It’s been a while since I wrote one of these. I was posting a life update every two posts, and it looked beautiful on my blog’s homepage, but it’s not sustainable when you start posting more than that because a life update every 1-3 days is overkill.
If you view the category page, you can see the life update images I’ve edited in the past appear as a gradient. I love it.
I might edit the featured images further back in the future for my life updates, but it was more fun to make the graphics and a tedious, time-consuming task to implement those graphics.
1. I’ve fully converted my book reviews to a new plugin, which I now use to catalog my personal library.
I used Ultimate Book Blogger for a while and purchased Book Database for the analytics and grid view. Since I found myself only using a few features from each, and could not pick and choose which features I wanted from each to custom build my own plugin, I reduced my book review plugin to one.
My primary desire concerning the tracking of my books has — after about two years of barely using Goodreads and ultimately loathing LibraryThing’s archaic user interface (UI) — been to find a better solution to cataloguing the books I own and/or read.
Book Database does this for me. I spend a lot of time on my blog, and it’s akin to storing ish in Google Drive, but the search features are better and reviewing books seamless.
The more I see people losing their accounts because of lost passwords, emails or content guidelines, the more I don’t want to spend a lot of time putting my best into other websites. Goodreads’s clunky design is archaic, despite having gone through a low-key overhaul in recent years — emphasis on low-key.
My employer insists on updating their bad UI to an even worse UI, use software ft. an engineering team who disables keyboard accessibility via JavaScript rather than learning how to design with accessibility in mind (and hej, forms don’t need special keyboard features added when they have their own already), and create new pages instead of updating and deleting old ones (so you have to click a few times to get the right page).
I’m sooo fed up with crappy, inaccessible UI and it been justified via gaslighting by the engineering/support team: “oh, we wanted the forms to have some keyboard functionality, but you can’t use arrow keys in text fields because it disrupted the radio buttons with the other design elements; our engineers decided it was best to choose functionality over accessibility.”
Social media is but a complementary service — and I’m already having to add info for my book reviews, anyway, so why not?
Perks of Book Database (BD) are the analytics. I can link my book reviews on posts manually, if I wish for them to be there. I didn’t want double terms added, either, because they’d pointlessly clutter the database. I need to add CSS for the searchable BD archive.
2. Autism burnout, work transfer, different position + pay
There’s a post on autism burnout.
I took a different, non-managerial position for one dollar less than my previous hourly because I was fed up being a loss prevention associate. My favorite aspect of the job was entering and analyzing data.
I’m not going to work for someone else forever. At this point, I’m so annoyed with the amount of people who don’t understand how difficult it is to maintain a job as an autistic person. Self-employed autistic people maintain their jobs better because they work for themselves and do their special interests as their job.
Few autistic people are employed in full-time positions. I wrote about these bits on the Autism burnout post as well.
3. Mixed feelings about returning to work
Every negative feeling I have about returning to work is every reason I want to be self-employed.
Every reason I want to be self-employed is justifiable if you know autistic people’s job struggles and how much they thrive when they’re self-employed.
But the majority of people do not know about it, and this is why I don’t discuss my journey much. I want a support system that I don’t have to pay for, but the moment I so much as mention self-employment, it’s like everyone is a Devil’s advocate. Not only am I expected to dish out my entire business plan and have all the answers for every situation, but I’m in need of a Serious Talk about money and the difficulties of running your own fucking business.
Which, again, if only you knew about autistic people, autism burnout, and the struggle to maintain a job as an autistic person! On almost every. single. employment resource for autistic people is the same bullet point articulated only slightly differently:
Have you considered self-employment? Figuring out a way to make money doing your special interest while working for yourself will allow you to set your hours and create a work environment that works with your sensory needs. You’ll also have a higher chance at being able to maintain your job in the event of autism burnout.
The only positive feeling I have about returning to work is in regard to earning an income so I don’t have to pay my insurance premiums out of pocket, can furnish my apartment, and not worry about my bills so much while working on my own business.
That’s it.
As I’m still very much in autism burnout, I’m not extremely social and am letting my special interests guide how I blog.
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