The Community Trash

It’s April, which means it’s Autism Acceptance Month! The tech industry believes it to be a space where average people can make a difference in the world, but more often than not these high performing employees are neurodiverse in a neurotypical world. I implore you, please do not support Autism Speaks, spread the puzzle piece, or speak for autistic people. Make room for us to have our own voices this month – we don’t need your help to be vocal, but we do need your help in elevating our experiences and needs, so take some time this month to make sure you spread the right kind of voices.

I’m gonna start this with: Do you realize how much I need to do to ensure my anxiety is under control in this ridiculous world? Anxiety is often a comorbidity of both autism and ADHD, it’s common to be treated for it when you have either of those. I was diagnosed with bipolar II and severe general anxiety in 2007 and I need an anticonvulsant used as a mood stabilizer to help with my big swings, a traditional mood stabilizer to help sedate me, improve my sleep quality, and keep my anxiety down, have an as-needed anti-anxiety medication when things get way fucked, and constantly use Cognitive Behavior Therapy techniques to bring me back to my center. I am convinced a large part of this is needed because people value “normal” over “uniqueness” thanks to capitalism, and it’s a huge reason why I would love to just go live on an island tending a community farm far away from tech (Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land is a mood for this). The tech industry is full of neurodiverse people, yet those in charge are in general Boomer age (or have Boomer ideologies), think people who get mental health help are “weak” or “snowflakes”, and typically tell their employees to “deal with it”. This leads to over stress which leads to over medication which leads to a lot of people feeling like they are not valued as a human. Now that’s out of the way, this post is part 1 of two about my career experiences before and after my autism level one diagnosis, focusing on before I became an FTE at Microsoft (part 2 will be about my time on Edge and after my diagnosis). Autism level one was originally called Asperger’s, but we don’t talk about him anymore (bad Nazi doing bad experiments, and you should avoid using the term ‘Aspie’ for this reason).

Obligatory note: When you meet someone with autism, you have met one person with autism. We are all unique individuals with a variety of superpowers, and my experiences are not reflective of the overall neurodiverse community. Are you neurodiverse or think you may be? I’d love to hear your experiences! I’m 100% down to help you navigate this world, neurodiverse or not, and how you can be the best you possible. 🥰

I learned that working overnights is terrible for bipolar brains after I was first diagnosed. Who’s got two thumbs and was working overnights at Walmart at the time? This girl. We lived in Colorado (where I was raised) and before this diagnosis I did a ton of damage to my unfocused career. I exploded at my first job, a bowling alley, because I asked one of my coworkers for a pretzel and cheese from the food counter and he sent back a Slimfast; I chucked the can at his head as I stormed out (I missed, sadly), stopping by the Manager’s office to take off my work shirt to throw it and my badge at the Assistant Manager’s face, then I walked out. I worked at a Denny’s briefly overnights where I was accused of taking meth in the bathroom because I am…uh…too cheery? Wish I was joking about that one. While I was in school to be a mechanic, I worked at a KFC/A&W with a school mate. I hated smelling like chicken all the time so I quit to be a nanny for my old neighbor and a friend of hers. I guess my roommate didn’t like some of that and while I was at my mom’s one extended weekend, that roommate packed all her shit up leaving behind a note that told me how horrible I was along with some pig statues; those were violently introduced to the wall when I read the letter and I still don’t know what I did to deserve that but her credit got fucked because she didn’t break the lease properly. 😂 I worked as customer service for Microcenter where I kept getting horrible anxiety every day I had to work so I sabotaged that by just…not showing up anymore. This was within 4 years, 2003-2007, and these are only the job things – I burned a lot more bridges with friends and my husband (then boyfriend) during this time, too.

After my bipolar diagnosis, I got off overnights and worked days at the customer service counter for Walmart. I started medications to control the mood swings, and went through so many before I found the “right” one – I ended up on depakote for a couple years. When we decided we wanted to leave Colorado for the Pacific Northwest in 2008, we moved in with my mother-in-law so that we could save up money for the move across the US; spoiler – we didn’t save anything because we both have ADHD and planning ahead was not a specialty of ours. 😅 But during that time I worked with her as a virtual assistant helping with content creation and editing videos for her clients, and I’m pretty sure I stopped taking my medication and focused solely on CBT. In 2010, we decided I needed a “real” job (lol) and my husband saw that a company he used to work for, iBeta, wanted some software testers. He convinced me to apply by telling me, “It’s your favorite thing, pointing out other people’s flaws!” That line actually worked in the interview, and for a year I worked as a software and hardware tester for SMART boards and monitors (this is still my favorite story explaining how I got into tech). I continued to have anxiety issues that would make me call out probably more often than I should have; my manager then told me that I would be significantly better at my job if I put more effort into making sure I was around – I didn’t know that I should have been advocating for my anxiety this early in my career, and I wish I did. It’s 2011 and we finally had enough to move up to Oregon – except we only thought we did and that entire situation was a mess, too. 😬 My first job in Oregon I lasted only 3 months doing iPhone and iPad phone support. I’m pretty sure that I ruptured a disc because I could not sit for extended periods or in certain ways, but we had no health insurance (because call centers treat their employees like cattle) so I had no way to find out what was really happening. Since I couldn’t take any time off to recover (because how dare call center employees get hurt or sick), I was unfortunately let go. Instead of getting another corporate job, I started building up my own business making jewelry by crowdsourcing funds to buy tools – I taught myself how to solder, learned I could make things in 3D form really well (I always thought I wasn’t artistic), and managed to get a little money out of it. But…me not finding another job really hurt us. The cost of that was needing to separate from my husband, give up two of our three cats, and me move in with my parents in southern Oregon. My husband still had a job – the one that would eventually change our lives – and he stayed up in Portland by himself working as phone support for Xbox. After that whole experience living away from my husband for 4 months, I got some of my shit together for when we got a place we could live in together.

When I moved back to Portland, I ended up getting a job with the husband unit doing phone support for Xbox in 2012. The very first phone call I took during training my trainer pulled my husband aside and said, “She sounds like she’s done this her whole life, she’s a natural.” Inside, I was terrified, felt like my voice was wavering, and got an adrenaline rush that gave me a headache and the shakes because of my anxiety. It’s amazing what masking your entire life lets you do. Like I noted in my post about empathy, I was really good at what I did for Xbox, especially once I got confidence in my abilities. I was a networking specialist, one of two women who were on that team – would you believe that I could easily take my troubleshooting skills from being a trained engine and transmission mechanic and fold it into networking? This role taught me how technically inclined I truly am; I could do in-depth, technical conversations with users and find answers outside of the troubleshooting built into the support tool we used. As support agents, we helped scale up a new call center building in Wilsonville, Oregon and during that transition an opening on the Games for Windows Live team became available. This was a highly desired role within in the call center, they had pretty low call volume and most of the time the answer was “turn off your antivirus”. I scored that seat (the only female agent on the team, our manager was a woman, though) the same time my husband got selected to go up to Redmond and help the Xbox supportability PMs build up the networking section and troubleshooting flows for the original Xbox One. I am still shocked at how well I did at the call center for someone who hates talking to people, but this role is the first one I can see the excessive amount of masking and compensation I was doing to get through things; for example, I got back onto an as-needed anti-anxiety so that I wouldn’t sabotage yet another job (lorazepam), found a group of people who were similar to me, and made some new friends.

My husband ended up impressing one of the FTEs for Xbox Community Support, and that man (hi, James, if you ever read this!) worked hard to get both of us up to the Seattle area and working on his team. I mentioned in my empathy post that I was told by my first lead on Xbox, “You talk to problems, not people.” I did not realize that my “learning” empathy and how to engage in text form as a company representative was a form of compensation. I have always been known for not having a filter from my brain to my mouth, not thinking how people would react to a) what I was saying and b) how I was saying it. Tbh, sometimes I don’t give a shit – sometimes you need that blunt slap in the face because a lot of people won’t do it – I am the friend who will give it to you straight. Shit, I lost track of where I was going with this. Oh, right, how I got unfairly fired from Xbox Community Support due to my lack of filter, directly related to my autism. I started as a support forums agent, helped launch the Xbox Support handle on Reddit, and moved into a Community Manager role for the Xbox Ambassadors. A beloved staff member of the Ambassadors, I snapped at a community member for being a shithead in Discord. I wasn’t bad about it, he was ranting about something he was upset with, and I said, “Be constructive or be quiet.” I recognize I could have done better there, and very shortly after the exchange this community member left the Discord server; he was well known for this when he would throw a fit, so it wasn’t anything new, and I honestly didn’t even notice because he was still talking to me in private messages. But someone on the team decided that this course of events meant I pushed him out of the community and made it an unsafe space for the rest. Except it wasn’t my interaction with him that made him leave. No one involved with my firing asked the community member what happened, no one talked to other community members like the volunteer moderators who were there, no one talked to me about the situation. One day about a week after the incident, I get pulled into a room and told that because he left the server after that interaction I was being fired. The member this was centered around tried to petition the team to listen, but they weren’t having it. Mentions of me in the Discord server were removed, a petition on the forums was ignored, my ex-colleagues mostly shunned me. To this day, I (and several others) fully believe that one “bad” interaction after 4 years did not warrant me getting fired. And that’s how I accidentally sabotaged a job I fucking loved by not having a filter thanks to autism, and man if I had known then what I know now things might have gone way different. (Like, probably not getting fired in the first place, for example.)

During my time on XCS from 2014-2018, I discovered Halsey (who didn’t at this point, amirite?), learned that she’s openly bipolar and was stoked to see someone like me sing about their experiences. Most of Badlands is just a call to my soul, but Gasoline, Castle, and Control are 3 songs that I relate to the most. My cousin was re-diagnosed from bipolar to borderline personality disorder closer to the end of this period, maybe 2017 or 2018. It got me re-evaluating my diagnosis of bipolar as something a little more so I went to a psychologist to get on mood stabilizing medication again and talk more about BPD. I was put on Lamictal then for my bipolar, told that we should focus on the symptoms and not the diagnosis (okay 🙄), and then released once the Lamictal controlled my swings and anxiety. Despite the lack of support for a new diagnosis from this psych, I will forever state that Lamictal saved my life, my relationships, and my career.

The role I had after XCS I learned that I love machine learning. As a content analyst for a conversational AI, I learned how to speak to a machine and realized that coding is quite literally simply learning another language – it’s just for machines, not humans, and my analytical brain easily understood the logic. This was novel to me – while I did teach myself some SQL so that I could do some stuff I was responsible for at Xbox I didn’t realize that the reason why I was so good at learning it was due to a boosted processing speed. As a space nerd, this gave me the itch to teach myself Python and R to start scanning images from NASA to help identify planets (before the James Webb telescope launch). The tool we used to make sure our chat bot Zo didn’t go Nazi like Tay was rule-based, as is the case with most conversational AIs, but the rules weren’t block or allowlists, they were English. It was teaching the machine how to contextually understand English; this opens up the ability to support the intersectionality and range of emotions of the human condition by a machine that’s used to strict rules. We built synonym groups including slang terms, did pen testing to ensure we were controlling the fairness levels appropriately, and I got to experience what it was like working directly on an engineering team… Except I wasn’t exactly on the engineering team and got in trouble for working on this tool when I was just a social media manager for Zo because it “wasn’t part of my responsibilities”. The engineer who built that tool will tell you that I understand his tool almost as good as he does – I found bugs that no one had thought to look for, and we made that program so much better over the short time that I was a content analyst before the project was retired. This role helped me fully understand the need for inclusive and fair technology, something I bring to every role now.

That team experience was an eye opener which showed me how well I can work on engineering teams and that my performance was significantly better than others when I was passionate about something. It’s also directly how I landed a role on Microsoft Edge after the Zo project retired with my then-manager pushing me towards the community position she realized she wasn’t gonna be a good fit for. Moving from partner to vendor at Microsoft showed me the impact I could make and the speed in which Microsoft moves, but becoming an FTE showed me the true firehose of information and workload you get immediately. This is overwhelming for someone who is aware of their weaknesses, significantly more so for someone who is unaware of their diagnoses, strengths, and weaknesses. Soon, I’ll post part 2 to talk about my experience on the Edge team before and after my diagnosis – something that I feel is really important to differentiate between. Until then!

– 🧜‍♀️🦄