I wanted to talk about having autonomy on a job versus having a job with narrowly defined duties and a power hierarchy.

You shouldn’t be pigeonholed into a job because of your diagnosis or gender or college major.

The OVR counselor I met with in 1989 thought I could be a school teacher as her first idea of what I could do. Was this because I had an English major? Was this because I was female?

As it turned out I got trained so I could get an administrative assistant job which I obtained in August 1990.

That first career was a total mistake.

Having the ability on your job to control how you execute tasks and what you do on any given day is much better if you ask me.

There’s a whole world of different jobs out there. Any vocational counselor should take into consideration what YOU might want to do. They can tell you if they think you’ll have a good chance of succeeding at this goal. Yet you deserve to have input into the kind of job you’ll spend upwards of eight hours a day doing five days a week.

I recommend the book Careers: The Graphic Guide to Finding the Perfect Job for You. You can most likely check it out of your local public library if you can’t afford to buy it.

Too I recommend getting a job in a public library for those of us creative folk who don’t want to wear a skirt suit or a suit and tie to an office job.

I’ve heard from a woman whose client was told by VESID that they should get a job as a janitor because of the kind of disability this person had. Only they didn’t want to be a janitor. So I gave the woman the telephone number of another agency that could help her client.

There’s a beautiful rainbow of expression of identities, personalities, and God-given gifts and talents everyone living on earth has.

We cannot continue to judge, stereotype, and pigeonhole each other.

People with mental health issues shouldn’t be slotted into ill-fitting jobs just because a counselor thinks there’s only one type of job we can do.

It might take a couple or a few trials at different jobs for us to settle on the career that makes us happiest.

In the coming blog entries I’ll talk about my own experience. Finding the job you love is like coming home to yourself. You just know it’s the right one to get up and go to every day.