The usual thing that you should know about me is that I’m a neurodivergent transgender woman who, aside of JMAA.tv as a side hustle, works at a typical marketing job in the fashion of a 9-to-5 office job. I’m not going to name which company it is, to keep my job safety in check, because this very particular company is icky with negative criticism regarding its corporate culture, but you should know it’s a corporate conglomerate in the Basque Country, in Spain, who is responsible for “integrating” neurodivergent people into normal, neurotypical labor, supposedly helping neurodivergent people to gain the skills and competences ideal for a normal job.

To say this is part of the usual corporate culture of this particular company and that this is the usual “carrot on the stick” for many neurodivergent people like me who were hired into this company is an understatement. This company has been trapping these sorts of neurodivergent people like me into these dead-end jobs for years, and I myself was included. Right now, at my current marketing office job as a marketing assistant, I am trapped in this job position, with no foreseeable future on getting a raise or working at another company, or even said company aiding me in taking the steps towards working at another normal company, like they used to do before, until they didn’t, for some reason.

Before I was at this marketing job, while at the same company, I worked at an R+D department within, fresh after my studies at computer engineering. I managed somehow to get to work at a company outside this one, a game developer who specialized in edutainment video games and the sort, but my work ethic was too low, so they forced me to go back into the original marketing department I was in. I spent over 10 years working on my work ethic at this company, to the point of nearing perfection at it, grinding work to the point that my peers and supervisors kept telling me I was “working really hard and great”. The problem is, when I started asking questions about whether I could get a raise for this hard work, or whether they could help me find a job outside of this company like they did before, they now start mounting up excuses, like they don’t help people work outside anymore, or that I “don’t work hard enough” for such a thing. Wasn’t I working hard enough then? This seemed like it contradicted the compliments I was getting at work from my supervisors.

Notably, the situation gets worse when I’m currently at an urgent situation, needing to soon move out of home due to my father hitting retirement in 2 years or so from now. The side hustle isn’t producing enough earnings at this moment, so most of the side-hustle spending are dependent on this very particular 9-to-5 job that I have mainly. And even then, if I were to live on my own, the bare-minimum earnings that I get from my wages at my current job isn’t enough to sustain an independent life, given to not just rent, but also food and other crucial spendings. And there hasn’t been a raise outside of the usual “low-performance” contract for over 10 years, save of the slight gradual increase due to the contract’s age.

So, what I assume these guys are doing, and why are they doing this now, is because they want to keep people like me inside more and more, without any sort of leaks, regardless of the wage costs, so they keep the low wages at bare minimum to reduce costs. It’s no surprise then why in 2023 alone, in this last trimester, they had a surge in profits once again, and less people left the company than the last one. For some reason, this very company wants to keep in their own homegrown employees, especially the neurodivergent ones, trapped inside so they can probably brag to investors and the sort, which, by the way, includes our local government, about how they’re so great at what they’re doing.

Let me tell you then: if you really wanted neurodivergent people to be perfectly integrated into neurotypical jobs, why then are you trapping them in this sort of constant “learning process” inside your company while keeping the embarrassingly low wages? It doesn’t make any glance of sense to backpedal on the strategy, then, of helping neurodivergent people work outside of this very company at neurotypical jobs, just to brag about “generating employment”. You’re not “generating employment”, you’re using neurodivergent people as cheap labor that can be outsourced by many outside corporations such as car manufacturers, electronics manufacturers, or even companies that even require outsourced marketing work, like a very-well-known media conglomerate that constantly gives us work at our marketing department.

And as of valuable work skills? I basically learnt a wide set of trades, like graphic design, video game development, or even software development, and yet, they still relegate me and other people like me, with more competent work skills, to sort-of under-qualified work such as filling databases, translating Word documents or managing Excel spreadsheets of sorts. The lack of work that cater to our higher technical skills is just relegated to neurotypical people in higher positions, apparently. It’s incredibly absurd, because it seems that the supervisors, the employers at this company, and especially the executive class at this company, are merely neurotypical people who don’t understand the basic needs of neurodivergent people like myself and just see neurodivergent people, with actual issues, by the way, as cheap labor. And this, friends, is a toll even on our mental health.

Then again, what I’m asking from readers like you? I just want to raise awareness about this issue, so do not harass these companies for this. However, I might ask for a sort of final plea for help to escape this dead end job: