Being human at work isn’t unprofessional

It’s a very disorienting thing to cry uncontrollably and not know why. In general, when I’m crying, I can’t really speak coherently, but at least I usually know what triggered the tears. But to not be able to discern for myself why tears are streaming down my cheeks, why I’m taking labored—by which I mean, quite noisy—breaths? That’s a different matter.

It’s also something that my fellow autistic humans can probably relate to, because one of the ways that autism affects the human brain is that, with some regularity, we’re probably going to experience this.

I spent the first 45 years of my life lacking this knowledge about myself, which is to say I didn’t know I was (and am) autistic. It probably didn’t help that, as a child, unexplained crying (and, transparently, sometimes even explained crying) was generally met with one of my parents saying, “if you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.”1

No surprise, then, that crying has historically been a shameful thing for me, something I did in dark corners, a locked bathroom, or my car. Always alone. Always unobserved. Ideally, never just before an encounter with another person, especially not someone who knew me, because they’d notice the way my face gets exceptionally blotchy and my eyes puff up. My mom says that I never got the measles, I just looked like I had them when I cried. (If you’re wondering: no, my mom is not RFK Jr.)

This context is important for the story I’m here to tell.

It was a normal early August afternoon when I got the email that kicked off my most pronounced, destabilizing, and public autistic meltdown. (So far.2) In those days, my partner and I traditionally spent a long weekend at a woodsy rental somewhere just before the fall semester began. We’d read, watch TV, do a little class prep/syllabus writing, and generally enjoy spending the last gasps of our academic summer together before things got really frenetic and it was suddenly, inexplicably Thanksgiving.

That year we were at a cute little house near Blue Ridge, Georgia. He was upstairs watching TV, and I was downstairs at a table in the kitchen/dining area, trying to clean out some accumulated emails. A message appeared from my dean:

Subject: Request

[We] have a new one-year term contract faculty member for AY 19-20. We are hoping this will become full-time tenure-track after this AY. I would like for you to move into [another office] … so the term person can move into [your space]. …

I want the term person in close proximity to [us]. … He will be close to … someone … he already knows. He will also be near Gary3 who has served two term positions with us. I’d be remiss if I also didn’t recognize the fact that the back hallway can benefit from having an additional person on it with your work ethic. Finally I know other people have been snooping on that back hallway to check out available space. I want to keep those offices … [occupied].

I appreciate your willingness to be flexible. Once I hear back from you I will … put in the work order for your telephone and computer.

A little context: At the time, I had what was, according to many, the worst office space in our academic unit. It was tiny, had no windows, and was right next door to the dean’s office, which made it impossible to avoid notice—something most professionals, and especially most academics, bristle at. This cupboard of a space was in the heart of the main department office, which meant that every single person who came by with a question or to be advised would likely register a beep on the radar system of my attention. There was no quiet; there was no peace.

But importantly, I’d spent the previous three years creating a cocoon of an office perfectly designed to be a sanctuary for my sensitivities. It felt like home, and when I walked into my office, my entire nervous system exhaled. It was like the room gave me a hug.

The arrival of the email requesting I change to a new location was, as a consequence, alarming. I wrote back almost immediately:

I understand all the reasons you’ve given, and if my office is the only option, I’m willing to move. Having said that, it is my (pretty strong) preference to stay put. I love my office location and the temperature. … My collaborations and relationships with [my neighbors] are very, very important to me, and there is no question that relocating would change those dynamics in a way I’m not excited about. I understand that [the other person nearby] served two term positions and that makes sense, but I also served a term position and, as you know, have a real heart for faculty development and teaching mentorship.

Again, I’m willing -- this isn’t a no -- but I don’t want to.

My words didn’t fully convey that my entire nervous system was flooding with stress hormones and paranoid panic. That’s because, as a female-identified person in a Western culture, I have been taught that I’m supposed to be pleasant and deferential. This was as confrontational as I could allow myself to be, and it was unusual for me to push back in any way at all, which my boss would’ve recognized.

Almost immediately, my boss replied:

Thank you for understanding. [The current occupant of your new office] will be in tomorrow to move his office. His computer and phone have already been moved. Either [our administrative whiz] or I will let you know when the work order requesting the relocation of your computer and phone has been submitted.

The crying began immediately, and it did not cease for weeks.

My boss didn’t tell me that she would give me something to cry about if I didn’t stop doing so at work—not in so many words. But it was obvious, the day I was moving my belongings and every day thereafter, that my sobbing fit was unacceptable.

To be clear: I was horrified I was crying at work. But I was definitely NOT making a choice to cry at work, in the presence of others; had I been able to, I would’ve come to campus in the darkness of night and moved my belongings far out of sight of others. However, my first opportunity to do so was the day everyone reported back to work for the fall semester. What’s more, the person who was moving into the closet of an office couldn’t do so until I had moved out. I had to do it right then. In front of everyone.

Painfully, I did so, without being able to control my sobbing.

In the swirl of everything, my department head sent me an email that read, in part:

With all due respect, and I mean respect, I have been told my [sic] many people of just how unhappy you are. … I fully expected you to be more professional about this. ... Most of us in the Division have had to move before and you are no exception to this. You do not own your office. In fact, you should count your blessings that you even have an office on this campus … we all should. … Ultimately, your Interim Dean made the decision she thought was best for the function of the entire Division. So, please stop telling everyone how ‘unhappy’ you are and how ignored you are and try to be more professional, please!!

My crying was later described as passive aggressive, insubordinate, and manipulative. It was characterized by my department head as: “One week of emotional disruption for several faculty members … regarding the simple request to move offices.”

At the time, I had no idea I was autistic…which only made my experience of the situation more destabilizing.

It was a year or two later when a friend softly suggested that I might be. My first reaction was amused deflection. The popular stereotypes of autism just didn’t fit: I easily held eye contact, I didn’t get so obsessed with a new topic that I couldn’t stop talking about it, and I found reading body language came naturally. Nothing about this suggestion made sense to me at the time, and I dismissed it.

Several years (and several positive annual reviews) later, my boss—the very same person who had moved me to another office space—let me know that she was planning to file a formal reprimand with human resources, seemingly out of the blue. I was stunned by this. Among the people I’ve known in my life, I’ve always been poked fun at for being a workaholic who is wickedly productive. People at work have (generally) liked me a lot. How could my boss find justification for a written reprimand? I was at a loss.

(Of course, in retrospect, that timing wasn’t at all mysterious. The reprimand was timed to take up residence in my employee file—my first negative performance evaluation-type document—about six weeks before my tenure review process began.)

In that formal reprimand, my dean wrote that expectations for me going forward included the following (emphasis added to autistic-specific differences in communication and/or behavior):

Engaging in behaviors and/or responses reflective of a mature attitude and sound judgement [sic]:
This includes the ability to maintain a mature, problem-solving attitude while dealing with interpersonal conflict; the ability to tolerate ambiguity and show flexibility – to withhold action or speech in the absence of important information, to deal with unresolved situations, frequent change, or unexpected events; the ability to relate to routine operations in a manner that is consistent with existing solutions to problems; the ability to conform to established policies and procedures.4

After the formal meeting where I was presented with the reprimand document, I was inconsolable. That’s when my friend and colleague came back to me and said more forcefully: “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you are autistic.”

I was so disoriented and felt so gaslighted by the unfolding work situation that I was willing to take her suggestion—any suggestion, really!—at face value and investigate. I bought a book (Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity) and started reading. Four pages in, Price writes: “The more I read about Autism, the more things began to click into place. I had always been overwhelmed by loud sounds and bright lights. I got inexplicably angry in crowds; laughter and chatter could make me blow up with rage.”

Ahem. There was no more mystery. Well, not about being autistic, anyway.

I can now look back and see that the scenario involving my office move had all the classic ingredients of an autistic meltdown. These happen when a social or environmental situation makes the autistic person feel like they do not have the capacity to self-regulate or when they sense their needs are going unrecognized.

I’m sure I’ve had autistic meltdowns before, but I’d found ways to explain them away—y’know, sometimes you just need a good cry, etc., etc. But this was such a profound experience because I have always been able to rein in the tears when I needed to. This time, I couldn’t. And my inability to figure out what precipitated such a lengthy crying jag plagued me.

Once I’d learned more about autism, though, it made perfect sense. For many of us, when an environment starts to feel out of our control, our bodies become pointedly difficult to inhabit. For me, if I cannot find a comfortable place to sit—or even if I’m not sure I’ll be able to find a comfortable place to sit before I arrive at a new place—I start to become visibly agitated. The same goes with food; if I’m going to a new restaurant and haven’t been able to find its menu in advance, I’m primed for a loss of executive function. It’s like tears start queuing up behind my eyes when this happens, ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice, all without my consent.

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Autistic meltdowns might look like: uncontrollable crying for no obvious reason; unusually aggressive speech/body language, often perceived as a temper tantrum; disconnection or dissociation from other people or the environment, which can happen suddenly or gradually; unusually loud talking or vocalizations; or physical tics, like rocking or flapping the hands or the general inability to be still.

Executive function is how we describe the taskmaster operations of the brain, including self-monitoring, planning, short-term memory, attention, speech/behavioral regulation, etc. As executive function diminishes, our instincts take over, often uncontrolled (or barely controlled) by the part of our cognitive system that tries to act in socially acceptable ways. When your nervous system feels under threat, it will do just about anything to regain its footing, even if its attempts to do so look pretty counterproductive from the outside.

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Although there was a lot of backstory and context bound up in how this seemingly simple request set off such a big autistic meltdown for me, there were two key things that my brain simply could not stop ruminating on:

First, the office temperature. The entire building had a finicky HVAC system. Over the course of the previous three years, I had managed to pester facilities management repeatedly, until they had adjusted the resting temperature of my office to my personal—and it should be emphasized, strongly held—preferences. I run hot… except that makes it sound like I am generally just a smidge bit warmer than others, when in reality I am a furnace. What’s more, I simply cannot stand being too warm. After much effort and repeated visits, the facilities crew had finally created the refrigerated climate in which I exist most comfortably.

An aside: One of my first jobs was working in a marketing department at a mid-sized university in Texas. The building was old and had a similarly finicky HVAC system5, and I occupied an office that was consistently—regardless of season—in excess of 75° F (approx. 24° C).6 That was the first time I brought a thermometer to work (now a standard part of my office décor). One Thanksgiving week, our team decided to make construction paper turkeys, the kind many of us made in kindergarten using our hands and colorful paper. My turkey had no feathers, though; they had all “fallen off” because it was sweating so profusely, the feathers piled along the bottom.7

To be evicted from an office perfectly calibrated to my climate needs felt like a clear and present danger to my well-being. To be evicted without any acknowledgement of my clearly stated needs felt callous and dismissive. It threatened my psychological safety … and, by extension, my physical safety as well.

Second, the process. It is not easy for any woman socialized in Western cultures to clearly state a need, especially not to those with authority. The acculturation process communicates the need to be meek, to defer to others, and to smile while doing it. When I explained my preference for remaining in the (objectively unpopular!) office, I expected my boss to recognize how rarely I expressed needing anything and to respect that it was important to me.

Given that the office switch was presented as a request, I genuinely thought that I had an actual choice in the matter. On receipt of the second email, though, it became abundantly clear that this was a false impression. In reality, I was being told I would be moving, and I was expected to jump aboard this plan with good cheer and a smile. I was expected to perform femininity.

And this is the thing that the neurotypical world doesn’t always understand about the neurodivergent mind: We are (generally) quite literal in our communication. When my boss requested I move, I took it as exactly that: a request, a kind of polite question. But it wasn’t, and the long-time-coming realization that it wasn’t confused me.

This is a fairly common autistic (and, more broadly, neurodivergent) experience. We don’t always know how to discern when someone is being serious or is performing what, in neurotypical circles, is (apparently) easily understood to be niceness. Please understand: I’m not suggesting neurodivergent people aren’t kind. Many (most?) of us have a strong streak of justice, so kindness matters a lot to us. But we also understand that kind and nice are not synonyms; often, they exist as antonyms.

When I am nice, I am performing a kind of saccharine sweetness that may not reflect my actual thoughts, and I am offloading the translation of my words onto the listener. When I am kind, I am honest and straightforward without being cruel. Neurotypical communication often leans on niceness that the communicator expects others to run through a niceness-to-honesty translation machine in their brain. Autistics (and many neurodivergent people) often lack this translation tool, especially when we’re feeling stressed. We assume the words of others reflect the truth; we take them at face value, and we act accordingly.

When my dean requested I move to another office, I took that at face value and answered honestly (read: kindly): no, I didn’t want to move. When my dean responded by saying she was having my phone extension moved and that I should come to campus to move my belongings as soon as possible, it was a message that communicated niceness (of a sort, I guess), but it was definitely not kind. It was, in fact, cruel, as it failed to acknowledge my stated preference and dismissed my needs as unworthy of consideration or response.

My autistic brain interpreted this as erasure, as invisibility, as unmistakable disdain. (This might have been Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, which is common among ADHDers and other neurodivergents.)

This incident was one of a few that ultimately led to the college denying me tenure and forcing me out of a job I loved desperately. It is also why I now have an autism diagnosis and talk about it publicly—because my willingness to make my autistic identity visible may mean that others will become more aware of what autism can look like in adult women. Hopefully, too, others will be less likely to assume I’m being passive aggressive, obstinate, manipulative, coercive, or unprofessional when they have this contextual knowledge.

Imagine, for a moment, that my colleagues and supervisors had led with curiosity instead of defensiveness.

Imagine they had been willing to suspend judgment long enough to ascertain what felt so triggering about this situation.

Imagine if we worked in environments where neurodiversity awareness allowed each of us to consider the ways we communicate to ensure they’re inclusive and supportive and give each employee the opportunity to thrive.

Imagine if neurodivergent friends and colleagues could learn about their differences without having to experience trauma.

Imagine if we prioritized kindness, not niceness. Imagine.

I’ve waited many years to tell this story, but it’s not because I feel vulnerable in doing so. Rather, I needed to be able to talk about this experience without bursting into tears anew. I think I did that for the first time in late January 2026—more than six years after this incident occurred, in case you’re counting. Six years of spontaneous tears over something my academic bosses saw as routine. This is the difference autism can make.

As I was preparing this piece to share with the world, I was able to see for the first time how the request demand to move offices could seem fairly benign. After all, an office is just a space: four walls and a door, where you keep your stuff. I can put myself in the shoes of another person and see how my great big reaction might’ve seemed … off.

And yet. I didn’t choose my reaction; it wasn’t within my power to control. What’s more, my behavior that day was unusual for me—a telltale sign of a potential mental health crisis.8 I wish that my supervisors had taken that red flag for the warning sign it was and extended a little curiosity and compassion; that would’ve gone a long way toward staunching the harm done by their actions.

I think about this story constantly, particularly as the near-constant chatter about generative AI has me thinking about the importance of human emotion and connection in education (and life). This experience was traumatic—and I don’t use that word lightly. But it was also decidedly human.

In the wake of all this, I no longer apologize for crying. Period. Crying is human; tears mean we care. This experience taught me to embrace, even celebrate, the authentic expression of emotion in workplaces, because emotion is human … and humanity is everything. What good is education if the people involved don’t care?

I wish I’d learned I was autistic earlier in life. When this unfolded, I could’ve had the language to help my colleagues and supervisors understand what felt inexplicable to all (myself included). I could’ve been a more effective self-advocate. Perhaps my supervisors would’ve been able to find the curiosity and compassion I needed.

I am happy that I learned something so precious about myself. However, the learning does not excuse the teaching. Nobody should have to experience traumatic events to become skilled in self-advocacy. The price is simply too high.