I started writing this post, a bit after 7 p.m. GMT (3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, my home time zone) on Friday 5 July 2024, on my hope to get to practice more often than once in a blue moon, via more non-Meetup non-Kijiji non-Craigslist means, job interview skills (JIS). Yes, for over a decade, but not quite 15 years (the latter of which will come in the Northern Hemisphere spring of 2025), I have been working mostly as a bookkeeper, but from no later than 2015 have been doing so mostly part-time. Â Yet whether or not I find more paid work than I already have (with professional income limited, mainly to a company run by a relative of mine), I have found, since having started my original JIS Meetup group (JISMG) in October 2016:
- few members of such groups who have attended more than one event per group
- so many such groups have gotten to a point where I have not been able to find even ONE then-member to attend, with the most recent such group I chose to abandon (with Meetup, at least from January 2023, having not permitted chief organizers of such groups to just close them down without assistance of that company) having been early last December after SV, the only member of the JISMG that I had been running to have signed up to join me at an event I had planned to on that day host had (almost 3.5 hours after the event had started and around 3 hours after I had determined I had waited long enough for him to notify me he would either be late or not able to make it) notify me he hadn’t after all been able to make it to that event
I was officially diagnosed in April 2002 as having long had a non-verbal learning disability, a diagnosis that, more than anything else, would help me better understand how I could cope and ways I could reach out to people that had had a chance of being successful. Â That's not to say everything I've tried has turned to gold, with attempts in:
- 2010, the year of my graduation with an Hon.BA in Commerce (that had included that Major and 2 minors [Economics and Spanish]), to try to host a New Year's Eve party to which then-execs of a cultural club of which I had then been an exec would be welcome to come to the apartment in which I'd been living to enjoy a potluck with booze served, to thank them for having put on an end-of-term halal dinner intended to reach out to the large Muslim community on the main campus of what by then had become an alma mater, with:
-- AM, the then-Alumni Chair, having claimed, not even an hour after I'd emailed him and other then-execs of that club, that I had had no business emailing the entire executive without permission from 1 of 4 or so exec officers, prompting me to reach out to a relative of mine for how I could pursue interests of mine other than via ANY campus of that alma mater, with her recommending trying out Meetup, which I would join the month after having sent that cultural club's then-Alumni Chair that email
-- my having spent the last 2 months of that year having gotten to feel out Meetup to find out if it would be for me
- late-2012 and early-2013 to try to find opportunities to mentor other people, initially via 1 of the colleges of my alma mater, then Kijiji, then Meetup, with the posting of a message, as a then-member (but also then-future co-organizer) of a Meetup group I had joined, of whether there'd been community support groups that would help me better understand what aspects I could do differently to try to help boost interest in those initiatives of mine, with a then-member of the same group having claimed:
-- to have been "honest here in that" personally she'd thought that I had been "looking in the wrong places...to achieve" my social goals
-- that whilst it might have been "nice to find others who" enjoyed my "interests, making multiple meetup groups" was "not going to make people immediately want to come out" but that doing so might instead had been deterring them
-- to have previously mentioned that "many people" might not have been joining Meetup groups I had founded because for such a founder "to be successful," it had seemed necessary to "have a circle of people" who I had already known to give me "some credibility"
-- that "making multiple meetup groups," when I hadn't known if even ONE would "be successful" was "not going to work because again," such groups had had "extremely specific focuses and there" had been nobody else giving me "support with" such groups
-- that "some people" would "not want to join" such groups of mine because I had been "the only one promoting them, making it seem like" I had been promoting myself "or looking for attention rather than...simply wanting to share interests with others"
- multiple JISMGs I have run having prompted me, given that none had, before this month, as far as I could tell, lasted into the 13th month, with:
-- the most recent such group I had chosen to abandon I had founded during the 7th month before I was to abandon such group
-- due to a lack of available ongoing professional help to practice job interview skills having prompted me to, late last month, put on, in a Meetup group, geared to adults with ASD, I hadn't founded but of which I'd become a co-organizer, a JIS event via which I'd hoped at least 1 member of that group would sign up for, with it TBD whether, with my having chosen to close RSVPs as of 4 p.m. GMT Friday so to give myself sufficient time to notify anyone who, within that group, had signed up
-- due to an email from Specialisterne, sign up for IBM Skillsbuild in my hope to find ongoing help to keep my JIS as sharp as possible even if I DO find more paid work than the limited amount I already have