Life is Mess and I Don’t Know What I’m Doing

Two months ago, my life made sense. It had a direction. I was working and coming home to my husband and baby. I was a Lead Sales Associate at a retail store, and I was looking at a future promotion. My son had just passed the one-year mark, and taking care of him was becoming easier. My family was beautiful. I was happy.

Then it all fell apart. My immediate manager at work had some personal problems arise, and she ended up leaving. Then, people who were further up in the company came in to help out. But they didn’t know us or seem to care to. Since we didn’t have a manager, our store was short-staffed. A manager is the only person within a store who can hire/fire people. Plus, our staff’s numbers (which were already small) were dwindling as employees left. And no manager meant there was no one to go to with any of these problems. Although I had been looking at a promotion, that possibility pretty much disappeared when my supervisor left. As I said, the higher-ups didn’t know us and didn’t care to.

On top of work becoming toxic, I got pregnant in the midst of all this, but I lost the baby after about a week. And I couldn’t just be sad. With people leaving work, I was the acting assistant manager. And I was at the point where I needed to choose if I was going to stay or leave.

I ended up quitting. My husband actually pushed me to leave at the end. I’m not sure I would have, but he reminded me that I don’t get paid enough to be that unhappy.

I also discovered (though I suspected for a while), I have autism. I’m on the edge; I can make it in society fine. But it’s harder for me. Mostly, I just see this information as a way to find new coping strategies and make life a bit easier. This also helped me to realize that I might be beating the proverbial square peg into a round hole with this type of job. Unfortunately, I don’t know the options I have. I’m just inexperienced with them.

So, I’m trying to figure out life. I think the take-home is that adulting is hard.