Around 2am it finally occurred to me that I won’t be able to continue as a hotel housekeeper, at least not in this hotel and not for so many hours. Especially after not having slept properly. So I emailed the guy from the agency to let him know that I won’t be back but I presume the agency opens at 9am and my shift is supposed to start at 8.30 and I haven’t been given any emergency number to call.

I always had problems with cancelling shifts/calling in sick. It always felt to me that I’m putting the workplace under enormous strain so I’d only do that when I felt like I really can’t cope, if I felt like I am somehow managing I always choose to turn up, which was not necessarily appreciated by others the way I thought it would be. I mean I earned myself an image of someone who’s always ready to work and I was often called in on the last moment, when someone else cancelled and if it happened to me that I had to refuse, some colleagues would get funny with me.

During the night I started having the same chest pain that I always get when I overexert myself. I first started having it when I was a teenager and had to work really hard on my parents farm. The farm wasn’t very big and most days we didn’t have much to do at all but when the time came we had to work several hours a day for 3-4 days in a row. So that’s how my chest pain first started. Then it was that bike ride to Łódź that I took in my early 20s, merely 70km one way. Then, later, in my early 30s I was told by my trainer at the gym that it’s best to do exercises without any breaks as they’re more effective and the same thing happened. The pain is specifically on the left side and only appears the next day, it may take 2-3 days for it to go away. I never had it checked up and from what I can read online about chest pain after overexertion, what I feel is not similar to anything else.

The pain is also accompanied by feeling of rather strong depressive thoughts that are now all about my inability to keep a job. Quite frankly, I feel, I’d be much better off never accepting this booking as I now have the impression that I am incapable of any work at all.

I wonder if the heart issue can be due to dyspraxia. People with dyspraxia have problems with their coordination but they also have weaker muscles and heart is a muscle. Possibly I should go to doctor but, like with most things, I bet they’d do some tests and all of them would come back fine. Maybe the tests should be done when I actually experience the pain, but I’d rather avoid causing it.

So I can’t do jobs that are socially demanding and also those that are physically demanding. What I’m supposed to do then?

The fact that I actually have first class bachelor degree in computer science feels very heavy now. I didn’t work in IT since I left Poland, which was 2007 but quite frankly I wouldn’t be able to do it either. The constant changes are something that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with. When I was choosing subject to study I didn’t know I’m autistic, but quite frankly even if I knew it wouldn’t change anything as there is such a low awarness of what having autism is actually like. Loads of people, including career coaches, believe that working in IT is a perfect job for an autistic person, and for some it certainly is. But I, personally, couldn’t keep up with the constant changes: you learn something one day and 3 months later it’s already considered out of date. I didn’t know I’d find it so difficult, I learn very quickly so it shouldn’t be a problem to learn new thing every couple of weeks. I guess it wasn’t even that, it was the fact that I was required to reject the knowledge I already had. That was something that I could not do.