Asperger's: The Land of Shattered Career Dreams

My personal experience demonstrates perhaps the most critical reason why an abused woman will remain with her male partner:  she believes that she cannot become financially independent of him.  I am a survivor of severe emotional child abuse from both parents and my grandmother.  For many years, I dreamed of financial self-sufficiency and believed I was fully capable of supporting myself independently of my parents.  I had planned to pursue a PhD in Russian studies and then become a university professor.  I also imagined myself perhaps working in the business world at a large corporation.  In addition, I hoped to work on Wall Street as a stock analyst. 

Unfortunately, I also have Asperger’s, a neurological disorder which is characterized by the inability to read social cues.  I discovered to my profound sorrow that I was automatically eliminated from nearly all the professional careers to which I had aspired because I was born with this unchanging condition.  In the office setting, the only important skill is the ability to read social cues and engage in sophisticated forms of social interaction. 

I was rejected by the academic world of international relations because in this field, the only skill that matters is the ability to read social cues.  Lacking this capacity, I am considered useless in the eyes of this profession.  No one in this profession seems to value me for my fluency in Spanish, my intermediate reading knowledge of Russian language, or my capacity to analyze complex political situations in the Middle East.   Why? I cannot function socially in an office setting. 

In my senior year of college, I went on 60 job interviews for corporate jobs and did not make it to the second round of interviews for any single company.  I graduated college with no job offers.  After graduating college, I was fired from every office job that I ever held.  Hence, my dreams of a corporate or stock analyst career were shattered from the start.

When I left my emotionally abusive family about 5 months ago at the age of 35, I told my Russian history professor about my history.  He asked me, “Rebecca, if your home environment  was that horrendous, why did you endure it for so long?”  Despite my best intentions, I ended up remaining in captivity for 14 years after college. 

I answered him, “Mark, I had dreamed of leaving my emotionally abusive parents since I was 12 years old.  Unfortunately, I felt forced to remain with my parents because I cannot support myself financially.  Since I have Asperger’s, I cannot work in an office.  Therefore, my career options are severely limited.”  If I didn't have Asperger's, I could have made it in the professional world.  But my career options with Asperger's are practically non-existent. 
The bottom line is that careers in academia and business are driven by social skills and not intellect.  academia is 60% social skills and at most 30% intellect - and business is 80% social skills and at most 15% intellect.  I have the terrible misfortune of having the strongest intellectual skills in fields that are the most driven by social skills of all - thus things like fluency in multiple foreign language, ability to find good investments, analytical skills -its all basically worthless in the eyes of the world.  So knowing accounting, foreign languages, investments, and foreign policy is basically a huge liability rather than an asset.   For this reason I am not bothering to get fully fluent in Russian, let alone start studying Arabic or Persian because language and foreign policy jobs are all based around social skills and so no matter how many languages I am fluent in, no one will hire me.  It is painfully clear to me that the system would reject me even if I were fully fluent in Russian, Persian, and Arabic.  I would add that I am so angry at the foreign policy establishment for rejecting me for having weak social skills instead of recognizing my intellectual abilities that I don't really feel like contributing to this field at all.   

If my intellectual skills were in things like the hard sciences, statistics, actuarial sciences, engineering, mathematics, computer science, and so on - in fields where having a brain actually matters - I suspect I would have been able to survive even with asperger's.  I would still have had career limitations but I would have had at least some career options.