![]() Much later, I read that in an interview if you have trouble looking the interviewer in the eye, they will think that you are lying-certainly not true in my case. My mother sometimes remarked how I had trouble looking people in the eye (a frequent autism symptom). I do think I use gestures, but now I don’t think that’s what she was referring to, but rather that I tend to not pick up on nonverbal signals sent by others, which I can believe. One thing that the interviewer at the autism center said about me that puzzled me for a long time was that my communication style was almost entirely verbal. (Although I did go back to college later in life to change careers, tuition was paid for with family trust money.) (It was diagnosed as “atypical,” meaning that I didn’t show any mannerisms common with autistics, just social awkwardness.) There is some compensation in that I am not been saddled with the horrendous costs of housing and college education that younger people have experienced, which in combination with family trust and inheritance money and a relatively frugal lifestyle and low expenses have made the lack of income more bearable. So I didn’t receive any sort of diagnosis of it until after the age of 40. I grew up basically before there was awareness of autism, and although it manifested itself far more starkly in my younger childhood days, my parents only found a regular psychiatrist to take me to, who apparently was not aware of it either because he eventually told them that he couldn’t help me. And even that doesn’t tell the whole story, because in probably at least 80% of those cases I have had to be the one to make the friend request I can hardly even remember the last time I received one unless you count a couple of people I didn’t know at all who were probably not making such request for any legitimate purpose. Virtually all of my relatives, former high school classmates, and such friends as I have with Facebook accounts who are currently active on it-and many who are not-have hundreds of Facebook friends. And I see more evidence of it on Facebook. ![]() That’s been pretty much the case for my entire life. To say that my social network is small might be putting it mildly. ![]() When I first heard that getting a job was “all about networking,” I thought that it would be like for a paraplegic to hear that it was all about running. My situation could be perhaps best described by how a therapist from my high school years described it: “A in intellectual, F in social.” One reason for my attachment to the dogs that appear on my Facebook profile is that I never have to worry about starting or maintaining a conversation with them, or their getting angry with me if I say or do the wrong thing. I estimate that I have spent something on the order of 20 years either unemployed or underemployed (much of that time making less than a living wage), translating into maybe as much as a million dollars in lost income compared to if I had been fully employed at the level of my academic and professional peers. ![]() This source says that the unemployment rate alone is between 76% and 90% (although it may not distinguish between “high-functioning”-those perfectly capable of living independently without assistance-and “low-functioning” individuals). I have read multiple stories and reports saying that the unemployment/underemployment rate of people on the autism spectrum is through the roof. ![]()
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