[cheatsheet]

I'm disgusted by your disgust. I wanted a PhD more than anything, but I didn't understand my disorder at the time, and I didn't have the care nor coping skills I needed to get through life on top of achieving what I wanted to in the PhD program. That was three years ago and I still cry almost every other night or so over it, but I am living a much healthier and more understood life, instead of every day being almost constant confusion and stress (on top of difficult school work, being a teaching assistant and a research assistant).

It helps when the work environment understands explicitly. I experience heightened stress and chaotic thought patterns in overtly social situations that ripple across months when the situations only last days or hours, and I need to learn to engage in them very slowly at my own pace and be comfortable.

If my former school understood this instead of having my professors call me 'aspie', maybe I would have a PhD by now. The one thing I learned from this is that I should not be forced into any situation that makes me experience distress, and I do not care if you think it's ridiculous. I have spent far too much of my life in difficult mental places, and I do not want to live like that anymore, and I won't. I don't force people around me to do graduate level math simply so they can talk to me in a language I understand.

We are not always clever and eccentric, 100% of the time. It would help if people stopped looking at us like computers and started remembering we are human too.