Amanda Witt works as a volunteer in the Library. Here is an article she wrote for Incite, the news magazine of the Australian Library and Information Association, and first published there this month.
My name is Amanda. I am a qualified
library technician and am currently studying towards my Bachelor via distance
from Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW. I am unemployed and have been
for five years, apart from a short six month contract in a school from 2012-13.
I also have Aspergers Syndrome, which has been changed to ‘high functioning
autism’ in the 2011 diagnostic manual update.
I decided to write this article to draw
attention to the plight of many people on the ‘spectrum’. They will soon be
graduating from school and maybe a tertiary course, and then looking for a job.
But until employers and workplaces are willing to take a leap of faith and hire
us, we will remain on the unemployment scrapheap.
These assumptions are why I continue to
remain unemployed. I have a brief sentence at the end of my cover letter,
stating that I have Aspergers and may require clarification in interviews.
However it seems that this is the death knell, with many schools choosing not to
interview me, based on incorrect assumptions over what I can and cannot
do.
My resume is full of library work, both
paid and voluntary, with some non-library voluntary work at places like the
Cathedral in Melbourne. I also do a junk mail round for extra money, to keep
myself occupied. Yet I have not had an interview since September 2012. Why?
Because seeing ‘Aspergers’ seems to summon fear in some people, and after asking
for feedback, I was told by one school that ‘the position involves lunchtime
supervision and people like you don’t like noise.’
I feel those who make the decision,
judge me on students they may have, students who have meltdowns when the daily
schedule is altered, who have to be alone each lunchtime, unable to cope with
the playground noise. That is not me. Nor is it many of us with the condition,
like the friends I have made through the recently established I Can Network,
started at Monash University in 2013.
School staff may not realise that these
students may have been diagnosed but their parents are not always taking them
for regular times with the psychologist. I see mine every couple of
months.
I was officially diagnosed just three
years ago, and was eligible to register with a specialist job agency called
Alpha Employment. The consultant would attend interviews with me, explain the
issues to the team and sit up the back, clarifying small points that I may miss,
such as body language cues which I do not read very well. Unfortunately Alpha
lost Government funding at the end of 2012, and the expert consultants were
retrenched.
Yet, like most on the spectrum, I am
good at things. I have an almost perfect memory of the Dewey Decimal System.
Once I know the library’s physical layout, I will shelve the books quicker. I
can also direct staff and students to ‘the third shelf from the left, on the
top, blue cover’ once I know the location of a book or popular series. Yet when
I mention this as a strength, it is somehow overlooked, weighed down by all the
weaknesses I am perceived to have.
So if you see my application in the pile
for a Victorian school or other library, then please re-consider and at least
give me an interview. You may be pleasantly surprised, and I will be just as
surprised if offered the job.
Amanda Witt, currently volunteering at Community of the Holy Name Library,
Cheltenham, Victoria.
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