Job Japes: The ND Diabetic's Grueling Gamble for a Salary.

An apology is in order. My work on this blog slowed to a crawl recently. I couldn’t muster up the energy to commit to writing routinely. It’s not that I didn’t want to, don’t get me wrong; I still have lots I want to say. My resistance to posting anything right away is because I don’t want to talk about exclusively negative topics.

But there’s one inescapable fact that has influenced my decision-making throughout Summer and Fall:

The job hunt where I live is demoralizing, yet despite that, I’ve been hyper-focused on it.

My mind is at odds with itself. If I’m investing too much time in a job hunt, it begs for me to stop. But it simultaneously urges me to keep going—because it feels like it doesn’t deserve to stop fretting about my employment prospects until I’ve applied to something. There have been multiple times when I’ve applied to a position that I knew I’d dislike or be a poor fit for. Whether it be due to my lack of experience, the complications of my disabilities, or having to account for my demented father when it comes to commuting—or doing anything outside of the house, for that matter—my job choices are limited. I’m trapped, others like me are just as trapped, and society only pretends to care about us.

I do at least have some advocates helping me through the job search and disability advocacy. And thanks to my father’s SSDI, meager as it is, I’m more financially stable than I would be living alone. But unfortunately, that job-hunting-first mindset has only recently decided to budge. So much time was lost on anxiety over employment, time that could’ve been spent on personal development in my hobbies. Or, more relevantly, that time could’ve been spent updating this blog, screaming into the void, and hoping someone would shout back.

There’s more to my outlook on this period of my life than the job hunt itself. While I’ve held down paid positions before, they collectively only lasted a little under a year. Both were retail associate roles, and both ended with me exiting on bad terms with my employers. For privacy reasons, I won’t give out the company names, but I don’t care if my former workmates find this. The writing from this point will be fairly rough and ramble-filled.

JOB #1

I was quite excited to start out working for this company. The staff seemed welcoming enough, to the extent that they wanted to get down to business and not fool around. It was all for the better, too; this was an office supply retailer that hired me just in time for the back-to-school season, and customers would be flooding in to prep their kids for the year ahead. It was nice growing accustomed to how things worked in this place; the training modules were decently thorough.

… But things started going downhill the second an abusive coworker made her opinion of me known on the same day. Going forward, I’ll refer to her as Kay. When we met, she not only didn’t greet me, but the very first thing out of her mouth when she decided to talk to me was “Do you not have work to do?”

I was on my lunch break. Because how dare I stop to take care of myself when my diabetes requires somewhat strict mealtimes?

Since then, Kay remained openly hostile and condescending towards me, rudely ordering me to get out of her way and dressing me down for even the slightest mistakes. Mind you, she was a fellow sales associate with no official power over me. It’d still be unforgivable if she were a manager, but her humbler role just makes her treatment of me worse.

Even so, Kay did have some seniority over me. She’d done good logistical work for the store over the years, and she was in the good graces of nearly every manager. At the very least, I wasn’t the only one who recognized how problematic this person was. But the store manager was too spineless—or rather, too willing to turn a blind eye—to discipline Kay whenever our coworkers voiced their concerns.

After the back-to-school season ended, business dropped off a cliff. There would be extremely long periods of nothing to do for me between customers, often as long as thirty minutes to an hour—which was frequently 25% of my shift for the day. The training modules did not prepare me for unstructured time, so, unless I was given furniture or a display to assemble… I spent a lot of the latter half of my six months in this store standing around and watching for oncoming customers.

Don’t get me wrong. I certainly tried to do more with my time, but I got conflicting information from my managers. Some of them wanted me to man the registers constantly and let other people complete other tasks, while others wanted me to venture out and do something other than wait, even if that meant leaving the registers unattended.

While this was happening, I’d stuck up for myself against Kay’s verbal abuse a handful of times. The first time, I politely but firmly told her to stop treating me like an idiot, after she began dressing me down for confusing one customer’s order for another. She backed off after that; I could tell she wasn’t used to retaliation in this setting.

Kay’s shock continued when, after once again ordering me to get out of her way, I snapped back at her—within reason--to cut it out. I seemed to be disappointing everyone at that point, between the managers and their poorly expressed and unfulfilled expectations, and now, this power-tripping bully once again displacing her frustrations with life on me. I had enough.

Of course, when word got around about what happened, I was reprimanded for my response. Never mind the fact that the head manager, Jay, said to my face that she knew this coworker was abusive due to past incidents, but did nothing to address it. From that point forward, all the managers grew increasingly passive-aggressive with me, especially one who also began displacing her frustrations about unruly customers onto me. I assume they and the others took Kay’s side because it’s easier to blame the new guy with the disability.

This isn’t just me playing a victim card here, or assuming the worst out of frustrated retail workers. I know definitively that they hated dealing with me and my diabetes. The nicest coworker I met there, Pim, was a retired nurse, and she relayed to me that Kay once vented to her about me and my diabetes. Considering everything else I’d heard about Kay by this point, I was deeply inclined to believe Pim, and still am; she had no reason to lie about this, and it lined up with Kay’s contempt for me too well. The managers were likely eating up every bad thing she was saying about me, like a pack of starved wolves.

There had even been times when my head manager snarkily asked about why I was taking my lunch break so early, despite the fact I had established my diabetes-related strict eating habits as early as the first week of the job. In fact, in times when I was manning the registers with nothing else to do, that manager asked me—and specifically me, no one else; I checked—to stand by the entrance and greet people. Another manager was confused about what I was doing one day, and when I explained, he seemed to have more questions than answers…

As you can imagine, midway through my final month in this job, I worked hard to find a new job and get the hell out of there. I managed to cut down my two-week notice to one week after finding something, and I left without saying goodbye to anyone except Pim—the one coworker who gave a crap about me and my struggles.

All this time, I felt I was losing my passion for illustration again. But as the first day of the new job and the last one of this current role both drew near, I started to realize my confidence was being pushed down by people who were bankrupt in good character. The best I had managed to do on the side were doodles of trees… So it was rather appropriate, then, that I managed to digitally paint on as my first finished piece done in the Krita program.

The victory was fairly short-lived, however, as complications with the second job began to arise shortly after its completion. But I still appreciate what it stands for: my growth in opposition to a world that wants me to kneel.

JOB #2

My second job was another retail position just down the street, this time specializing in home décor and gifts. It started as a temporary job for the holiday season, and I took to it like a fish to water. Business was constant, the register system was identical to the one in the first job. Sure, it was the exact work as before, but I liked it enough to transform it into a year-round position. The whole reason I did was because my coworkers seemed a lot more understanding about what I was going through.

Emphasis on “seemed,” at least when it came to the head manager.

Mills was a gossipy sort. Even during the interview, she asked me to elucidate on my negative experiences in the first job, and I, desperate to escape and find solidarity with someone, opened myself up all too willingly.  She was probably genuinely concerned at the time, but it’s also a product of her two-facedness. Based on her regard for her customers, this was someone all too willing to viciously deride someone behind their backs while putting on an insincere smile whenever they were in the vicinity.

She even expressed how prideful she was in the gossipy culture she cultivated for the store, something that was maintained by the encouragement for managers and fellow associates alike to text each other. I ended up being too open about myself, simply because Mills and some of the others were overly open about themselves. This set a bad precedent for me even long after this job ended. It probably had something to do with my autism, but I assumed this sort of honesty about job troubles would fly in every interview. Thankfully, I caught on to how wrong that was after only one.

A few months into the job, Mills requested I stop pulling out my insulin pump when attending the registers. From what I remember, she feared corporate would assume I was pulling out my phone in plain view of the customers. I complied, simply because I assumed she had my best interests in mind…. But knowing what I do know, this was probably the biggest red flag of the two before the actual fallout. Intended or not, this was flat-out discrimination. If I need to deliver insulin through my pump, it is infinitely more practical to deliver it on the spot.

I shouldn’t have to cater to a corporation’s inability to tell the difference when I’m only trying to take care of myself. Besides, if my blood sugar is out of range, that can often leave my motor skills impacted. Having to retreat to the back of the store to administer treatment in private meant I’d be liable to trip on something. This wasn’t a corporation that knew how to apply basic logic; they just wanted to protect their fragile sensibilities by refusing to acknowledge a person’s diabetes—which would be manageable if I was given the grace to do so.

Unfortunately, I was not given that grace. In March of this year, I had three blood sugar episodes across a time span of two weeks.

The first one was a persistent case of hyperglycemia—high blood sugar—caused by two failed infusion sets. Eventually, I requested I go home; the issue hadn’t been corrected by the time I arrived at work, and I’d spent an hour and a half sitting in agony in the break room as I struggled to recover. This was entirely fair, but it colored my coworkers’ outlook on me going forward, especially in the subsequent incidents.

The last two were cases of hypoglycemia—low blood sugar. This time, Mills pressured me into returning home because of a perceived attitude problem. I was visibly tired and sad because I was running out of energy, but I didn’t figure that out until after she made her decision. I didn’t feel like I was able to argue, so I once again complied.

The final incident saw me catch the low blood sugar this time… which meant having to take a second break to eat more food to make things right. Though she tried her best to hide it, Mills remained visibly and audibly incensed about this, questioning why I can’t just eat like everyone else, callously suggesting I upend my mealtime routine so I can make do with only one meal break alone. I tried explaining that it wasn’t feasible without serious consequences to my health, and while she seemed to accept my explanation, she seemed to remain unsatisfied.

I was correct. By the time I got home, my blood sugar was back in range, so I decided to apologize for what happened to Mills over text. The following is the paraphrased conversation:

Me: I'm sorry about the additional break I took tonight. Sadly, no matter how good my control is with my blood sugar, I'm going to end up burning through whatever food I’ve eaten, as doing work like that uses up a lot of energy. I was on my phone back there looking at potential food that could help with this. I'm going to try some of it out next time I have a longer shift like this.

Mills: As I stated, it's my job to make sure that we comply with each other. You communicated to me clearly what you needed, and I, in turn, communicated the company’s break policy. It’s not more complicated than that. I need to communicate company policy. I do have worries. I might need to see if you may need some accommodation. Let's see where it goes from here. You might just not be able to do the job, and I'm waiting to see if we can work out some things. You must be able to hold your own... and I'm just not seeing it at this stage. We’ll discuss this when I’m next available.

It was probably a mistake speaking about this blood sugar issue in absolutes, but it’s true. When I’m low, I need food to keep it higher. And as for the response I got, I feel there’s an attempt to stay professional and understanding, but some of that frustration bled through, clear as day. And it’s even more insulting to read now after approaching M about this issue in person. She acted like the conversation didn’t even happen until I elaborated. It’s like dressing me down over text was the most unremarkable part of her day.

She had a litany of issues with me that went entirely unexpressed until that afternoon. I don’t want to toot my own horn and say I was a saint, as a handful of them were legitimate complaints. No one’s perfect, and there’s always room to improve. The only reason I know the rest were discriminatory was because I also asked for them in writing. Establishing a paper trail is useful in situations like these… And sure enough, most of the complaints traced back to my diabetes, just worded in such a way to avoid implicating it as the issue. And when I asked Mills about whether the diabetes was to blame, she instead fingered my autism.

No one aside from Mills was passive-aggressive with me during my last days in the store, but I no longer felt welcome. And by early April, I exited and didn’t look back for a second… And that unfortunately brings me to where I am today.

I’ve struggled to find a job ever since. Life with my father has grown harder, as his mental health has seen some sharp declines. I feel demoralized, resentful, and more than frustrated. It’s not all been doom and gloom, however. I managed to get an official diagnosis of my autism, and I’ve built quite a rapport with some friends of mine, both my one in-person friend and his family and a few online ones through Discord.

And, well… Like my grief with Tiger, I did manage to complete one art piece to embody how horrible those ten months were. The bullying, the rejection, and the anxiety of not being able to push forward…. It put me right back where I was in 2022, facing an imaginary monster in an epic fight to the death, a monster that restricted and taunted me for feeling I wasn’t good enough. A monster I tried drawing again right after the tree painting in 2023, but I couldn’t finish this other piece in time for the new year.

But, shortly before my 26^th birthday, I found it in me to not only complete the piece but take some significant risks in doing so. I may be struggling now, but I can rest easy with this victory:

But for now…. I must keep going.