The Autistic's Guide to Working in Residential Life

The Vermont Connection Volume 43 The Embodiment of Liberation: Embracing Opposition and Resistance within Higher Education Article 18 April 2022 The Autistic's Guide to Working in Residential Life Catherine Meyer University at Albany, State University of New York Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/tvc Part of the Accessibility Commons, Higher Education Commons, and the Student Counseling and Personnel Services Commons Recommended Citation Meyer, C. (2022). The Autistic's Guide to Working in Residential Life. The Vermont Connection, 43(1). https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/tvc/vol43/iss1/18 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Education and Social Services at UVM ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Vermont Connection by an authorized editor of UVM ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact . 184 • The Vermont Connection • 2022 • Volume 43 The Autistic Guide to Working in Residential Life Catherine Meyer A day in my life as an autistic residence life professional usually goes something like this. I wake up late because I overextended myself on call last night, spending an hour trying to calm down from an angry parent calling the emergency line to curse at me for quarantining their COVID-positive child. Either that, or I wake up an hour early and can’t get back to sleep because my brain remembered that I have to remember to take the dog out before I go to work. I have work-related stress dreams all night. I go to the bathroom, take my meds (sertraline for the debilitating depression and anxiety, vitamin B12 for chronic fatigue, vitamin D for the seasonal affective disorder, and cetirizine for seasonal allergies), and brush my teeth with the stiff, old toothbrush on my sink. I remind myself to buy a new toothbrush for the millionth time this month. I’ll forget again in 5 minutes. I make the exact same breakfast every morning: this month, it’s a bagel, frozen from my favorite bagel shop, with maple jalapeno cream cheese and an iced vanilla chai latte with oat milk. It comforts me to start my day with a little bit of predictability - plus it tastes delicious. (Sometimes I don’t have enough money left to buy more cream cheese, or oat milk, so I just won’t eat. Better to just skip it than to waste precious energy on making that big of a decision so early.) I check the weather, assess my energy levels, and try to decide what clothing to wear that looks acceptable for the office but won’t trigger the shit out of me after an hour or so. I’ll probably end up changing into something softer, stretchier, with fewer tags at lunch anyway. One of the reasons I started learning to knit my own clothing was to be able to wear tagless clothing – even Catherine Meyer (they/them) is an author of joyful, adventurous novels for queer, trans, and neurodivergent young adults, a UVM HESA alum (‘20), and a Resident Director at the University at Albany. Their work centers hope, joy, and existence as resistance in a neurotypical, binary world. They are an avid knitter, home cook, and Pokémon fan, and live in Albany, NY with their partner Alex and two rescue dogs, Millie and Obi. • 185 the scissor-sharp stubs itch like wildfire. I unlock my office door and turn on the twinkle lights hanging on my wall. I’ve curated the perfect space to make me want to exist in my workspace. Stick-on brick texture wallpaper, fake ivy vines everywhere, color-coordinated throw pillows, door tags and memorabilia from my own Resident Advisor days, and a massive lending library filled with novels that I’ve read, loved, and now lend out to my students when they need a pick-me-up. (I have a library tracking app on my phone, so that I can remember who borrowed which book. Otherwise, I’d never get any of them back.) When I started my job at UAlbany in August of 2021, I couldn’t function in my office until it looked nice and felt like a welcoming place. Now, I actually feel good and get work done, because I’m comforted by the sensory input around me. The light gets filtered through privacy-glass window clings before it can burn my retinas. My twinkle lights help me focus, so that when I start spiraling from overstimulation and oversocialization I can watch them slowly flash and fade until my breath returns to normal again. I have a couch with pillows and a cozy knit throw, for my students to feel welcome in but also so that I can switch up my sitting position when my body starts to hurt, and I get overwhelmed. I go through my emails, marking them as read and sorting them into the 50plus folders and subfolders I’ve created in Outlook to organize my work. In grad school, I tried just freeballing my inbox, and I could never find anything even with the search bar. I organized my inbox my first day on this job. I respond to the emails misgendering me first, so that I have enough energy to stand up for myself before I waste it on minutiae. I think it’s really freaking awesome that so many autistic people like me are trans, but some days it’s exhausting to deal with both kinds of tired at once. I have to remind myself to open every email with a greeting. Otherwise, I’ll be told during my performance review next week that I’m too cold. For some reason, people tend not to take very well to emails that get right down to business without any niceties. I think they’re a waste of time, but I do it anyway because dealing with the backlash hasn’t historically gone well for me. I try not to schedule student meetings before lunch, because the earlier it is, the harder time I have of making sense of my words or helping people effectively. I work on administrative work: processing conduct cases, creating training plans for student staff, responding to emails, or catching up on tasks 186 • The Vermont Connection • 2022 • Volume 43 from the day before that I didn’t have the spoons to get to. A fire alarm dumps unexpectedly. I shut my windows and put in earplugs. I have to force myself to text the group chat that myself and the other professional staff on my living area have started: “do you need backup for crowd control?” If it’s me on duty, I cry internally and steel myself. I put on my neurotypical face and go get the master keys and wait for the fire department in the cold. I have to deepen my voice and act like a dudebro, or else I’ll be “ma’am” and “miss”-ed all morning. If it’s me that’s responding, I will likely lose my entire morning and a chunk of my afternoon to overstimulation fatigue, and probably won’t get much done at all today. I lose focus about thirty times before I finally put reality TV shows on my second desktop screen or play a podcast. The white noise helps me focus. (My favorites are Survivor and Chopped.) I hop on Zoom for a meeting. In order to keep my focus, I knit a sock, or organize my Post-It notes, or reorder my dry erase markers by color. If I don’t have a menial task for my hands to do, I will forget everything t (...truncated)