How Autism Changed My Career Path

When I first entered the workforce, I was a boilermaker apprentice at a shipyard. The truth of the matter was that I wanted to actually become a design engineer. To this day, blueprints and drafting and design still intrigue me. But as we all know, life happens, and like life - things don't always go according to plan.

So, how did an ex-boilermaker apprentice turned warehouse manager end up in marketing? I can answer that in one word: Autism.

When I was in the world of warehousing and logistics, I quickly realized that most people in that industry really 'fell' into it. It isn't like people really flocked to warehousing to load pallets and deal with packing lists and inventory levels. It's one of those jobs that have to get done and it pays the bills. I also discovered that there is a serious design element in logistics that eluded me when I 'fell' into it... and that kept me doing that type of work for well over a decade.

I'm sure that many of you reading this may have had a similar experience in your career decisions. What will pay the bills, put food on the plate and keep the roof over your head?

When one tracks inventory levels and looks at spreadsheets day in and day out, it's rather easy to get some odd-ball thoughts in your head. Some days it's about politics, others about religion, or faith, or maybe pop-culture. Sometimes it was a really interesting experience while standing in line at a grocery store. Basic day-to-day conversations where people just open up about their life and what they are going through.

This type of storytelling intrigued me for some odd reason. Yes, warehousing paid the bills, but I wanted to do more. So, I started to blog. I found that writing my thoughts out was very cathartic, and helped me to express an idea a bit more clearly than speaking. I also wanted to learn about how others used the medium, and see how people used various social media sites. I know, weird, right?

So, how did Autism make me want to change my career path?

Don't laugh, but I used to blog on blogger, Yahoo! Geocities, and ended up on Xanga. I found the interaction and engagement of the users on Xanga was what I was looking for. Blunt, honest assessments of what I was writing. This encouraged me to interact more, eventually connecting with many members of the Xanga Team, including John Hiler (CEO) and Marc Ginsberg (President) of Xanga.com, LLC.

Did I know any of these Xanga users at the time? Not really... just a few that I knew personally, but the majority of these folks I didn't know at all. Both John and Marc shared their thoughts with me on what could work, and wouldn't - in terms of utilizing their platform. There have been many discussions since, but I don't want to get off point...

It was during this time that we found out that our son was diagnosed with Autism. So, I blogged about it from time to time. Not a lot of specifics, out of respect for my son's privacy. Rather I wrote about my issues surrounding the diagnosis, and my personal struggle as an Autism Dad. Come to find out, there are many autism dads out there who have had similar experiences and challenges, which has helped me from time to time.

I knew I wanted to change my career path, but let's be honest - going from a warehouse/logistics guy to a marketing guy would need a bit of work - and I needed a lot of help.

It was about 2008 when I called up Marc Ginsberg, President at Xanga, and shared with him what was going on - and I wanted to learn more. At that time Xanga was diving into various niche blogging community sites, and if anyone was interested in helping out - let them know. (so, I did)

Marc asked me to write out a list of topics I'd be interested in. So - I wrote down things like home-repair, cars, sports and other topics that intrigued me at the time... and out of sheer lunacy, I also included Autism. Let's just say Autism wasn't something I really wanted to discuss anymore openly than a few blog posts on my Xanga account. To be honest, I was still struggling with the fact that the confirmation of the diagnosis meant that my life would be completely different from other dad's... and this scared me.

However, it was these blog posts about Autism that moved both John and Marc and the team the most - at least that's what they shared with me at the time. It was encouraging that they liked what I wrote. But, I had to think about it some more. Do I want to head up a blogging community site dedicated to anything Autism related? What would its purpose be about?

So many questions, so few answers.

That was January 2008. Later that same year Autisable was launched and has been in operation ever since... minus the two years when Xanga went through some major site changes and the site was essentially shut-down. It wasn't until 2016 that I ended up creating my own company and took ownership of the site.

While operating Autisable I noticed many of my shortcomings. Both in marketing the site and in my ability to serve the autism community at-large.

But more importantly, I needed to understand my son more. You see, his autism hinders his ability to speak verbally.... and that led me on a search to learn more about him and how he perceives life.

So in my quest to learn about my son, I ended up realizing that I needed to learn more about how to communicate to the world about Autism. To this day I'm still on this quest, and as part of this journey, I've been honored to help other companies with their social media and content marketing efforts.

I've met some amazingly fascinating people along the way, who regularly inspire and encourage me to learn more...

So next time you hear the word Autism, you just might remember this autism dad whose career path changed because he wanted to learn more about his son.