This is a topic I think about a lot. It’s one I discuss with my therapist to some extent nearly every time I see her. And yet, just a short handful of years ago, I had never even considered that it was possible to work any other way. Prior to the pandemic, I knew that some people worked remote, but those were always high-level jobs that seemed wholly out of reach to me.

In fact, back in 2019, I told my then therapist (you’ll see why I no longer see her very quickly) that my goal was to move far enough up the ladder with my current employer that I could work one day a week from home. That was the privilege that salaried positions at this employer enjoyed at the time. My therapist told me, in not so many words, that that was a pipe dream and that I was being unreasonable to want such things.

And then Covid happened, and overnight the entire world changed. My employer was slow to make the change, but eventually, we were all sent home and to save money, many of us had our hours cut. I went from 40 hours a week to 32, and wasn’t required to come into the office at all but usually did for about a half day each week.

The change that this brought to my physical and mental health was suddenly having a ten ton weight lifted from your back that you had no idea you were even carrying. Society itself seemed to be crumbling around me, but I was the happiest I’d been in . . . well, probably the happiest I’d ever been. Because for the first time in my life, I could just do my work in my own space with no distractions. Of course, my productivity soared like most people’s do when they move to remote work.

But so much more than that, I wasn’t exhausted every hour of every day. I didn’t end every work day with a tension headache. Most strange, I found myself actually desiring and seeking out social interactions with other people. And, because most of those social interactions needed to be virtual, I was actually comfortable and enjoying myself!

At the time that all of this happened, I already knew that I had ADHD, and I suspected that I was autistic as well, but I was in the beginning stages of my research on the disorder. So it would be a while yet before I noticed how strongly environmental stimuli affect me. But the pandemic gave me a year in which I could explore what it was that was so different about working from home and why my until then average job was suddenly the best job I’d ever had.

Now in 2023, I worked 3 days a week from home, more than I ever even imagined being possible back in 2019 when my therapist shot down my dream of 1 day a week, but the contrast between my at-home days and my in-the-office days is stark. Where for many years prior to the pandemic and my journey of self-discovery, I would come home exhausted, irritable, and in pain without ever really understanding why, I am now in tune with myself enough that I can identify the individual triggers that are contributing to the issue.

The days I’m at home, time flies. I get so involved in my work that I sometimes forget to take breaks. I can eat fresh food that doesn’t upset my digestive system. I drink way more water because it’s my own filtered water that I’m familiar with the taste of, and I can add ice cubes. The room is the temperature I want it to be at any given time, with the amount of light that works best for me. More importantly, there isn’t a single fluorescent light in the entire building!

When I’m at home, I don’t spend all of my time eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, whether I like it or not. I don’t have to wear headphones to listen to my music, and I don’t spend all day on hyper-alert because someone might walk up behind me and catch me unawares. Best of all, if people do want to talk to me, I’ve always got a forewarning, even if it’s just a few seconds when the Zoom call rings (other high-masking people out there will know how important that two to three-second heads up is).

The days that I’m at home, I really, truly love my job.

But on days that I’m in the office, I usually go home grouchy and exhausted. I get up extra early just so I can be one of the first people into the office because then I’ve got some time to work in the peace and quiet. Most of the days in the office, I take pain killers, because I get tension headaches, and the muscles are so tight in my neck and shoulders that I end up unable to turn my head fully.

I turn the lights off on my half of the office on the days that I’m in. I’m sure it bugs a lot of people. In fact, I know it does because I came back from running an errand on a day when people thought I was out and they had turned all the lights back on. But under the harsh, unforgiving blaze of fluorescent lights, it only takes me about an hour to get a headache from squinting against it.

And offices never have good airflow. I’ve worked in modern and old offices, but it’s always the same. It’s almost like they design them to have no air movement. It’s unnatural how still the air is. And it makes my head feel pressurized like it’s going to explode. For this reason, I have a desk fan in the office at work, which I have running the entire time I’m there unless I’m on a Zoom call. In that case, I have to turn it off because it’s too close to me and garbles my speech on the call. It only takes a single thirty-minute call without my fan on for me to get so dizzy that I feel like I’m going to puke.

And, of course, there’s also the temperature. I run hot. I always have. If I could live in a world that was perpetually 55 degrees F, I would be in a paradise with my light sweaters and cuddly blankets. But here in reality, I’m almost always hot. And thanks to the complete and utter lack of air movement combined with the fact that “comfortable” to me is “freezing” to most people, offices are always too hot. Even better, my body’s two reactions to any form of discomfort is to be in pain and to be nauseous. So when I’m too hot, I’m nauseous!

So all of these environmental factors that I have no control over are by themselves, enough to make my days in-the-office pretty miserable (and I didn’t even mention the constant background hum of electricity!). Still, we’ve not even touched on the social stressors. Because I have severe social anxiety. At different points in my life, I’ve been one step away from full-on agoraphobia.

And most of your neurotypicals in an office setting don’t get this. When I say that I would be perfectly happy working at home five days a week and converting most of my meetings to email formats, people come back at me with, “Yeah, but you’d get lonely.”

No, I really wouldn’t. Or, maybe I would, but it wouldn’t be the sort of lonely that could be fixed by small talk with coworkers. That’s never the answer.

The truth is that between my social anxiety and my ADHD, trying to work in a room full of people is just never going to be a winning solution for me. I don’t hate my coworkers. I actually kind of like some of them. But idle chitchat about my weekend will never be a way I desire to bond with other people. And if I’m trying to work, I don’t want to be surrounded by the constant noise and interruptions.

Even when people aren’t talking to me in the office, if they’re within hearing of me, you bet I’m listening in. But not because I want to. Because I have ADHD, and my brain is literally incapable of tuning out anything. All stimuli are equally important in the eyes of my brain. And so I’m just bombarded for eight hours with other people’s meetings and conversations and comments. And the tings from their messenger. And the ringing of their Zoom calls. And the trill of their new email notifications. And the buzz of their phones vibrating on their desk . . .

I could go on.

Is it any wonder that I go home with a headache and exhausted after trying to keep up with that all day? Of course not. But all of this is what I struggle to get neurotypical people in my life to understand. It’s not simply that I “don’t like” being in the office. The problem is so much more complicated than that.

But most of the people I work will never know what it’s like to always hear, see, and feel everything. Many of my coworkers do get their main socialization from idle chitchat and can’t imagine that it might be different for others. And so when I say that my goal is to move into a job that is 100% remote, many of them assume it’s because I want to slack off where no one can see me.

Maybe because it’s what they would do.

I would really like to see a world where working from home is not only a completely normal and legitimate way to work but where this is seen as a reasonable accommodation for people like. me, whose disabilities make working in an office setting miserable. I see statistics all the time about how the autistic community is unemployed at a higher rate than any other disabled group, and I have to think that everything I’ve described above plays a huge role in that. But our needs aren’t taken seriously.

I actually tried to get partial remote work as an accommodation at my last job as a last resort when I was dangerously burnt out. I already had intermittent FMLA because the job made me so miserable that I got physically sick, but I knew that a more productive solution would be for me to simply work from home some days.

Did I mention I was the only person in the department at the time without work-from-home access? I didn’t think it was such an outlandish request. Even my management agreed it would be a good set up for me. But HR dragged their feet on it for the better part of four months until I mercifully found a new job.

This from a healthcare institution with lofty DEI goals.

It’s really no surprise to me that so many autistic people are forced into un- or under-employment when this is the sort of support we get in office settings. I just hope that with all of the new attention on DEI in companies, some of them might start backing up these goals with actions.