Je was op zoek naar: i knew it (Engels - Zoeloe)

i knew my friend could be jealous
i was heart broken cause she was my friend my best friend and only friend

almost five decades in, i think i finally figured out what i want to do with my life. but rather than speculating early in life, i had to experiment, succeed, and more importantly fail in order to earn these insights. when i was in high school, i wasn't giving much thought to my future beyond basic survival. i grew up in a dysfunctional home. i was abused. and i was, at the time, not yet diagnosed with autism. but i knew i was very different somehow, and so did my peers. when they went off to college, i bounced around with a number of low wage jobs. one of the things i learned early on was that i could not make a career out of working with my body. i had to find a different vocation. tech was omnipresent in my life. i learned the logo programming language before starting kindergarten just so i could program a homebrew robot built by the groundskeeper at my summer camp. later, i'd helped my uncle to build an program a heathkit hero1 robot. i had an apple iie computer that i enjoyed programming. and i ran a bulletin board system. it seemed a foregone conclusion that i should work in tech. and once i got my foot in the door, i did pretty well for myself. i'd had a couple of false starts with working as a manager. the responsibility fell on me a few times just because i was the most senior engineer and there was a vacuum to fill. i got pushed into it by default. but i wasn't good at it, didn't enjoy it, and i'm betting the people who worked for me didn't, either. it was some time after this that i'd learn that i am autistic. and this helped me to understand myself much better. it also helped me to understand the challenges i had always had in connecting with other people. much later in my career i'd had a more cultivated experience transitioning from engineering to management. i had the benefit of an experienced cto mentoring me, challenging me, helping me to understand that this was going to take a very different skillset and was not remotely the same as working as an engineer. this time i rather enjoyed it. the experiences of being a leader stuck with me as fond memories far more than anything i'd built myself as a technologist. helping people to be their best selves, helping teams to realize their potential, to build better products, was something i'd come to really enjoy. but while i was really enjoying the opportunity to create safe spaces for others to feel a sense of belonging and to be safe to do the best work of their lives, i was still (and to this day still feel) that people like me don't belong in most workplaces. while a lot of work has been done to create safety, inclusion, equity for people of all different colors, gender identities, lgbtq+ identities, there is still a huge gap in cultivating safety and equity for disabled folks and, in my experience, particularly for people with very different ways of thinking. enter neurodiversity. even the most radically inclusive workplaces, it turns out, may unintentionally exclude people for having different types of brains than most people. imagine being excited to start a new job, hearing hr folks during an onboarding session get all of your new coworkers worked up in sense of antipathy against those who speak very directly while not conveying a sense of personal care to others. if you've spent much time with autistic people, you might think that this style of communication is very common to us. and it's one of those things that makes it hard to connect with non-autistic people. so while everyone in the onboarding session is taking turns sharing negative adjectives to describe the very nature of autistic candor, any autistic people in the room might be made to feel like they are not welcome in this culture. so to know my path forward, i have to reflect on the beaten trail behind me. what part of this delighted me? what parts traumatized me? what do i want to do differently
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