We'd like to ask you all for your thoughts, suggestions, and ideas to help us resolve an ongoing issue.
The issue
At a high-level, we are a neurodivergent (AuDHD) spoonie with a mixture of health issues that are preventing us from being able to get or do a "typical" job and earn an income.
By "typical" job, we mean one where the company and role just aren't well-suited to many folks who are disabled (including being neurodivergent), have support needs, and/or have other health issues.
Most "typical" jobs broadly:
Have fixed hours (start/finish times and total working hours required).
Require a minimum fixed amount of time in a physical office.
Require a lot of interaction with other people (including colleagues).
... and so on, so you can probably understand how difficult it is for us to find any suitable paid employment that we can do 😅
This is made harder by the fact that:
We only know how to search for "typical" jobs.
There is zero support within the UK for finding suitable employment outside of "typical" jobs.
The welfare system within the UK is fundamentally (and intentionally) broken
The request
We have zero idea where to even start, so we are genuinely asking for your input and recommendations here.
We have decent reading comprehension, writing ability, and neurospicy pattern recognition, but we also have an inconsistent level of executive function and energy (physical and mental), so we can't do a job where we have to clock in and out at set times, even on a part-time basis.
Even whilst writing this post, we're already out of spoons and on to knives today, meaning that we're pushing through to ask for help.
Any suggestions will be appreciated, and we'll add additional details to the post based on any questions or thoughts from others 🥺🫶
Thank you in advance for your thoughts, as well as your empathy, understanding, and kindness :MentalHealthFlagHeart:
Read an interesting question earlier today in this post and realised that:
we have absolutely no idea ourselves; and
it's almost certainly not appropriate for us to chime in, as we're English and white!
So, we're posing the question here (in genuine good faith) for anyone who is part of the global majority or part of an historically-marginalised group within a white-majority society (e.g., white Irish, travellers, etc.):
Is expat (expatriate) a term that we should avoid using?
From what we've read since
@psiie posed the question, it looks like the answer is probably yes, due to its association with whiteness, wealth, and status, but we would very, very much appreciate your own thoughts on this 🩷
Is there a type of all-in-one support brace that supports your chest and shoulder muscles on both sides for when you've overdone them, but still need to get stuff done?
Genuinely asking here, as we've overworked all muscles around those areas, but still need to do some tasks.
In an ideal world we'd take the time to rest them fully, but we don't live in that world and stuff needs doing before we can pause 🥺😔
As it stands, we look like a t-rex right now, but still need to do a number of chores, and there isn't anyone else who can help.
We have at least one shoulder support from when we first borked one shoulder about a decade back (which led to us getting epic office arm supports), but we're looking for some kind of cross-chest support that also helps with both shoulders.
... and anyone else who falls under the broad trans umbrella :TransHeart:
As it stands, our follow list has a bias towards trans woman, trans fems, and fembies. We want to balance out our feed and see your posts, thoughts, problems, questions, and joy that we're not currently seeing.
The problem we're having is that we genuinely have not been able to find many by searching 😭
For example, if we do a search from our instance for #TransMasc, we only see about 13 profiles and a handful of posts, probably due to our server not fully searching across fedi 😞
(FYI, any tech recommendations on additionally relays or ways to solve this search / federation issue on a Glitch-SOC server would be very much welcomed.)
So, please can y'all either reply back for us to follow you, have some recommendations of folk we can follow, or have thoughts on getting around our search / federation issue, we'd be super grateful :PinkHeart: