When I was a kid my parents divided the house into rooms for cleaning. Two kids, two parents, twelve rooms: three rooms each. Nobody did their rooms, so I did them all. With no parents home between 8am and 8pm, I had to do something remarkable to get their attention.

It didn’t work. The only way to get their attention was to participate in their fights. That’s what I think of when I look at this picture of my childhood home.

My parents’ fights were always the same fight: they both had big jobs, but my mom had better executive function (not the word we used back then, believe me) and she was furious that my Harvard-grad dad couldn’t manage his time.

The fight took many forms: Dad is not home by 10pm, mom is sad, she needs me to witness her anger. Or dad is home at 8pm but acting out his 1950s fantasy of coming home to no responsibility, so my mom throws dinner at him. I tell dad, “I’m sorry mom did that,” and we pick the food off the floor together.

Where was my brother? Invisible. He’d disappear. Not that he had good parents. He had neglectful parents. I had enmeshed parents. Oldest daughter syndrome is enmeshment.

The pattern is parentification, then responsibility, then isolation, then burnout. The parents don’t do it on purpose. They just inadvertently expect the daughter to make their lives easier, or shine a light they can mistake for their own glow, or both. Autism makes all of it worse, because oldest daughter syndrome is fundamentally a boundary problem, and autistic families are death for boundaries. But the girl participates. Once your value in the family is service, you protect that value, because it’s the only one you have.

My oldest daughter syndrome amped up when my parents had two more sons. I was 16. Throughout the boys’ childhoods I was the one protecting them from family violence. I talked to child services, talked to the school principal, fielded phone calls when the boys ran away from home.

Last month an old boyfriend called. He’s the despicable boyfriend on the first page of my first book. I couldn’t believe he was calling. Then he said something that shocked me: “How are those two brothers of yours? I remember you were with them all the time.”

A friend was dropping her kid off at school in Boston and asked me to meet for coffee. She’d cried half the day. She asked if I felt that way when I dropped my brother off at college.

I had no memory of dropping my brother off at college. She said, “I was with you! I remember it so clearly.”

I didn’t remember because I had a new baby and I was supporting my family financially. I took my brother to college anyway. He stayed with us on his vacations — each of my parents had a million-dollar home and I had a 400-square-foot rent-controlled apartment.

When I had my second kid, my aunt said, “It’s nice for you to have your own, after raising those two boys.”

“What two boys?” I asked. No one had ever said that before.

Once my parents divorced and I started to understand how much I was doing for the boys, I didn’t do less. I did more, with more devotion. Because if I stopped, I’d have no value in the family.

Eventually the girl breaks. If she breaks outward, the parents tell people she has oppositional defiant disorder, which is a family disorder we pin on one child. If she breaks inward, it’s cutting or an eating disorder or going silent — the only ways left to be the one taking care of herself, since nobody else applied for the job. Either way the family describes the break as the girl’s problem, arriving out of nowhere, after years of her being so easy.

Breaking is the good outcome. The girls who break young get to protect themselves. The ones who never break grow up and keep going. They don’t have kids, because their entire experience of children is that children are labor — they watched their parents resent the work, they did the work, and nobody volunteers for that twice. Or they become the one who takes care of the aging parents, and the siblings call her bossy and controlling. The parents call her bossy and controlling too, once the power flips. And it might be true. After forty years in the role, she is bossy and controlling. The family built her that way.

I assumed, without ever examining the assumption, that I would always be something like my brothers’ parent and they would always be something like my kids. They’re in their thirties now and they’re not interested. They want a sister, or they want distance, but they do not want the person who raised them, because needing her now would be pathetic. A sister who raises her siblings almost never gets to keep them, because they will not want the same relationship as adults, and hers is the version that requires them to stay children.

When I see an oldest daughter parenting her parents or her siblings, I want to tell her: this is not a real place for a girl to grow up, this love is not love that can feed you.

The girls don’t listen. I wouldn’t have listened either. So I’m talking to the parents — the ones whose lives are too interesting, too demanding, too unfair to do everything themselves, so it’s reasonable that their daughter picks up the slack. Parents never say it that way. They say, “She’s always been independent.” “She’s always been such a caretaker.” “She’s had a lot of problems.”

Three ways of saying the same thing: somebody had to clean the rooms, and it wasn’t going to be us.

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I ran a study at Harvard and published a paper. But my best finding is sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished. So I’m embarking on a furtive rescue mission. To start, here’s the finding:

I measured the achievement kind of passion — the drive to get better at something and win. This is the thing competition researchers treat as the engine behind workplace success, and I’ve been fascinated by the topic for decades.

So I gave the standard competitiveness scale to 58 autistic women and compared their scores to the published averages for men and women. The autistic women scored significantly higher than neurotypical women. And they were statistically indistinguishable from neurotypical men. On the trait that predicts who will win at work, autistic women don’t look like other women. They look like men.

I get that 58 successful women and a borrowed comparison group, is not bulletproof. But research on autistic women is so sparse that 58 is a flood.

Women who’d tell you the most about competitiveness don’t spend their time filling out surveys for the love of science. So most research comes from mothers who bring their autistic kids in for free services. Those mothers aren’t tested directly — there’s a questionnaire researchers fill out about the mother, from watching her, to decide whether she’s probably autistic too.

This is because revealing to a mom that she’s autistic is the kind of thing clinicians will do almost anything to avoid. It’s like when a kid gets tested and walks out labeled ADHD, not autistic, even though it’s likely both are true. Getting real-time information about autism is nearly impossible because the conversation involves too much stress and conflict. (I’m the only one who is excited to give you that information.)

Anyway, I had access to a rare group in research: successful women who already know they’re autistic. I proposed a participatory study, where the subjects help decide on questions — the forward-thinking, subject-centered method everyone praises. The women wanted to talk about trauma. They wanted it on the record that most autistic women had traumatic childhoods — something the research already shows and no one will say to the women themselves, because no one wants to offend them.

The IRB would not approve the trauma questions. The ethics board whose entire function is protecting research subjects decided that asking autistic women about their trauma would be too traumatizing for them. So we agreed on a new set of toothless questions blah blah published paper blah blah.

But still, I had this clean little finding about competitiveness, and there was nowhere to put it. Harvard’s school of education said it wasn’t their field. The business school didn’t want research that says autistic women are as competitive as men, because professors built careers on telling successful women they are not as competitive as men.

So my data sat. For years. It’s still sitting.

What finally changed wasn’t the finding. I used to think universities owned research because they owned the methods. Then I realized that the methods are just the gates that AI is now crashing.

The finding didn’t become less true because nobody published it. The women didn’t become less right because the IRB wouldn’t let them talk about trauma. And the data didn’t stop existing because it belonged to no department.

So here it is. Imperfect. Unpublished. Belonging to no field. Which is still more than the people who study autistic women have managed to learn from the women themselves.

The post I have data showing only autistic women are as competitive as men. No one would publish it. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

The World Cup is in Boston, and I live in the middle of the city, so I spent two weeks surrounded by Scottish people. Boston has a literal law against happy hour and a nightlife notorious for being lame. So it made sense that the Scots, who go to bars the way we go to Starbucks, drank all the beer in the city. There were beer delivery trucks lining the streets to keep up.

The Scotts so clearly love their country and their team and each other, and they were having the time of their lives. I watched them wave their flag and wear their flag. And every day they wore kilts that encoded their Scottish family lineage — except for the drinking kilts, which are the ones it’s okay to spill on.

I was in my own city, enjoying their bagpipes, and drinking songs, and endless energy for fun.

But I felt like an outsider watching people who knew exactly where they were from, and I don’t feel that myself, even in my own city.

In the US you’re expected to say where your family is from. It’s a national pastime — everyone is from somewhere else and proud to name it. I remember when my kids first ran into this. I told them we’re Jewish, that after the Spanish Inquisition my family went to Eastern Europe and their dad’s family went to South America. “But what country?” they kept asking. “You have to say a country!”

There isn’t one. I can trace my DNA almost entirely to a small area where Poland and Latvia and Ukraine meet, and my family moved from shtetl to shtetl across it for generations. But those are all places that hated Jews. You can’t say you’re from a place that spent centuries trying to be rid of you.

And I’ll never feel from the US either. Every Jewish person I know has a passport and knows, somewhere in the back of their mind, that the people who didn’t get out of Germany in time were the ones who assumed they were safe. Every Jewish person I know is also exhausted and stressed by what Netanyahu is doing in Israel, which means the one place that was supposed to be the answer to all of this is its own source of dread. It is hard to feel part of something when belonging in one direction makes you precarious in every other.

So I watched the Scots and understood, with more force than I expected, that I could never be that, but also that I don’t actually want to be. The Scottish joy is the joy of the class clown: this will be fine, everyone will laugh, nothing bad happens to me. You can only move through the world that way if the world has agreed in advance to find you charming. If those same men had been Black, drunk in the street at 10:30 in the morning, they would have been arrested.

Their ease is not available to everyone, and I am not built for it. Jews can barely manage a party on Purim, when getting drunk is the instruction. It’s not our style. We are restrained where the Scots are gregarious, careful where they are careless. But I think it’s okay. What I was actually feeling amidst the fun, was how strongly I belong to something after all.

Not a country. A diaspora. I belong to a people defined precisely by not being from anywhere — held together not by a flag or a hillside but by the shared knowledge of having been moved along, over and over, and having carried the thing with us anyway. I feel it every time I can tell someone is Jewish: a small click of recognition, a guess at the family behind them, a culture I already know the shape of.

I didn’t know how much I felt this until I stood next to people who are not from the US — where everyone is displaced – but from Scotland where their tie to their place is everything.

Belonging means saying who you’re with and who you’re not. The Scots draw that line around a country. I draw it around a people scattered across all of them. I loved watching the Scots but I would not trade. One of the best things I did with two decades of raising my kids was try to give them this — not a country to be from, but a people to be of, so that wherever they end up standing, a few feet from someone else’s flag, they’ll know exactly who they are.

The post In my neighborhood the Scots started the party at 10:30am. Every day. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Personality type is especially valuable for neurodivergent people because it systematizes things we find difficult to understand intuitively. The problem is that autism and ADHD make us nearly impossible to type correctly — including ourselves.

I kept wondering: if I’m really an ENTJ, why am I the world’s most failing ENTJ? Where is my Fortune 500 company to run? The breakthrough came when I stopped looking at what I was accomplishing and started looking at what I was trying to accomplish.

Now when coaching clients tell me their type, I usually see immediately that it’s wrong. I’m also smarter about typing my own neurodiverse family.

My kids loved Cards Against Humanity, so we played all the time. Nino used an X-acto knife to cut offensive words out of cards, and the cards he couldn’t salvage he saved. The kids assumed they’d get a box of cards when they turned 18. Instead, they got every confiscated card from every expansion pack, meticulously organized by topic. No one needs this. It’s an OCD project Nino invented for himself to assuage his need to sort and organize.

Once I separated autistic sorting from his larger goals, I could focus on his overriding belief that everything should have meaning and connect to people. That’s how I arrived at INFP.

In this week’s Personality Type Office Hours, I’ll show you how to work around the test by separating personality type from neurodivergence to identify core motivations. Join us Thursday, June 18 at 8pm ET. Paid subscribers only.

Here’s the link to become a paid subscriber if you aren’t already.

Here’s the link to the zoom session.

The post Is that your personality or your ADHD? appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Quilts from Gees Bend

People email me their result from my personality test, and I can tell from the way they write the email that the test result is wrong. Finally, I realized that a huge percentage of the people who find their way to me are autistic, and autism breaks the Myers Briggs test. It’s like I accidentally ran a fifteen year study on autism and personality type.

The test breaks because every question assumes you can see yourself, and seeing ourselves is the thing those of us with autism can’t do. Scientists call this deficit theory of mind.

Take introvert versus extrovert. It’s not about how social you are — it’s about what exhausts you. But I never want to go to a party, and once I’m there I don’t shut up. Am I an I or an E? The official tiebreaker is whether the party recharges you or drains you, and for autistic people the answer is always drained, because people hate us at parties.

J versus P is worse. A J needs things settled; a P keeps options open. But autistic executive function means we have no consistent relationship to settledness. I’m a J about my aspirations and a P about everything that requires getting off the sofa. I want things orderly when they’re my special interest and flexible when they’re someone else’s rules.

And underneath all the letter confusion is the real problem: personality type is an exercise in relativity. The test is asking whether you’re an extrovert relative to the entire universe — not relative to your loud family, not relative to corporate America where everyone performs extroversion. Answering requires holding the whole distribution of humanity in your head and locating yourself inside it, which is precisely the theory-of-mind work autism makes hard.

Another reason autism makes typing ourselves difficult is that autism is about extremes. Normal people are okay at most things. For example, they’re okay at school and okay at sports. But autistic people are uneven: very good at some stuff and terrible at others. See: spiked brain. But also see: Gees Bend Quilts. Because those quilts are have the same architecture as more typical quilts, but they have exagerrated, uneven proportions.

The same exaggeration happens within type. If ENTPs are generally funny, cheat on their spouses, and can’t hold down a job, an autistic ENTP has been married fifteen times or has never worked a day in their life. We’re not different from our type. We’re our type with the volume knob broken off. But there’s a reason that Gees Bend quilts are on US postage stamps: the uneven composition is a surprising and beautiful and a national treasure.

So autistic people are less predictable, yes, but that’s also the reason we need need type more than anyone. This’ll be the topic of my Personality Type Office Hours on Thurs. June 18 at 8pm ET. During that session we’ll also talk about the typing method I’ve landed on after fifteen years of correcting peoples’ scores scores; those wrong scores are where I get all my best material.

New personality type posts:

INFP: Your inability to self-edit is finally worth money

INFJs confuse being understood with being loved

How to talk so an ENTJ will listen

INTJs don’t hold grudges, they archive them

ENFP: I spent two days reading about the Song Dynasty instead of writing this post.

ENFJs get sidetracked by rewards

The post Personality type posts + how autism breaks the test appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Chairs (1970) Tom Berg 

This is a guest post from a college senior I coached.

When my parents divorced, my mom more or less kept my younger brother and my dad more or less kept me. We each saw the other parent, but never very much and never for very long. My brother and I only saw one another every other weekend for the better part of four years.

I didn’t think anything of the fact that my brother and I were split up. I didn’t think anything of the fact that I went to work with my dad every day, even on weekends. As far as I knew, this was just how families worked.

It wasn’t until Penelope explained autism that my family started to make sense.

From a young age I knew there was something different about the way I responded to situations compared to most people around me. “Autism” was a word that carried a lot of stigma when I was growing up, so when Penelope first suggested it explained some of my behavior, I resisted.

The idea itself wasn’t new. Autism didn’t reveal something about me that I didn’t already know. What it gave me was a vocabulary and a body of knowledge for understanding things I had sensed for years but couldn’t explain.

My dad originally sent me to work with Penelope because he wanted me to understand the workplace. She helped me do that. But she also helped me understand my dad.

I had already accepted that I was naturally weird. What I hadn’t realized was that the same explanation applied to my parents, my brother, and many of the family dynamics I had spent my life taking for granted.

Nobody had ever told me my family was unusual, probably because we didn’t socialize much as a family. Once I understood autism, though, so many things clicked into place.

As I got older, my dad and I drank almost all the time. I thought it was nice because we were watching baseball together. Looking back, I can see that we never really learned how to talk to each other. We could sit together for hours watching a game, but whenever we had to talk about something important, we fought.

Learning about autism didn’t make me blame my family less. It made me understand them better.

The relationships that changed the most were the ones with my mom and my brother.

Before, I loved them, but I didn’t put much effort into showing it. I told myself that meant the relationships weren’t very important to me. Looking back, I think something else was happening. Distance was easier than trying.

Learning that all of us were struggling with some version of the same thing made me more empathetic. For the first time, I stopped seeing myself as the only person who had been hurt by our family dynamics.

Since then, both relationships have changed a lot.

Even though I live across the country, my mom and I spend a few hours every week watching TV together remotely. I tutor my younger brother in math and English twice a week.

I used to understand our family in terms of IQ. I went with my dad because we were smart and my brother went with my mom because they weren’t.

I believed that for years.

Now I watch my brother play the drums and realize how wrong I was. Autism doesn’t distribute strengths evenly. My brother can do things I can’t do. We all have minds that spike in different places.

For a long time I thought understanding my family meant ranking everyone. Now I think understanding them means paying attention.

I know the state of my family relationships was never entirely my fault. We were all shaped by the same family system and by our own autistic ways of connecting.

But I want to take responsibility for the part I can control.

I don’t want to work weekends the way my dad did. When I have kids, I want to spend my time watching them grow up. I want to be present. I want to be a good husband and father instead of always choosing what’s emotionally easiest in the moment.

Understanding autism didn’t change me, but it changed what I think is possible for me.

The post My dad hired Penelope to coach me. Here’s what happened. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Z tells me the list of things I can never write about — just to be sure I don’t forget. I am surprised he’s doing it at our local coffee shop where anyone could hear. The last one is, “Don’t tell people Nino left us because he didn’t want to raise two autistic kids.”

“Wait. What? You’ve never said that to me before.”

“Forget it. Everyone already knows. I just thought the list needed more things or you wouldn’t remember.”

I look around to see if the people in the coffee shop are nodding. I think the real reason Z is concerned about what I write is that his friends read my blog — they never would have except that Duke has my first book in their library, and Z made the mistake of telling them, which only mattered because the cover is Six Sex Scenes.

When the kids were little the New York Times interviewed me about why I thought it was okay to write about my kids on my blog. The article turned out to be about how moms were ruining their kids’ lives by putting everything online. At the time I chalked the piece up to the NYT being too old to keep up with my amazing forward-thinkingness.

The article was on the front page. The picture of me was in our rented house in Madison where there was no furniture because I spent so much money landscaping the yard. We had all the birthdays in the yard that year in the small garden toward the back. When the kids asked where the old plants were going, I said they were dying. When I traveled on a kid’s birthday, I told the kid it was a different day.

The quotes from me are about how by the time kids grow up they won’t care about what’s online because everything will be online. I was so sure of myself when I had little kids. Now I see the reporter, Leslie Kaufman, is an obituary writer.

Z has to make sure I remember the list of forbidden topics because he thinks I forget about boundaries when I write. So I pay for our coffee even though he has way more money than I do after the Uber settlement. I need to function like a parent with boundaries, and money is my only way.

Z asks us to dress up for his birthday. I tell Nino he needs to show up for the kids or I’ll regret letting him back into our lives. He reminds me that I used to tell the kids their birthday was a different day when I had to travel.

Still, he shows up to the birthday decidedly dressy. Then I notice they’re clothes he took from his dead dad’s apartment. I tell him, “Thank you for trying.”

Our building is turning into short-term rentals, so I have to move, fast, before the kids think I got evicted. That’s the thing about a crisis — if you move on your own volition, you have something lined up with time to spare and it looks like it’s not a crisis.

I had a crisis trying to make all that look like it was happening. The place I got is a block from Nino’s apartment and there’s a garden in the back, so it looks very intentional.

Z told me he thinks I’m not making enough money to support myself.

I told him not to worry, I have a webinar tonight.

He said: “What is a webinar? Is that Zoom?”

He’s right that I need to focus on work. But the garden was just sitting there. So I moved all my plants from three other gardens I’d made around Boston and I got it looking really nice.

Z told me I have a problem with gardens and a problem with evictions, and this is going to be the fusion of those if I’m not careful. Also, he said, “It’s probably stealing when you take plants from a garden you already made. And you’ve been sneaking into the garden when you tell us you’re working.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw you going outside again. In the dark. Just like you used to. You have to cut yourself off.”

I say nothing.

I didn’t think it mattered what day their birthday was if they didn’t know the difference. I still don’t, really. I’m already keeping each kid’s list of things I can’t write. In exchange, I get to keep Nino — he’s not the best dad, but he’s the only person who will let me write anything. I need a way to keep bad boundaries and still build something that matters.

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My first sense that recent college grads are in hell is when I realized the job hunt process is totally broken. Kids use AI to write their resumes, screen ads, and fill out applications. Meanwhile, AI is sorting resumes for companies, and the AI sorters prefer AI-written resumes, so kids are sending out thousands of applications before getting a single interview.

Duolingo received 10,000 applications for one internship and pulled the listing weeks before the deadline. TikTok said they hire the first good resume that comes through, so apply fast. Think about the explosion of college applications that happened with the Common App. That’s what AI did to job hunting.

But this doesn’t explain why recent college grads have higher unemployment than the overall workforce.

The first jobs AI squashed were entry-level jobs in fields like writing, teaching, and research, and roles that measure corporate productivity: low-level accounting, marketing analytics, and consulting. Internships followed, because what’s the point of an intern pipeline when there are no entry-level jobs at the end of it?

The hottest startup out of Stanford right now is Extern, a platform where Fortune 500 companies list projects for kids to do from home, using AI to simulate a job they’re not getting paid for. It’s the apocalyptic version of the gig economy.

But young people were already working from home before AI ate the entry-level jobs. And working from home is where careers go to stall because the entire learning curve of early careers depended on proximity to people you can annoy — people who eventually take you under wing so you stop irritating them. That apprenticeship is gone. There is no remote version of it.

People-skills jobs are not going anywhere. But people skills are defined by the specific culture of a specific office, and younger workers have never been to an office. And kids can’t learn these skills from professors who went into academia specifically to avoid having to learn corporate ropes.

I got an email from Extern recently. The pitch was about personal branding — how you build it by attaching yourself to a big company name, which you can do by working for them for free. I was struck by how this hijacks what personal branding used to mean: being known for your new ideas. Now it means borrowed credibility from companies that won’t hire you.

The person who sent the email included her LinkedIn profile. When I clicked it, I got an error message. I told my son and he said: “Mom, we hate LinkedIn. We do it because this is a crisis and we will play by any rules in order to be employed.”

This is not the internet with reckless Gen X subverting everything they can. Gen Z grew up in Covid. They don’t want a revolution — they want an office. They want someone to let them inside an institution and show them how work works.

Gen Z doesn’t need to worry about AI taking jobs because they didn’t even have those jobs. The real problem for new college grads is the disappearance of mentoring.

Young workers used to learn by being physically near older workers: overhearing meetings, asking inappropriate questions, watching how decisions got made. In one of my first jobs, I agreed to be the CEO’s beach volleyball partner just to get more time around him. That led to him funding my startup. Today remote work removes the proximity we need for knowledge transfer.

So now parents hire coaches, pull strings for internships, and pay for simulated work experiences because companies stopped providing an initiation into adult working life.

The post The career killer for Gen Z isn’t AI. It’s remote work. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.