I get scared when the telephone rings.

Though I don't fancy myself a blogger, I'm adding a blog to my site and posting this pretty much out of desperation. I need to get some shit off my chest and putting it anywhere else makes me feel like an intrusion or a burden. If there's anywhere I can put these thoughts, I think my very own site is the place.

Here's the thing: I keep crying at work.

The issue is bigger than that, but its essence is well-captured by that statement. From spring 2025 to summer 2026, I was an on-call public services assistant at a small public library in my area. Last month, I went from being on-call to a regular part-time employee in the same role, now working 20 hours/week. I am not adjusting well, to say the least.

There's so much context to all of this. Just earlier this year, I was (finally) diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (as well as Social Anxiety Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder. Fun stuff). It took 24 years to finally get a piece of paper with that information on it - I spent a long time just being kinda fucked up and completely clueless as to how to communicate about it or cope with it. When I was 13/14 years old, I spent an entire school year having a panic attack every morning, from my sheer dread of having to interact with my classmates who I found impossible to interpret. The stress was so bad that I ended up developing eczema and asthma which I hadn't had before. I'd go through phases of regular panic attacks later in life, as well. I only lasted a week when I tried to move away for college in 2021. My anxiety over being away from the familiarities and routines of home was so all-encompassing that I couldn't sleep or eat for days and began to feel as if I were going crazy. I started becoming paranoid about others seeing or watching me and was worried that I'd hurt myself. So I dropped all of my classes in the middle of the night and had my dad come pick me up and I moved back home. I transferred to a university that I could commute to from home and got my degree anyway, but my downright inability to move away and be independent felt like a devastating and humiliating failure for a long time. I guess it still feels that way, because I try to never talk about it and even tell all sorts of lies to explain the gaps in the timeline of my education when it comes up. Well, now anyone who finds my site will be able to get this information, I guess. So be it.

My particular manifestation of Autism means there are some things that I fully cannot do (ie. driving, living by myself), but most other things are possible for me. Well, possible in the same way that it's possible to run a 5k without any training. You can technically do it, but it's grueling, painful, exhausting, miserable, you're liable to injure yourself, and you most certainly won't be finishing ahead of anyone else. So, although I'm technically able to work, I've only ever managed to get customer service-type jobs, as those are pretty much the only entry-level jobs that exist and actually hire people these days; and customer service means doing everything I struggle with the most for hours at a time every week. Navigating social interactions, multitasking, maintaining focus while faced with competing sensory input from all directions... it's not just about being bad at these things. If it were a matter of skill, my close study of my co-workers and my reading and practicing would have made it all easier, right? And externally, I think it does look like I've gotten really good at this stuff. Honestly, I'm not half bad at de-escalation - I haven't been yelled at a by a patron a single time this year! - and I've mastered my phone-answering skills to the point that my co-workers have gone out of their way to compliment it. But internally, it remains just as difficult, just as painful, and frankly even more exhausting because I'm trying so hard. It's the psycho-emotional equivalent of wading through mud every time you have to get somewhere.

I was so excited to start working in a library. I knew public service wasn't my ideal role, but in the current employment landscape in my area, it was the only way for me to get my foot into the door of the library world while working on my MLIS. I don't think I fully understood or appreciated the fact that being public service staff at a library is customer service x1,000. So much of my time is spent trying to explain technology to elderly people who don't even know what an internet browser, URL, or e-mail address is, and sometimes, no matter how patient or compassionate I am, they get frustrated and take it out on me. And then I know I'm going to have to see them again the next day, or on the same day next week, and my heart just drops knowing I'm going to have to interact with them again. This is the nature of the job and I think it's a good thing for people to get help like this; and just because they're rude or difficult doesn't mean they don't deserve help. But given that I find it difficult enough to have a regular interaction with anyone, having to repeatedly navigate these complex and sensitive interactions every time I clock in at work has been enough to send me spiraling. Whether I'm good at it or not, I loathe doing it. It makes me start resenting the very existence of other people, and I've started getting frustrated with people for needing any help at all. I don't want to be that kind of person, but that's what tends to happen to me when I'm running on fumes. And with my new hours, few as they may seem, I'm always running on fumes.

And thus, my frequent "bathroom breaks" that mostly involve my locking myself in a stall to cry for a few minutes while pretending to piss. At least once in a five hour shift, I feel overwhelmed enough that I need to do this. Sometimes it's because of a difficult patron, but other times it's just because it's loud, or busy, or I keep getting interrupted while trying to work on something, and it just gets to be too much.

Earlier this week, I came home from a shift in such a deep hole of depression and misanthropy and exhaustion that my partner was genuinely concerned for me. I expressed my hatred for our patrons, my wish to simply stop existing, to be unreachable to all people forever. My feelings of being trapped, like I was cursed to do this forever, would never find a job that didn't make me want to die; and also my feelings of inadequacy. Why couldn't I just get over myself? Nobody fucking likes their job, but they manage. So what right do I have to be affected like this?

I have a tendency to write my own internal experiences off until they get so extreme that somebody is able to notice them externally and thus validate them. And things usually have to get pretty bad before this happens because I don't really express my emotions in a typical way. Around acquaintances and co-workers I mask so intensely that they might as well not even actually know me. I try to be open and honest with my friends, but I think I tend to hold myself so neutrally that I'm effectively still lying to them about the intensity of my feelings anyway. You'd think my family members would be the ones to see through everything, but they don't, really. My mom often thinks I'm struggling when I'm doing perfectly fine, but then will be surprised at the times when I can't hold myself together anymore, not realizing I'd been bulldozing my way through so much up until that point. And my dad's just kind of oblivious. My partner is the only one who can always, without fail, get an accurate read on what I'm feeling and how intensely. So the fact that even he was so worried by how I was presenting that he begged me to take a mental health day off of work (which I didn't do, because I think I kind of hate myself) made me realize... shit, this is serious. I think this is the first time in our 7 years together that he's ever asked me to do that.

And yeah, I know I shouldn't need to scare the shit out of the love of my life in order to understand that things are bad. I should be able to understand that when other people refer to the "Sunday scaries," they're not talking about having actual panic attacks over the notion of returning to work. What I am experiencing is not typical, and I can't just keep ignoring it or pushing through it just because I think it's what I'm supposed to do.

And yet... and yet... and yet...

I don't feel like I'm allowed to feel the full weight of being disabled. Despite my diagnosis, despite years of suspecting I was autistic and literally receiving accomodations for it, I still default to treating myself as if I'm not autistic, as if I'm just a failure, a person that never built character, never learned to work hard or overcome challenges. My accomplishments feel like consolation prizes, and my failures or inabilities feel like the true throughline of my character. These feelings are doubled by the fact that everything I'm good at or accomplished in is something that isn't really useful. What does my English degree and published poetry and novel manuscript and zine collective really count for if I can't drive, can't live independently, can't survive 90% of jobs, even fail to feed myself half the time? And so what if I'm detail-oriented and love to organize things and do solitary, routine tasks, if all of the jobs that ask for those sorts of qualities are being fed to LLMs? Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do?

And I don't feel like I have the "right" to complain because everyone I know has a job that seems ten times harder or more soul-sucking than mine. Fast food kitchens, classrooms, call centers - I wouldn't last a day in any of those settings. So how could I possibly bring up my feelings about my own job? The other day, I was waiting for my order in a cafe and overheard two people around my age having a conversation about work, and one of them was talking about how burnt out she was from streaming so much. It's not fair of me, because all labor is labor, but I wanted to slap her upside the head. I imagine this is how my friends and family must feel about me when I complain about my work, so I really try not to ever bring up my feelings on the matter outside of trying to make my complaints into fodder for humor. The result, though, is that I just spiral further, not just feeling burnt out and trapped and depressed and anxious, but also feeling as if I'm going crazy because I don't have anyone to look at me and acknowledge the reality of my experience. I watch as my co-workers go about their days all bright and chipper - one of them even claiming he plans to work this job until he dies (what the hell?) - and able to laugh off negative patron interactions and move on with their days, and I just feel there is something so horribly broken in me that I can't do what they're doing. I've tried changing my outlook, I've tried being positive, being mindful, but that just turns into more masking. The only thing that helps me get through the day is totally separating from my body and pretending I'm not there at all. I'm right back to where I was when I was 13. It's absolutely demoralizing.

I don't feel hopeful for my future or for the future overall. Finding work is only going to get harder and harder, while food and housing will get more and more expensive. Libraries are infamously consolidating staff and services, not expanding, so I'm realizing I made a really stupid decision wasting my money on this MLIS, but I'm too far gone to stop now. I'm searching high and low for jobs that don't involve interacting with the public, but the pickings are slim and the few roles available are quite competitive. I'm applying anyway, because I need to do something, anything, to convince myself that this won't be my life forever.

I guess that's the one thing you can say about me. I'm a notorious quitter - of jobs, projects, extracurricular activities, etc. - but I just can't ever seem to quit on myself. C'est la vie.