I Was Forced Out of My Job
By: Kate Taylor
Tags: Work, Disability, Mental Health, Equality, Autism

There’d been a great deal of upheaval in my life prior to taking the real estate job. I’d been living with a roommate who could no longer hide his alcoholism. He was having trouble at his own job, so I should have seen his abandoning the apartment coming. But I didn’t.

I managed to find someone to take over the townhouse and secured a studio in a developing part of the city. I was scared because I had very little money at that point and, just before my roommate abandoned the apartment, I’d given two weeks notice at my shipping job for health reasons. Having grown up hearing stories about my grandparents in the Great Depression, I did what my grandmother had done. I rationed out the food I had and I waited for a job offer.

When the call finally came, I couldn’t believe my luck. It was the best offer I could have hoped for. And it came just in time. When I received my first paycheck, I was out of cash and had two days worth of food left.

Determined to prove that the company had made a smart choice, I applied myself to the role and learned their methods so quickly it amazed my trainer. She was used to new recruits taking months to be able to handle the accounts on their own, not weeks. I took it as a good sign that one of the company’s oldest employees was impressed.

But while my trainer and my immediate supervisor liked my being able to lighten their workload, the other people in the office looked at me with suspicion. I’ve never “fit in” well and, while I tried to relate to my co-workers, we couldn’t seem to find common ground.

I was single; they were married or divorced, usually with several children. They liked to chat and gossip as they sat in the open office; I invariably missed the point when I tried to join in. Over time, I began to be ignored when I asked them questions. People would leave the break room when I came in. When I walked past one woman’s desk on my way to the bathroom, I was consistently called an “uppity bitch.”

Trying to talk with my co-workers so I could understand and fix the problem did nothing but bring more abuse. The head of HR was no help because she instigated much of it. She and two other women sat in the break room one afternoon and, loudly, talked about everything that was wrong with me, from my makeup to my attitude.

I was stunned. Fighting back nausea, I entered the break room and asked what it was that I had done to make them so angry. The response? That they weren’t talking about me (a lie as they had used my name several times) and that I needed to stop trying to “start shit.”

I couldn’t believe the situation had gotten that bad. I went to my supervisor at the end of the day and explained what was going on. And then I did something radical, I disclosed that I was Autistic to him.

My trainer already knew; she had a grandson on the spectrum and had asked me outright if I was too. It felt good to not be judged so I’d confirmed it and we’d had a few conversations about Autism. I’d recommended books for her, but I hadn’t imagined that she would have told anyone else.

But she had. It had filtered out to the rest of the company so that when I disclosed to the supervisor, he was unsurprised. He was also unsympathetic, telling me to “just ignore” the others and keep doing the excellent work I was doing for him.

Haunted by the prospect of being unemployed again, I did my best to follow his advice. I used headphones to try and block them out and began smoking for the first time in six years just so I could escape out the doors a few times a day. The depression and anxiety I’ve struggled with since childhood reasserted themselves viciously. But it wasn’t until my co-workers discovered my PTSD (and started intentionally triggering it) that I went to my supervisor again.

Post traumatic stress disorder presents in a variety of ways. An exaggerated startle response is one of the most common and mine went off one day when a co-worker dropped a stack of binders behind me. I was wearing my headphones so I hadn’t heard her approach but the resulting noise caused my entire body to jerk hard enough to send my chair a few feet backwards. The office roared with laughter and after that I couldn’t relax no matter what. I was always waiting for the next attack, constantly sick with headaches and a clenched stomach.

My supervisor didn’t care. He advised me not to retaliate and assured me I had a job there as long as I did good work. As far as he was concerned, my being allowed to wear headphones was all the accommodation I needed. No other “special allowances” would be made for me. And then he told me not to talk about being Autistic anymore, not with him and not with my trainer.

I was stunned, humiliated. I knew this wasn’t right, that it was blatantly illegal. But there was no way I could afford a lawyer to fight it and I had to keep the job while I searched for another one. I didn’t know what to do except try to hold on.

I began to notice that other executives were watching me closely. They began to give me assignments that I had no time to do and no experience with. They’d “approved it with my supervisor” so I took the work and kept my head down.

I was told that I couldn’t clock in a few minutes early as I’d been doing, as everyone else did. I was denied overtime when I really needed it to complete the extra work. And then the death blow came.

In a company wide email, everyone was informed that my co-worker, S., was going to take over my duties. Nowhere did it explicitly say that I had been fired but there was no other explanation. That day, I waited for someone, anyone, to come and tell me to turn in my badge, to fill out paperwork, or do an exit interview.

But no one did.

They were waiting for me to break, for me to leave. They needed me to quit because if they fired me they might end up in a discrimination lawsuit. That whole day as people congratulated S., I kept asking myself if this was going to be the thing I let break me. When my supervisor refused to see me, saying he was too busy, I thought, “Yeah, I think this is.”

At 4:30, I gathered my things, put them in my purse, left my badge on the desk, and walked out. I wish I could tell you that it felt triumphant, like I was finally free, but I can’t do that. There had been too many months of torture and I was too numb to feel much of anything.

It would take a long time to reverse that fact and even longer to feel like I wasn’t to blame. Getting my story out there helps. And maybe it’ll help someone else too.