and practicing simple LH RH arrangements I’m making up from lead sheets. All my prior experience with piano was based around reading music. But I think what I really want to be playing on is an accordion, because I can take the accordion out into the world with me, now that the world is a pianoless hellscape.
Your experiences with the psychiatrist are infuriating!
I know they have to exclude other conditions as the cause of the symptoms before diagnosis of ADHD, but it sounds like she doesn’t realize they can be comorbid or as you mentioned the lack of accomodations and medication as the primary cause of the depressive symptoms.
Do you know what tests they are using? This is the one my general practitioner used to determine if I qualified for meds (before my formal diagnosis which was a bit more in depth): https://www.caddra.ca/wp-content/uploads/ASRS.pdf
It’s entirely self-reported.
With the formal diagnosis I did a few more questionaires and they interviewed me. While I understand that includes asking questions in a certain way and looking for behaviors, it was mostly asking questions about how symptoms impact my life. I hope that information helps demonstrate how it accounts for things that cannot be directly observed.
(PS. I haven’t forgotten about the polyvagal info I said I would provide. I seriously misjudged my capacity 😬)
Yes, she’s just incompetent. I just wanted to go in for a quick eval for ADHD, but I dropped that I was doing a more thorough psych eval in a month and she said, “Oh, well, in that case, just give me a call back in two months and let me know what they said.”
They didn’t directly administer an ADHD scale at all, and they really just focused in on the last two weeks, and gave me a PHQ-9. But it really is tragically bad because the test makes no effort to determine causes of depression, jsut symptoms, and the psychiatrist likewise made no effort to distinguish between the situation and a depression.
Like imagine a psychiatrist saying, “So we administered the test and it says you are very depressed.” And the patient says, “Yes, ever since my entire family was mudered in front of me last week, I have been feeling rather glum. It’s also hard because I am living on the street and the police shredded my tent two nights ago and I keep getting attacked by a schizophrenic guy that is convinced I’m a spy for the world government.” And the psychiatrist responds, “Well, with your PHQ-9 score, I’d recommend starting you on Prozac.”
I mean, I’d get it if these people were working at walmart out of high school, but I just can’t accept that this is the cream of the social crop, the people that studied the hardest for the greatest reward of working society–becoming a doctor. On top of that, we’ve made them the gatekeepers of our entire system and given them such great responsibility, but they are so bone-crunchingly stupid I just can’t process it. And the cherry on top of the cake is that this is the system that has decided I’m not qualified to work within it.
The world is really quite mad and the primacy of cocksuckery over competence is a rampant human condition.
Anyway, I have another appointment with another psychiatrist–hopefully of the pill-pushing variety–on Tuesday, so I may be able to start seeing if I can tackle ADHD medically. I also have two psych evals scheduled, the first with another apparent monkey who just gives tests over five hours and scores them blindly, the second in March with someone who does a two hour interview with minimal testing.
The ADHD meds are there to help me develop some job skills, the psych evals are there to help me apply for disability, and my neurodviergent therapist is there to help me with my emotions. i think I’m on a good track, but a long road.
No worries about polyvagal theory, there’s plenty to absorb on that AideCanada site.
They didn’t directly administer an ADHD scale at all, and they really just focused in on the last two weeks, and gave me a PHQ-9.
I am not trying to invalidate anything you are saying, but even for the ADHD tests a lot of it is “In the last two weeks have you…” Just mentioning so you can be prepared and not feel that is them just fucking it up. You can see a lot of the common tests (autism and ADHD) on this website (which some people consider problematic for some of their practices, but it’s still a handy collection): https://embrace-autism.com/autism-tests/
Like imagine a psychiatrist saying, “So we administered the test and it says you are very depressed.” And the patient says, “Yes, ever since my entire family was mudered in front of me last week, I have been feeling rather glum. It’s also hard because I am living on the street and the police shredded my tent two nights ago and I keep getting attacked by a schizophrenic guy that is convinced I’m a spy for the world government.” And the psychiatrist responds, “Well, with your PHQ-9 score, I’d recommend starting you on Prozac.”
Lol I get it. I was diagnosed with and the undiagnosed with Bipolar II in the range of two years almost 20 years ago. On an intellectual level I can get why. I was super depressed because of ongoing abuse and I can see why autistic joy can be misinterpreted as hypomania. But if you decide I’m not bipolar and you just shrug it off? (Or tell me that maybe it’s borderline personality disorder) That feels fucked up. I had been inpatient twice at this point so it’s clear it wasn’t something that was going to just fix itself.
I mean, I’d get it if these people were working at walmart out of high school, but I just can’t accept that this is the cream of the social crop, the people that studied the hardest for the greatest reward of working society–becoming a doctor.
If I can share my perspective: I think we as a society put too much expectation of perfection on certain professions. Doctors are just people. They should be thorough and I totally agree you are being failed by your doctors! But I think we need to accept that they are just as flawed as the rest of us.
Working as an engineer for almost 15 years has kind of reinforced that lol. Very few people are really certain about what they are doing and I think the people who feel very confident that they know exactly that to do are the most dangerous. I have a few credentials that give me authority to do certain work but my education level is just bachelor. I used to feel self conscious about that but after a few years of working with people with Ph.Ds I stopped lol. Not that they aren’t (mostly) excellent engineers and that getting a Ph.D isn’t hard. But it’s indication of a high level of mastery in a small realm, not being really good at the field as a whole or even having common sense. I had one guy constantly talk down to me about why I was refusing to let him solve a problem for me (I just kept saying, “No thanks, that’s not a problem we have! 😊😊😊” ) because clearly I didn’t understand his genius. So I eventually got sick of it and invited him to tour the facility he was offering to optimize. He pretty quickly saw he had no fucking clue what he was talking about and left me alone after that.
I also draw a parallel between the way a physicist might simplify a complex object as a sphere in order to make broad generalizations and the way general medical practice or even psychiatry is performed. It’s generally not good enough to make detailed conclusions about an individual but it might work on a population level. More care needs to be applied to the individual case.
On top of that, we’ve made them the gatekeepers of our entire system and given them such great responsibility, but they are so bone-crunchingly stupid I just can’t process it. And the cherry on top of the cake is that this is the system that has decided I’m not qualified to work within it.
Yes this is bullshit and I’m sorry you have experienced it. I’ll spare you my rant but self-regulation has a lot of problems and I say this as someone in a self regulated profession too.
The ADHD meds are there to help me develop some job skills, the psych evals are there to help me apply for disability, and my neurodviergent therapist is there to help me with my emotions. i think I’m on a good track, but a long road.
Good luck with everything! Do you have access to occupational therapy? I only bring it up because the meds did not really help with skills for me. They made existing easier but there is a huge gap between that and learning actual skills to adapt life (including work) to my abilities. I used an OT to develop the list of accommodations because if I just look at a list of the common ones I’m just like “nah I don’t need that!” but I still don’t fully understand the mechanism behind my struggles so it’s really hard to see how they can help and more broadly what else I can do to help. Two things I would have never done but make a tremendous difference (very personalized, not suggesting this for you):
- using the windows colour overlay to make my monitor not hurt to look at all the time.I thought that was just what monitors felt like and why we are encouraged to take breaks, and I already have blue light filtering lenses in my glasses.
- my primary care person “prescribed” that my husband ignore me for the first 30 mins after I get home from work to make the transition easier for me and to take the edge off being perceived. He’s 100% on board and this addresses the fact that I am not even aware that I’m getting overwhelmed and am therefore unusually sensitive. It prevents hurt feelings (imagine greeting your spouse and having them burst out crying) and takes care of my needs at the same time.
Waking up. 25F outside. Let the dogs out back. Going back to bed.
