Lux AlptraumI think when a lot of people hear something like “my mental illness makes it hard for me to work a corporate job” they interpret it as like, “I’m just too crazy to be in an office, who knows what I’ll do!!” or “I’m prone to depression and can’t reliably get out of bed”…
And I’m sure that’s true for some people, but for me, when I think about the interaction between my mental health and a highly structured work environment, the issue is primarily that many of the things I need to maintain optimal mental health are at odds with corporate life.
I just need a lot more sleep than I’d reliably be able to get if I worked an office job, and I need to be able to just check out when I’m low functioning rather than be expected to bring the same level of performance every day very reliably
I’m not saying I *couldn’t* do it, especially if I was working somewhere that prioritized employee wellness, but it’s just made much harder for me than it seems to be for other people.
Anyway it took me a really long time to put the pieces together on this; I knew that I was always ending up in jobs that had more flexible schedules and was actively avoiding corporate life but I assumed it was because I was just naturally anti-authoritarian
But after I got my OCD dx, when I actually started to think about how OCD might affect my ability to function in a corporate environment I was like, “… ohhhhhhhhhhh.”