I am an autistic adult. I was recently diagnosed but have suspected for years. I also struggle with other mental health problems, including: PTSD (from being bullied and other childhood abuse/neglect, bad family drama, poverty as a child, abusive step-father as a teenager, etc.), social anxiety, and depression. I'm working on all this with a therapist. It's been nice to have someone who is on the spectrum themselves to work with, and I feel I can trust him and talk to him about anything (obviously, I don't trust people that easily so yay I guess).

Anyway, I am currently financially dependent on my wife (I'm a non-binary AFAB, pansexual), and don't want to be. Also, I think for the sake of my happiness, living my best life and all, I might need to live alone so I'm trying to save up for that. Even if I love my wife and I do, I still think it's better for me to live alone in a one-bedroom apartment. Currently we're trying to share a big house and it's just not working.

That's another reason I want to save to move out. It would help my wife be able to move into an apartment that's smaller and easier for her to manage, because she has ADHD and the stress of cleaning shared living areas bothers the heck out of both of us.

So to do that, I have to figure out what career path to take to escalate my career. Currently I'm working on a gig app as a pet sitter. The gig app delays my payments sometimes and also takes 20% of my income while basically doing f*ckall, so that's nice but like, it'd be hard to advertise my own pet sitting business and weed out the scary people and scammers on my own. Pet sitting is kind of stressful sometimes, especially dog walking, so I want to change jobs. Also, obviously, if I want to become financially independent, I need to make more money.

I'm currently studying Penn Foster's program for wildlife conservation and forestry. I'm not sure what career I can do out of it. Like I think I might like being a park ranger, wildlife research assistant, or wildlife fire fighter or something like that. However, I'm concerned about my physical stamina. I have sleep issues and sometimes get exhausted quickly. I'm working on trying to build up my physical stamina.

But even a boring retail job, if it was designed to have minimal social interaction and with autistic people in mind, might be worth looking into. I'm open to suggestions. I also have an Ashworth career diploma in graphic design (but I've never landed any clients with that on forums like Upwork), am working on a fantasy novel and painting which are creative outlets to communicate my feelings about my pain and trauma, I study a lot of topics on my own, including psychology. I have considered going back to get my bachelor's online in Psychology and then going to get a master's at a local college so that I can be either a therapist or a school counselor. I think I'd like that being a school counselor would put me in a position to be an anti-bullying advocate and possibly rescue kids from the same fate that traumatized me. I'd know to look for signs of bullying and abuse that adults overlooked in me as a kid, basically.

Anyway, if anyone wants to share their own experiences with trying to become financially independent and totally self-reliant as an autistic adult, I'd like to hear it.

Also note that I'm in the USA there's no services available to me, but I have considered moving to Canada and Ireland and France and if you live in another country with more disability services I'd like to hear about your country. Thanks!