Bullying in The Workplace

Written By Contributor

By: Patrician M.I. Todinescu

This is the second post in a series of posts about bullying @ work - worst jobs for autistic people.


When I was younger, I was lucky to land a position as an accounting clerk in the film industry, with little to no previous experience in accounting. The job made me around $1000 per week, but of course being young and in a new city, I would also blow about that same amount per week. 

The daily tasks were my ideal type of work, pattern-based and repetitive: sort completed receipts alphanumerically, file the sorted receipts in their correct account folder by date, and so on until the end of the day, every day. The job started out ideally; all my coworkers were pleasant, and I joined in on the casual, friendly banter as we all worked through our own assigned tasks.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last long. Things took a sour turn one day, as the friendly chatter started delving into personal opinions on politics, or other hot-topic issues. Inevitably there were disagreements, and we all quickly agreed to disagree for the sake of professionalism. Despite this, one of my coworkers had now become openly disdainful of me. Theirs was the desk I walked past every morning to get to my own, and the previous cheerfully polite “good morning” greetings were now replaced by silent, cold glares. The once bright and relatively stress-free environment had now become tense and vaguely antagonistic. 

Each day I dreaded going in to work, as each meek word out of my mouth was met with thinly veiled scorn. I retreated further and further into myself, my motivation to complete my daily tasks plummeting, and my professional performance sinking with it. I dreaded being in the same room as this co-worker and asking them even a single work-related question required significant psychological preparation. I would take frequent coffee and bathroom breaks just to minimize my time spent around this person. I jumped at every opportunity to work in a separate room, or to assist a separate department, regardless of how brief the task elsewhere was.

My boss became aware of the situation after I self-consciously confessed my struggle, but there was nothing to be addressed, since there had been no actual confrontations or problems outside of the “cold shoulder” treatment. Instead, I was assigned to auditing and reorganizing the previous decade worth of files, mercifully, and was able to escape into the back room for most of the day. But the damage had already been done. 

The work environment became so emotionally unbearable that I began experiencing physical symptoms from the stress of being so clearly unwelcome. I felt physically sick, my digestive system reacting poorly to any food I ate no matter how healthy, and my brain was muddled in a thick fog – that served to numb me from the stress – but made sorting alphanumerically take twice as long. I made simple mistakes frequently, that set me back several hours apiece, and each passing day I stuttered and stumbled increasingly through my words and social interactions, until just meeting people’s eyes took a painful amount of effort.

I grit my teeth and pushed through, trying my best to keep my focus, and internally working to brush off the silent ostracization I faced daily. It was excruciating. Each day I felt less and less tethered to reality, a blurry filter constantly superimposed on everything in sight, as if I were underwater. It quickly became too much. The only outcome of suppressing my psychological stress, was to force my feelings into physical symptoms that were much harder to ignore. 

Full of guilt at my inability to keep my emotional reactions from interfering with my productivity, and drowning in the shame of failing to hold yet another job for more than six months, I resigned from the best opportunity I’d ever had, or could picture for myself at that time.

This job took place well before my Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis, and even though I was good at intuitively knowing when it was time to move on from a place, I berated myself endlessly for quitting that amazing gig. I am now well aware of this “shutdown” process my brain initiates when under too much stress. To avoid a total self-destructive spiral into meltdown, it is imperative I remove myself from the stressors as soon as possible.


Looking back on this now, with thorough knowledge of my limitations, and well-established healthy coping strategies to address my specific needs, I can easily see how being equipped to understand and communicate my needs would have made all the difference. I don’t believe that there are specific jobs tailored for autistic people, or a neat little ‘worst jobs for autistic people’ list that everyone can access and use when considering what job fields to go into. I believe that autistic people, or any neurodivergent persons, are capable of doing any job that suits their unique skill sets, as long as we, as a collective society, are able to allow and accommodate the unique needs of every individual behind those skill sets. 



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Bullying in The Workplace

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