Ah, the many plans that are destroyed by falling back to the beginning of the burnout cycle. I had plans to post here at least twice a month; instead, all of the progress I made was completely lost as this current system disabled me and caused me to have burnout. The system in this case, is work. It's always work. And although I have been in a state of autistic burnout since 2015, when I got my diagnosis at the beginning of last year, I was making real progress in feeling better. Unfortunately, although I am figuring out who I am and becoming okay with my differences, the world treats me the same way it always has, and they have no plans on changing their viewpoint or treatment of me.
So currently, I am back in survival mode after I took a beating from the human rights violation case I had against my employer (one of which nearly caused me to commit suicide), which I lost. The reasons stated were that a "reasonable" person wouldn't have seen it as harassment, and the people involved "meant well." Because you can abuse people and cause them severe dissociative disorder and suicidal ideation, and there is no harm done if your "intent was good."
I now sign off my emails to them with a quote: "Most of the evil in this world is done by and through “good” intentions." - Ayan Rand.
I also stupidly took on the role of representative for all the Library Technicians at our interdepartmental meeting where "we are all equal and have a say in operations" of the library before I knew I was autistic, and when I was so happy that someone saw me and thought I would make a good contribution. We are not equal, and I got caught in a terrible situation where some of the Lib techs wanted me to broach the subject of morale in the workplace. I wrote a proposal and sent it to the committee for consideration and that prompted the University Librarian to tell us that morale is not a departmental problem and we have to go to HR and tell our problems individually.
This leads to the fact that HR and my union rep have been less than helpful on this situation, as my cataloguing coworker and I already put in a complaint about the librarians deciding to take away our cataloging work, and for 2.5 months, I had nothing to do at work because they took away longstanding projects I had been working on because somehow even though the librarians involved are not our supervisors in any way, they were able to just tell us we weren't allowed to do our job because no librarian knew how to do my job and no one wanted to supervise the cataloging department
So now I'm just intensely sad, all the time, and have severe imposter syndrome. I spend most of the day on TikTok once again in the hopes that the autistic community there can remind me I am worth something, even if my work feels I am valueless. The other part of the time I spend reviewing my autism journal, reminding myself that I am autistic and that I have words to explain myself, and there are other people out there that know my pain.
I hope that soon I can get out of survival mode and back into my healing journey, but until then, my healing through this blog is going to be spotty.
