#like ... i've seen my grade school test scores and my placement was '1st grade math 11th grade english' in 2nd grade

[anghraine]

There is basically no way to talk about this without humblebragging and also giving way to, idk, internalized ableism or wtfever, but:

Grad school is sometimes incredibly frustrating, on top of the other reason it's incredibly frustrating, because people will be like "Elizabeth's mind is very bright and analytical," and that is nice, and there's nothing about having a mental disorder or three that contradicts it, BUT

One of the things about autism for me—a way in which it feels distinct from my mood disorders—is that some parts of my ways of understanding and experiencing the world just don't work. I realize this description sounds accurate enough for mood disorders as well, but it's difficult to articulate what I'm actually trying to get at that feels fundamentally different. It does, though.

Being bipolar frequently sucks and frequently sucks more than autism, because depression is terrible and I have a history of very severe depression. Nevertheless, being bipolar isn't, at the core, what makes me literally unable to do most math or drive or otherwise multi-task, and it's not what makes keeping track of things like scheduling or simply where things are spatially so difficult, and it doesn't have that much effect on hand-eye coordination and balance and things like that except in conjunction with the autism.

And then there's the sensory overload, which triggers super easily and is... worse when I'm depressed but very obviously rooted in my visceral and almost inexpressible loathing of most sensation and eye contact.

Now, I wouldn't (and couldn't) excise my autism if I had the choice, because there's no ... separate non-autistic self, it's not a layer of apathy or terror or something, it's all me. And yeah, I know we're "supposed" to conceptualize this stuff as "works differently," or these things aren't accommodated properly, or whatnot, and I understand why. But some days it just feels like some parts of my brain are fine and then large swaths don't work right, and people don't really get what it feels like to be getting a PhD and surrounded by people telling me how bright I am, but also to be unable to calculate tips or develop my ideas at the speed that everyone else is doing or write within the usual time limits or line up tasks in a practical way.

It also feels like there's no way to talk to people IRL about the massive chasm between the things I do really well and the simultaneous sense of having blank spots in my brain. My diagnosis even talks about this—not my towering frustration, lol, but that I have advanced reasoning skills that can obscure the extent of my disability in other areas.

So one moment I'm teaching Classical rhetoric to college students and the next I'm blankly staring at a division problem or struggling to manage basic scheduling, and it feels ridiculous and embarrassing. But I can't tell the authorities in my life that—I can get accommodations, but they don't get how intensely uncomfortable it is to have people constantly assuming I can easily do things that either a) I can't or b) are very difficult because I'm "bright" and... blah.

(Making this unrebloggable for hopefully obvious reasons. I mostly needed to vent.)

#anghraine whines #full-on whining but ... people sometimes talk like autistic people who are doing things like grad school are the enemy #who don't get Real Autism #and they genuinely don't seem to grasp what it's like to go through the world with these massive gaps in ability #like ... i've seen my grade school test scores and my placement was '1st grade math 11th grade english' in 2nd grade #and nobody responded in any way to the gap through the entirety of k-12 or most of college. i just kept failing remedial math. #but i've often felt literally insane (esp bc it took so long to detect and i didn't know why things Didn't Work) #'it's not that it doesn't work but that it works differently and-' please stop talking #i know that feels true for some people #it doesn't for me and it's very tiring to always have to deal with #anghraine rants #rare breed of attack unicorn #ivory tower blogging #long post