![]() No good national data exist, but various small studies suggest the problem of joblessness is chronic, says Paul Shattuck, a professor of public health at Drexel University who studies autism outcomes. The challenges of navigating the social complexities of a workplace is one reason unemployment even among college-educated people with autism appears to be disproportionately high. “It’s moving in the dark without a flashlight.”Īuticon’s Culver City office. “When it is hard to read the room, so to speak, it does morph into anxiety over time,” said Grey Patton, a 23-year-old employee on the spectrum who graduated from the University of California, Riverside, last spring and who, like Hirasuna, started working at Auticon in January. Guesswork is prevalent, misapprehension the norm. For some people with autism, socializing is an elaborate game with more exceptions than rules, so that any small decision - hover outside the boss’s office? don’t hover? - poses an insurmountable challenge. Doubts flourish under fluorescent lights that expose every slight, every interpersonal hurdle.Īnd then there are people like Hirasuna, who are on the autism spectrum people who feel bombarded by those same clues and cues, all the while knowing they are unreliable interpreters of their meaning. A higher-up checks a watch midconversation a comment in a meeting is talked over someone and someone else go to lunch. Offices, for plenty of people, can occasionally be overwhelming, crowded with feelings too big for cubicles, too personal for a professional setting. Was he supposed to wait right there for someone to open the door? What if they were busy with another appointment at that moment and he interrupted or even ruined it? Hesitating in the hall, he feared he would just stand there forever, blowing what seemed like such a good opportunity - to do work he might actually like - in a disastrous moment of total self-conflagration, his head exploding with uncertainty. “It was like my brain threw the blue screen of death on me,” he recalled. ![]() As he recalled this moment of indecision, he reached up and pulled on a strand of hair a few times. “Like, ‘Hey, here I am!’ ” A mass of soft, pale brown curls surrounds his head, cloudlike. Did he open the door and barge right in? “It seemed kind of rude,” Hirasuna said. Given a few hours, Hirasuna could usually make sense of whatever computer code someone threw at him, but this particular script was elusive. After going upstairs to the right floor, he stood outside the door of the office, stymied by what to do next. He made an appointment with a recruiter at the office, and in early January, he forced himself to make the 10-minute drive to Auticon’s office two blocks from the beach. ![]() He remembered that in September, he went to an innovation fair at his old high school and met the head of a technology consulting business called Auticon, which specializes in hiring people who are, like Hirasuna, on the autism spectrum. Hirasuna could not imagine a worse hell than a job in customer service, which would require, he sensed, a more cheerful public face than he could possibly muster. ![]() Finally, last November, his parents insisted that he get a job - any job, at the bakery down the street or at McDonald’s, if it came to that. During the day, he slept at night he rose to battle the enemy in futuristic cities and pastel landscapes on his PC, or tinkered on another monitor with any of the codes (Java, Perl, Rust, C++ and C#) he taught himself in high school. For a few months, he took some classes at a local community college, but eventually his routine gave way to solitude at home. He managed to attend college at Arizona State for just over a year but returned home for good in November 2017. To say Hirasuna is shy is to say the ocean is big - it captures nothing of the vastness of the feeling. Outside, sun poured down inside, he looked at the top of his forearm and noticed it was every bit as pale as its underside. Before Ben Hirasuna showed up for the first job interview of his life, he went for weeks at a time without leaving his parents’ home in Santa Monica. ![]()
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