Retroactive Continuity & Me
Part I: Somewhere In the Middle of the Story
I was once fired exactly one week after I disclosed to an employer that I am Autistic.1 I made the disclosure organically in the course of an informal conversation at work with a boss who’d modeled vulnerability and encouraged the same in others. My mental health had been brittle for a while and for a variety of reasons, not least of which was the work I was doing as an adult-diagnosed Autistic person trying to make new sense of decades of experience viewed through new lenses. In the flow of an open conversation I was unburdening myself to someone I considered a friend as well as a boss, like a mentor I suppose. Afterward, I said it was such a relief to be able to talk about my mental health without fear of retaliation, that I’d never been open with any other employer concerning the bouts of depression and paralyzing anxiety I fight through just to get out of the house some days.
When I was called in for an unscheduled meeting a week later and told of the decision that my employment would conclude with immediate effect, I was taken completely by surprise. I wasn’t thinking about my disclosure at the time, focusing as hard as I could through body-shuddering sobs to listen to the argument for my sudden dismissal. I was also experiencing Autistic shutdown, instantly quieted and retreating into myself, folding my arms across my chest and closing my eyes, my chin sinking and my jaw clenched and lips shut tight. I was still, listening in a state of shock.
I recall the explanation was vague and well within an employer’s broad discretion in an at-will context, calling into question my commitment to the mission of the organization, my bandwidth for the responsibilities of the role, and the quality of my work. But the centerpiece of the justification was that I posed a risk to the organization’s reputation and ability to operate because I had said in a meeting the prior week that it didn’t matter if we relied on one year’s data on a particular issue or the next year’s data because the relevant metric was absent in the most recent data and was actually irrelevant to our purposes in the first place. What was repeated back in the firing meeting was that I said “it didn’t matter what data we used.” I felt like I was going to throw up.
So the decision was a shock, and an affront, and the explanation felt to me like bullshit. I couldn’t disagree more strenuously with the portrayal of my work ethic as reckless or my work product as shoddy. To be brief and to the point, significant samples of my work were used by the organization after my departure, in some cases with no changes whatsoever. There had been a lot of tension around a project I’d been managing, but by the time of my firing I’d been receiving uniformly and strongly positive feedback. Other than that, I had received no other indication that I was at risk of any kind of discipline or adverse action, least of all sudden termination with immediate effect.
When I got home, I felt relief. I felt anger and sadness and loss and shame. But also relief. I’d been struggling with an ongoing and unpleasant workplace dynamic for what seemed like weeks, to the point where I was avoiding the office and had been suffering gastrointestinal distress. This kind of discomfort is fairly common among Autistic folks, I’ve come to learn, and is perhaps connected to a particular gut biome or “gut profile.”2 In my case, I experience significant and increased distress in my intestines when I am anxious. Just a few weeks before the firing, I half-joked to my wife that I thought I had colitis because of an ongoing bout of diarrhea that had been plaguing me long after what I initially thought was a stomach flu. All that discomfort stopped when I left the office, my arms full of bags and boxes stuffed with my office belongings.
As an example of the workplace dynamic I’m talking about, I recall - vividly - a meeting about a month prior to my dismissal and a little bit closer to my disclosure, of course. In this particular meeting I broke down crying, a full-on sobbing fit, I think in response to a question like “how’re you doing?” As noted above, I’d been struggling mightily with my mental health, and had been extremely anxious and depressed. My response to small-talk questions like “how are you?” is to answer them frankly and sometimes with great detail, and that’s what I did in that meeting. In another context, and certainly in other work places, I would have veered toward the concise and trite, but I was trying to practice vulnerability and opened up. I wept and was brought tissues. It felt cathartic, and I felt seen if awkward.
After I’d finished weeping, the meeting focus turned to some formatting and organizational edits I’d made to a document. That process had been frustrating because the content was still in development and all the feedback I was getting was related to copyediting concerns. As a professional writer and as someone who has taught composition to thousands of college students over the years, I like to think of myself as an adept crafter of constructive feedback. I know what helpful feedback feels like, and also know that I’m bound to get feedback I disagree with that I’ll have to satisfy anyhow. Only once in my life have I received feedback like I did in that meeting. A colleague rose from their seat, strode across the room to a projection of a shared document displaying my work, and pointed sharply at that document, angrily saying: “You should have just done it the way I told you to do it!”
That meeting changed things for me. I didn’t leave work that day thinking that I would have to find a new job, but I did leave with a good sense of what I needed to ask for in order to create and perpetuate an equitable working environment. In the days leading up to my firing, I was rehearsing a meeting I wanted to have with my supervisor, in which I planned to bring attention to the hostility that had peaked in that meeting, and in which I hoped to reshape a working dynamic that felt toxic. I was nervous about saying anything because that same meeting had been referred to more than once by the boss as an exemplar of how we could “work well as a team.” I was nervous, but motivated - if they wanted my best work, I needed to clarify what kinds of conditions made that most likely.
But I never got the chance to make my concerns known. The firing meeting occurred on the very same day I’d planned to use a standing meeting to discuss my concerns. I was too late.
Too late to realize how and what I was feeling, and why, which is all pretty typical for me. It turns out I have significant challenges identifying and processing my own emotions due to what’s called alexithymia.3 There is an overweening and false assumption about Autistic folks that we don’t have emotions or don’t care about them. The truth is much more complicated and variable for individuals, but I can say for certain that I feel things quite deeply and sharply - it’s just that I also have trouble articulating feelings or even detecting changes in my emotional landscape.
I don’t know if I’ll ever achieve the kind of fluency others have when it comes to talking about emotions and emotional needs, but something I learned through this firing episode is that I have to advocate for myself to create ideal working conditions before they deteriorate. I’m still not great at it, and I recognize the need to improve, which I frequently feel desperate to do. Sometimes it feels like a capitulation to admit it, but it’s true that I’ll always have to work harder than others to know myself in the moment, at least emotionally. That’s incredibly frustrating to contemplate, and I wish for myself and those around me that I’d get better at it, like yesterday please and thank you!
But I’m not starting from square zero these days, and have the luckiest luck to have married an empathic and emotionally attuned person who happens to work with a lot of Autistic clients as a speech-language pathologist. I could hack away at a keyboard for weeks and fail to approach the following, which is a wide-ranging and also very succinct description of me that my wife wrote as a summary to share with family:
Jacob was recently diagnosed as Autistic. This process included screenings that ruled out OCD, Bi-polar disorder, ADHD, and PTSD as diagnoses that are sometimes confused with or comorbid with Autism. He then met with a clinician who after taking a detailed history and conducting a lengthy interview, diagnosed him with Autism. Jacob’s autistic traits include: he info-dumps or speaks in great detail about his special interests (congressional testimony, labor relations, politics, birds, etc.) and doesn’t want others to interrupt by asking questions; he has difficulty predicting and understanding others’ feelings; he has alexithymia or difficulty recognizing and understanding how he feels (I see this especially when he doesn’t recognize that he’s angry/yelling); he has difficulty regulating emotion and sensory information and becomes flooded which creates a fight/flight response; he scores high on “masking” behavior where he compensates for his challenges with social interaction by hiding his social differences which is exhausting and painful; he has sensory differences like aversions to different textures, sounds, smells, visual stimuli like anything on the dashboard when driving; and he is an introvert—social interaction is exhausting for him because masking is hard work. His brain is also amazing at visually organizing a space (packing a car with Tetris-like precision!); he has a steel-trap brain for details that interest him; he's a wizard at patterns of all kinds; and he's a terrible liar which means you can trust him.
Upcoming from Happy Glasses:
The next post in the Retroactive Continuity storyline will get to the meaning behind the Happy Glasses newsletter title - and I also hope 🤞 to include some archival photos of the author in his first pair(s) of “happy glasses” (dependent on my finding said photos first).
These posts will be part of the paid subscription options, though will be available to all readers before archiving behind the paywall.
And, following from my very first post, I will commence some explication of the four promises behind the Project 2025 power grab playbook. The next post will cover the first promise to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”
These posts will be free and will stay outside the paywall.
This is not a story about seeking and failing to be accommodated, but about some of the stumbles I’ve had in a journey of self-discovery as an adult-diagnosed Autistic person. For what it’s worth, in short, this employer was not a covered entity according to the general rule of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended, nor according to relevant state law at the time, so I effectively had no rights to argue with regard to employment discrimination.
This piece offers a good overview of the connections between Autism Spectrum Disorder and the presence of certain microbes in the human gut. Note there is no claim here that the microbes cause people to be Autistic, just an observation that those microbes are more apparent in the guts of Autistic folks.