An Official Hiatus

I was originally going to start this post with a very ominous, one-line “Hello.” I have elected not to do so, so you’re getting one of my very rambly introductory paragraphs instead, which is honestly way more in-character for my blogging style. Truth be told, I have no idea how I should start this post— and I know we’ve seen that before, to a certain extent, with the various and somewhat entertaining ways I’ve chosen to open the blog posts of the past, but this one is particularly difficult to start. The title might clue you in as to why.

First, let’s address the elephant in the room: yes, it’s been awhile. I’m very sorry. I’m checking in on the blog for the first time in over six months, and I’ve broken the promise made by the me of the past, who solemnly swore on multiple occasions that she’d never leave you hanging like that again. I lied, and I’m sorry that I did. In my defense, I definitely was not intentionally deceiving you— the me of the past who wrote those promises never to take a long, unannounced hiatus had every intention of keeping said promises. She just also happened to be overestimating her own abilities to write as consistently as she would have been able to in an ideal world… and now we’re here. Many months later.

So I’m sorry, for the first thing. I want to lead with the apology. I know it’s been a long time since you heard from me, and it truly was not my intention to let the blog go dark for so long. I also want to apologize a second time, because the reason I’m writing now is to bear some news that’s not the most ideal. I want to announce an official hiatus from this blog.

But before I get into the specifics, I do want to say hi. The last time you heard from me, I was in a really difficult place, as evidenced by my long, slogging posts about how burnt out I was and my struggle with adjustment to life after college. I did finish out that semester, as I was getting close to doing the last time I posted. It was a long and pretty difficult summer, and an even more difficult fall, but I got through both of those seasons, and now it’s January. We’re now closer to the two-year anniversary of my college graduation than we are to the date I started graduate school, which is a very strange chronological truth to acknowledge, but a truth nonetheless. My final semester of my graduate program started last week, on Tuesday the 16th. A few months from now, I’ll officially have my master’s degree.

Anyone who has read this blog before would likely know that it was very much my intention to write consistently through my time in grad school. I know I had some ambiguous feelings around the time I finished college about what was going to happen with the blog in grad school, but there was definitely a time when I thought I could write consistently as a grad student. As has been demonstrated by my writing behavior, I wasn’t able to fulfill that hope— but the hope was definitely there. I thought it might be beneficial to the blog’s audience— whoever might be reading, whether it’s someone who knows me personally or someone who stumbled upon this content and wants to learn from my lived experience— to include grad school on the blog. Since this blog has always been a glorified public journal, featuring the occasional informational post that’s less personal, I figured I could add grad school to the blog’s chronological documentation of my life. It would just be a continuation of my college blogging pattern.

But you know what they say about the best laid plans. I wound up not finding the time to do things that way, and instead punctuated the first year of grad school with often-spontaneous posts, which sometimes took the form of life updates and profuse apologies, and occasionally focused on a particular topic (in the style of my college posts). The second year of grad school has been radio silent altogether, except for today’s post, which marks my first of the academic and calendar years. Seeing as Spring 2024 is my final semester, I’ve reached the point where it’s better to admit that I won’t be able to write consistently than to continue lying to myself (and to the readers) about future posts that aren’t coming.

Interestingly, the question of writing hasn’t been difficult as a grad student at all. You might remember that my autistic special interest is my own writing, the young-adult fiction that I write as a hobby, and I gave a little update on that circa last spring (AKA my most recent attempt at writing on this blog consistently). Writing, in the sense of my creative hobby, has pretty much been the only thing that has come easily in grad school. This has been extremely unusual, because— this will be no surprise to you if you know me— grad school has been extremely difficult on my mental health. I really have no idea what the brain chemistry or timing magic behind being able to write while in such a difficult mental place is, but as I’ve said before, I really don’t make a habit of asking questions of my own brain when special interests are going well— I’m just grateful for the creative joy in the first place.

So I’ve been writing plenty, and I’m so grateful for that. Writing has truly been my saving grace during the difficult mental health times of the past year and some change. I simply haven’t been writing on this blog. It’s definitely frustrating that I haven’t been able to find it in me to write a blog post for so long, and that the only reason I’m writing one now is to announce that I’m going to be taking a more official break from them. I genuinely enjoyed the schedule I held for myself in college, with weekly posts on a breadth of topics, and I’d love to get back to that someday— but more on that later. In the meantime, I want to be honest about where I stand with the blog right now. I’ll be taking a hiatus, and this time, it’ll be official.

I know that “announcing” a hiatus, as if I have some kind of following, seems a little weird— and maybe it is weird, full stop. I’m no stranger to the fact that this blog has never been popular, and I’m not in the market to become some kind of autism blogging influencer. Those actually exist now, and I feel like they weren’t very common when I first started the blog in 2018, my freshman year of college. I have a lot of thoughts on the way online conversations have turned when it comes to discussing neurodiversity, and those thoughts could likely make an entire, separate blog aside from the one dedicated to my own life experience. I might dive into that someday, but now isn’t the time.

The reason I’m “announcing” a hiatus, then, isn’t necessarily to address the clamoring of the blog fans desperate for new content (hahaha, can you imagine?), but to be honest to myself and to you. When someone clicks onto the front page of this blog, they see my most recent post on display. I don’t want my most recent post— and, therefore, the thing that greets visitors to my blog— to be the me of last April, promising you more content soon. I want to be transparent about my own abilities at the moment, and I’ve decided that it’s best for me to take an intentional break from this blog.

As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, I’m about to finish my master’s program. It will likely not come as a surprise when I tell you that it’s been extremely difficult— and much more difficult than I thought it would be. I’m being tasked with writing a “reflection paper” as I finish up my degree, something required of every student who finishes my program at my school, and I have no idea what I’m going to say. There’s definitely a lot that I could say, but I’m not sure how to summarize how difficult my time in grad school has been without sounding like a downer. I think I’ll come out on the other side of this program a little wiser, and definitely a lot more educated in my field— but I think that reflection paper might wind up sounding a lot like one of these blog posts. If I find it fitting enough for this blog once I do write it, I might consider posting it here. It’ll probably do a much better job of summarizing my feelings about completing this grad program than I could do in any post dedicated to the subject.

Make no mistake: I am glad that I did this master’s program. We’re just about at the two-year anniversary of me finding out I got in, and I can still remember how happy I was the day I got that call. I wouldn’t change the way I did things, despite how difficult this has turned out to be. This was the right decision for me, and I’ve learned so much in my field of study. I’ve gained new skills, met new people, and grown from my experiences, and I’m looking forward to putting all of that to use when it comes time to decide how life looks after the program. I think my difficulty in grad school has had much less to do with grad school itself, and much more to do with what it means to “grow up” or become an adult as an autistic person. I’ve felt permanently stuck in the growing pains of “becoming an adult” since I first went off to college, and every time I think I’m getting the hang of it, something else comes along to complicate things all the more.

Despite not having written much while a grad student, there is plenty I could be writing about. This is part of why not writing has been a frustrating process; I know that there’s content for the blog coming out of my own experiences, but I can’t seem to find the right words to make something meaningful or educational out of them. All of my energy has been spent enduring those things, rather than reflecting on them in a self-referential way (the way I often did during times of crisis in college). The jury’s out as to whether the former or the latter strategy is better for dealing with tough times, but I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to document these things. I genuinely wish that I could have.

But there may come a time in the future when I can, and that leads me to where I want to finish. I want this to be a hiatus from the blog, but not an ending. I am hesitantly optimistic about the idea of writing on here again once I finish my grad program this coming May. I’ll be working after graduation, and I’m excited about new opportunities. I’ve finally identified an area where I feel I could really thrive professionally, and I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to find work in that field, so that I can put my skills to good use.

Spoiler alert, though: I’ll always be writing. Whether it’s on the blog, in my fiction, or in my professional life, writing is definitely what I do best. I’m hopeful that I can return to this blog once I’m done being a grad student. The original intention of this blog was to document the autistic life in college, and I think it would be a really neat exercise to apply that same methodology to documenting an autistic, adult life in the “real world.” I’ve written a lot about “the real world,” and how that can be such a nebulous concept as an autistic person. Anticipation of entering “the real world” has caused me an immense amount of anxiety and anguish over the past year and a half. I’m starting to realize that it might be easier to process these big changes if I think of “the real world” less as part of my future, and more as somewhere I already am.

But there’s a lot I haven’t done yet— like moving out, and having a full-time job, and existing as an autistic adult outside the comfort zones I’ve always known. Some of those things are so daunting to me that I’m becoming anxious just by writing them out, but they’re things I’ll have to deal with one way or another. Whether they’re in the near or far future, they’re going to be part of my life— and they’ll definitely be hard, but maybe that’s why it would be a great idea to write on the blog about them.

This is definitely not goodbye from me, so please don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll never hear from me on the blog again. It would make me extremely sad to leave this blog behind permanently, and I hate endings and goodbyes anyway. This is simply me putting official words to the hiatus that’s already happening. After I take an official break from blogging to finish up my grad program, you’ll hear from me again. I’m hopeful that I’ll have a lot more to say.

Obviously, I will leave all my posts up. This blog is meant both as a personal venture and a resource, and I want people to be able to read through my post history, whether they’re curious about my informative posts or looking to get a bigger picture of my experiences. I’m really proud of the fact that I wrote so consistently in college, and I hope that readers use those posts however they see fit.

And now, if you’re still reading: thank you so much. Thank you especially if you’ve stuck with me through the many years of posts on this blog. I firmly intend for this not to be the last. I can always be reached on social media— I don’t use Twitter anymore, but my Instagram and Facebook are active— and through the contact form on this website.

Thank you so much for reading.

Autistic Burnout: On Being My Phone

My phone is on the charger right now.

It’s been on the charger for a little while, probably at least an hour. I’m not sure whether or not it’s reached full charge yet, but I would be willing to bet money on the probability of it not being fully charged yet. I had to plug it in when I got home from work today, because it was at 1% battery and hanging on for dear life. When I left home this morning, on my way to work, my phone was about 75% charged. If you are good at math— which I am not, but I guess this isn’t a very difficult math problem— you will be able to draw the conclusion from this that my phone lost all its battery while I was at work today. A time during which I was barely using my phone at all, for the record.

For important context, I have an iPhone 6. Yes, I know. I need to get with the times. If you’re reading this blog, even if it’s for the first time, you’ll know that I’m autistic— and if you somehow clicked on this blog without knowing that, then congratulations, now you do know. Despite the fact that I’ve written plenty around this topic as a general concept before, I’ve never dedicated a post entirely to the phenomenon of being autistic and dealing with change. That isn’t my objective for the post today, but I can point you to this post from the beginning of this academic year for a good touch on the subject of change. I can also point you to this post about dorm housing for a more concrete application of my resistance to change that deals with something more concrete and closer to my phone situation.

All of that to say, the reason I haven’t replaced my phone is because I hate change. Even change that’s for my own benefit, such as upgrading my smartphone so that I’m not attempting to operate all of my communication via a device that Apple is very determined to sabotage so that I’ll have to buy a newer version, is extremely difficult for me to stomach. This is why I’m still kicking it with an iPhone 6 that loses all its battery from doing nothing at all.

But at this point, since we are now on the fifth paragraph of this blog post, you may be asking yourself a very valid and relevant question. The question would be this: Madison, why are you talking about your phone?

Good question. I’ll tell you why. Today, I want to talk about being my phone.

In other words, I want to use my phone as a metaphor. I’m going to treat the concrete object of my old-but-trusty cell phone as a model for a certain problem that I want to talk about as the topic of today’s blog post. You’ll notice, by the way, that it’s not Tuesday. It’s also been a little longer than two weeks since I wrote the last post, so I’m failing in my objective to write approximately every two weeks, and for that, I apologize. As I’ve said many times before, including in this post where I came back from dormancy, I am very determined to keep this blog running. I just can’t commit to a writing schedule, because of reasons which will become apparent to you once I do this thought experiment wherein I compare myself to my cell phone.

As you may be able to discern based on the introductory paragraphs in this post, my phone battery health is not very good at all. I’ve had others suggest to me that I should get the battery replaced. This is probably a decent suggestion, but my phone is also so old that I feel like replacing the battery would be a moot point. It would be easier just to upgrade, but, as we already went over, my autistic brain really doesn’t love the idea of having to get used to a new phone, especially considering that I’ve had this phone since my freshman year of college. I had the same phone from seventh grade— when I first got a phone— until I finished high school, so you may be able to sense a pattern about my hesitancy to update my electronics.

Again, I promise that all of my dwelling on the shortcomings of my cell phone’s operating system will make sense. I am telling you so much about my phone because I think that my phone and I have something in common. We’re tired, and we’re running out of things left to give.

I’ve written before on this blog about the idea of social battery, or the idea that each autistic person has a certain capacity for social situations, and that when we reach capacity, our “battery” is “drained.” Because of my use of my cell phone battery as a stand-in for my own energy in this post, I should clarify that I’m not speaking specifically about social battery. I’m speaking about something a little more pervasive than that: namely, autistic burnout. The reason I’m my phone is that I am burned out. It’s beyond what I thought was possible. I want to unpack that a little.

So I’m nearing the end of my first year of grad school. It’s very hard to believe that I’m already just about halfway done with my two-year program. It’s also hard to process that, at this time next year, I’ll be in a position where I have to think about what comes next— even sooner than that, actually, because making plans for the following year can and should start early, as this post from college demonstrates. We aren’t going to talk about my crippling fear of the future and of growing up in this blog post, although we probably should at some point, since it’s extremely relevant to my “autistic journey” or whatever you want to call it. The point of this paragraph is for me to tell you that I’m almost at the end of the year. This, obviously, necessitates a little more schoolwork than is regularly scheduled.

But okay. Whatever. I can deal with extra schoolwork during finals and busy times of the year. I’ve done it a million times before, and I wrote about it here during college, among other places. The difference between those times and now is that I never felt quite as burned out during those times as I do right now.

Now, you may be thinking: But Madison, you wrote about burnout on this blog in college! It’s true. I did do that. I actually did it multiple times. I would go through periodic internal debates about whether or not I had reached a new, unfixable stage of burnout. I want to be kind to my college self while writing this post, and I don’t want to invalidate what she went through. She was dealing with a lot. I don’t know why I’m writing about myself in the third person; sorry. I was dealing with a lot in college. I had an experience as an undergrad that was, at the end of it all, completely net positive and full of good things— but that doesn’t mean that college wasn’t hard for me. It was. I struggled with my mental health, faced social challenges, and more often than not overbooked myself— plus, I was in college during a pandemic, which was its own bag of issues for all college students, not just autistic ones.

So college was, at many points, a challenge. And again, I don’t want to discredit the struggles I went through. But the thing I keep thinking to myself, as I reflect on where I am now mentally versus where I’ve been, is this: college me had no idea what burnout really meant.

I know this sounds weird, because, like I already said, I wrote multiple times throughout college about the idea of struggling with “permanent burnout.” The best way I can explain this now, with almost a year’s removal from the environment of college (we just passed the one-year anniversary of this post, which made me realize how long it’s really been), is that the burnout I struggled with in college was a combination of regular college student stress and the usual difficulties of autism.

What I’m going through now is undoubtedly different. Right now, I am my phone.

It’s like this: I lose my energy from doing little to nothing at all. I can wake up fully rested from a perfectly good night’s sleep (fully “charged,” if you will), and still go through my day exhausted. Even the smallest of tasks, things that shouldn’t use up a person’s energy, feel insurmountable. My to-do list a few days ago had three items on it: do laundry, write my work schedule on my calendar, and complete a simple task for my research job. I did not complete the to-do list, despite having hours to do so.

I am my phone. My whole day, I feel like I’m hanging on by one percent. Communication has gone completely out the window. The act of returning a text— something I have always been awful at— is unthinkable. Don’t even get me started about emails. I’m going about my entire schedule on an absolutely-necessary basis. If it’s not an emergency, a work obligation, or something for an academic grade, I can’t fathom doing it.

I am my phone. Even the things that used to come easy feel harder. I keep repeating to myself that I’m not the person I used to be, the person I was proud of being when I finished college, and it makes me sad. I feel like I’m making backward progress, not forward progress. I’m losing skills I used to have. There are some days I don’t even feel like a person— more of a sorry excuse for one.

There’s a term for all of this, and I’ve read plenty about it online. This is called autistic burnout. I know, I know. I’ve probably said this before on the blog. Autistic burnout is prevalent in adults who are seen as “higher functioning,” and there are not many resources for us in terms of combating it. I want to point you, in a rare occasion of linking externally, to this really informative article for a better definition of autistic burnout than I can give you myself. It probably says a lot about my current level of exhaustion that I can’t even fathom coming up with a definition for the thing I’m experiencing.

Now, I want to address a couple of things. First of all: yes, I know that I am being very dramatic. This is my blog, and I get to be dramatic on it. I’m also being honest, so maybe my honesty is dramatic. This is the reality of how I feel on my worse days, and I’ve been having a pretty good string of bad days lately. The best way I can explain this is that a busy schedule and the impending end of the academic year have combined, stirred up my volatile emotional state, and added to the burnout I was already feeling. It’s basically like the perfect storm, and here we are. I haven’t gone a day without crying in over a week.

I keep joking that I’m “procrastinating my meltdown.” I can tell that a meltdown is coming, and I, quite frankly, do not have time to have one. I think what’s happening in response to that is that my brain keeps eking out “bits” of a meltdown, and it’s coming out little by little rather than all at once. I’m not sure that this is better.

Another thing I want to address is that I’m hoping this is temporary, but I’m not so sure exactly how it’s going to look to recover from this burnout. A very fantastic way to complete the phone metaphor in this post would be to say I need to “find my charger,” but even when I spend long amounts of time “on the charger,” I don’t feel any better. No amount of time relaxing at home or engaging in special interests is making the burnout any better, even if those things provide temporary relief from the overwhelming-ness of it all.

So how do I fix it? Well, that’s a great question. Every autistic burnout advice post I’ve read online gives the same suggestions, which might work for some people, but are useless for me: take time off work/school! (I cannot.) Spend time in special interests! (I’m already doing that, with all my limited free time.) Reduce stimuli! (I don’t even know what this means.) Adapt your schedule so it’s less overwhelming! (People are able to do this?)

Unlike my phone, I can’t have my battery changed or something. The solution, as with so many other autistic struggles (especially as an adult, I’m finding more and more), is apparently just to hope it gets better. When my semester ends, I am hopeful that my schedule will at least be a little less fast-paced and packed, which might allow me some more time to spend on the charger— but who knows what will happen when I go back to school in the fall. It’s making me sufficiently anxious and upset to think that this might get worse before it gets better.

But from my perspective, at least right now, there are very limited answers or solutions for autistic adults. Like an iPhone 6, there’s nothing you can do to help us. The world isn’t made for us, and that’s why we struggle so much to fit into it.

One more thing before I go. The last time I wrote a big, dramatic post like this, I went off the map for months. I am not doing that this time. You may not believe me, which I wouldn’t blame you for, but I seriously do not want to do that again, because I made myself a promise to keep writing on here even when it’s hard to. You may not get weekly posts from me like you did in college, but you’ll hear from me.

In the meantime, there is definitely schoolwork I should be doing. The next time you hear from me, I suspect my semester will be over. Hopefully I might feel a little better by then. If you pray, I could use it! Here’s where else you can find me.

Next Time: I’ll do a “year in review” post for grad school, year 1. I know, I know. The return of a classic.

Disclosing Autism in Grad School

Hello! I’ll begin this post with an apology. This is a timing-related apology, because it hasn’t been exactly two weeks since I last wrote— at this point, it’s been a little more than that— and the last time you heard from me, I did mention that I was going to try and get into a schedule of writing roughly every two weeks. I recognize that my use of the word “roughly” in that promise was intentional, and was probably meant to account for timing discrepancies like the one I’m now returning from, but I do really want to try and stick to that as something of a schedule. So I’m apologizing to you now, and getting it over with. At least I’m not coming back from the dead the way I did in February.

In any event, I’m here now, and I’m writing a post. I was sitting in my kitchen, looking at my completed Monday to-do list, and trying to decide why I still felt like I had gotten nothing done today despite both completing that to-do list and working on creative writing— and then I decided it was because there was extra free time, and I needed to do something with that free time besides look at memes of my favorite band on Pinterest, so here I am writing a blog. This post is slightly overdue. In my own defense, I’ve been busy, but I’ll get to that. As something of a consolation to you, I know for a fact that my blogging schedule will get much more consistent again once summer hits.

We’re still a little ways out from that, though, so let’s do this post now, and hopefully I’ll feel productive once it’s done. The reason this has taken me a little longer than predicted/expected is because my schedule, right after the time you last heard from me, got completely chaotic the likes of which it hasn’t been since college. This is mainly because, on top of everything else that I already had going on with school and my weekend job, I got a new, additional part-time job. It’s actually the job I mentioned having an interview for in this post. I enjoy the work, but it’s made me very busy when combined with being a full-time student! So please forgive me. Today is the first day I’ve had completely free in several weeks, and that’s because it’s Easter Monday, and I have it off from school.

I’ve now been rambling for three paragraphs about “life update” things that have little to nothing to do with what I actually want to write about today, so I’m sorry about that, too. Although I do tend to do that at the outset of pretty much every post I write on this blog, so if you’ve been reading me for awhile, you probably are used to it. If you’re new… well, you might want to accept that I tend to ramble at the start of my blog posts. It’s like my way of warming up.

The post I intend to write, which I will now begin to focus on topically, is one I’ve actually been promising to you for many months. I think I first brought up the idea of writing this post in a end-of-post “Next Time” thing that didn’t come true circa my cluster of posts on the entry to grad school, and then I might have even promised it to you one other time since then and not followed through. Today, I’m keeping the promise: I want to write about the “disclosure moment” in grad school.

But what is the disclosure moment? I’ve written about it once before, in this post from college. The disclosure moment is my non-scientific way of referring to the moment when I actually let people know that I’m autistic, since, as I’ve written about variously (like here, for example), I don’t “seem autistic,” at least not to the average neurotypical who doesn’t know what traits to look for. I might not even “seem” autistic to another autistic person, or to a neurotypical who knows autistic people, just because autism manifests differently in every person, and what one person expects an autistic person to look like might not be what all autistic people are like. I also use masking as a social defense mechanism. The name of this blog has the sarcastic “High-Functioning” in quotes for a reason.

So I want to talk today about the idea of “disclosing” my autism in grad school, and what that’s looked like so far. If you can believe it, I’m almost done with my first year of my program. I really don’t want to talk about that right now, so we won’t, but it is helpful context with the passage of time, because it situates us in a certain place with regard to the amount of time I’ve spent in this place that’s still relatively new.

First, I’ll do a little precursor for context. I’ve written a little on this blog before on the idea of being “openly autistic,” a term which still sits a little weirdly with me even years after I heard it for the first time. I’m not in the mood to rant about aspects of autism activism online which I’ve found problematic or unrepresentative of my experience, but I do need to use that idea of being “openly autistic” in this post, because it’s somewhat relevant— although I won’t use that phrasing, because it doesn’t work for me personally. Instead, I’ll say it like this: people knew I was autistic in high school and in undergrad.

In high school, this was because I made it known— but it took up until almost the end for me to do it. I got diagnosed with autism halfway through my freshman year of high school, and I disclosed being autistic to handful of people here and there, usually as an explanation for some kind of “problem” like struggling with anxiety or routine or whatever. When I was a senior in high school, though, at an event which is now infamous in my memory, I got up at school assembly on Autism Awareness Day in full puzzle-piece garb and explained the importance of the day. The entire thing stressed me out immensely, and was also very impulsive, but I did have some wholesome conversations about it with people around campus, including both classmates and teachers, after the fact. In the end, I count that as a good memory.

College was a slightly more interesting situation. It was when I started this blog, so anyone who was following me on social media would technically be able to find out that I was autistic. I also disclosed that I was autistic in various, isolated situations where I felt it was relevant. The post I wrote about disclosure during college is a good example of a situation where I felt it was relevant. Other examples, off the top of my head, include sitting down with my choir director ahead of our trip to Spain and explaining that I was nervous in the context of having autism, and talking to a professor about the prospect of moving away from home for grad school. Which, spoiler alert, I did not wind up doing. I’ll give you one guess as to why.

I would say that, by the end of college, I had gotten a lot more comfortable talking about my autism in public. The perfect testament to this is the public talk I gave, right around this time last year, about living with autism, as part of a series of talks put on by my school’s intercultural center. It was one of the best parts of my senior spring.

Then my environment changed, and I went to grad school. Now I’m in an interesting position: once again, nobody knows I’m autistic. This faces me with a decision, namely, whether or not to tell people.

I’m almost a year into my program, and here’s the report: I’ve explicitly disclosed my autism twice. The first time was almost by accident, and the second was very much on purpose. I say “explicitly” because I’ve had a number of situations where I speak vaguely about “having an invisible disability” but not naming autism as said disability. Those have been interesting situations, but they deserve their own post, so we’ll do that later.

Instead, today, I’ll tell you about the two times I have explicitly disclosed my autism in grad school. We’ll start with the first, which was many months ago now. I was having a random conversation with an acquaintance from my program in the student lounge. I can’t even recall what we were talking about, but I remember him mentioning something about the Boston social scene. I explained, completely offhandedly, that I was autistic and didn’t get out much due to social difficulties. He looked taken aback, and then said, “But you understand sarcasm so well!” That was basically the extent of that disclosure moment.

The other disclosure moment was to a professor. It happened midway through last semester, right around the time I wrote this post and went off the map from the blog. In other words, my mental health was really suffering because of the transition. The professor I disclosed to was my research advisor, and I was behind on work because of feeling so burnt out. I felt that I had no other explanation for my lack of productivity, except for autism-related issues, and so I had to disclose. My professor was very kind about it, and advised me to take care of myself.

I feel like this post has been somewhat anticlimactic in that there’s not much more to say about the disclosure moment so far in grad school, but maybe that’s the point. Having to make the decision as to whether I want to share about being autistic with other people has always been interesting for me. Like I said earlier in this post, having this blog in public on my social media does technically make my autism openly discernible to anyone who chooses to learn it, but I really don’t think there are that many people who know me in person who read this blog who didn’t already know that I was autistic. If you are learning that I’m autistic from reading my blog, um… surprise, I guess?

But I guess this is what I mean about having an “invisible disability.” It really is invisible— at least, if you’re not sure what to look for. And because autism never looks the same from person to person, it can sometimes be really difficult to identify. If you take nothing else away from this post, maybe remember that autism could be anywhere, including in someone you know!

And by the way— happy Autism Awareness & Acceptance Month! I didn’t do a post on April 2nd this year, probably much to the disappointment of Past Me, but you can read this post, for example, to get an idea about World Autism Awareness Day and see a glimpse into my thoughts on the way we talk about autism with regard to activism. I actually want to talk more about this before April ends, so stay tuned there.

For now, I’m signing off, and I’m glad I did this today. Here’s where else you can find me, and happy Easter and/or Passover if you’re celebrating the recent spring holidays!

Next Time: On autistic burnout.

9 Months Since College Graduation… Now What?

Okay, so… first of all, I actually meant to do this yesterday. I’m trying to settle into an unofficial “writing approximately every two weeks” schedule on this blog, after making my great return in February to end my very long hiatus, and I fully intended to follow through on that unspoken promise to myself yesterday… except then a huge winter storm happened. Long story short, I was without electricity all day yesterday, and I’m using today to catch up on the giant to-do list I made for yesterday of which absolutely nothing got done because I couldn’t access electronics. This is what happens when all of your productivity happens on your computer. Without your computer, you can’t do any of it. I would have been a completely useless member of society 100 years ago. Except maybe not, because of the whole writing thing.

But anyway. None of that is even close to the point. The point is I completely intended to do this yesterday, and I didn’t. My apologies. At least I’m doing it now!

I also have to gear up emotionally a little bit for the post I’m about to write, but I’m going to do my very best not to get emotional here. Partly because I don’t have the time in my day today to become emotional and therefore unproductive, and also because I’m trying to approach this topic with a perspective that’s more educational for you than reflective for me. Even though I do a great deal of self-indulgent reflection on this blog (see the most recent post, and even the post before that for examples), I also want you to learn things. So here we are.

The topic I listed for today at the end of the last post was that I’d do some reflection on college now that I’ve been out for over six months. I realize now that I’ve actually been out of college for closer to a year. It was at this time a year ago that I was starting to realize how quickly graduation was approaching. Actually, this is the one-year anniversary of what I affectionately refer to as “the best week ever,” that being spring break of my senior year, when, among other things, my special interest writing brain finally found its groove for the first time in over two years.

Looking back, I actually view March of 2022 as a turning point in a lot of ways. I always considered the return from spring break as the “home stretch” of a year of college— coming back from spring break was when it started to feel like the semester was passing really quickly, and that was even more so the case during my senior year, when I was wrapping up academic stuff and doing really cool things in my college community. (Actually, on this topic, I am currently in my first week back from spring break for this current semester, so we’ll see whether the principle holds up in grad school as well.) I even felt like this in high school, to a certain extent— coming back from spring break means the semester is about to start passing by really quickly. Before you know it, it’ll be May.

But we’re about a year removed from the start of my favorite part of my favorite year of college. And I want to do some reflecting on college in general, now that I’ve been out of it for awhile.

I’ll begin with a brief story. I have a dear friend who graduated from my college one year ahead of me. As such, my senior year of college was his first year out of college, so he was “out in the real world” for a year before I got there. I remember a conversation with him midway through my own senior year, after he had been out for awhile, in which we were discussing my approaching graduation. He told me the following (I am paraphrasing): “It won’t really hit you until it’s been about six months, and then it’ll hit you hard.”

He was right.

I know that I did my fair share of reflecting on college in the immediate wake of graduation. I reported to you once I’d been out of school for about a month, and I wrote intermittently throughout the summer. I wasn’t really feeling the weight of missing college when I was writing during the summer. I only vaguely alluded to it when I came back and wrote in the fall a few times. You might notice that right around the time I “went off the map” from this blog was when I hit the six-month mark from my college graduation.

Looking back, I actually don’t think that was a coincidence. I think that it’s a direct testament to the fact that my friend was right. For sure, the time leading up to and immediately after college graduation was an emotional experience, during which I was saying goodbye to a whole life I’d become very familiar with over the course of four years— but it didn’t really hit me how much I was going to miss it, until I had been away from it for awhile.

That’s where I am now. I’m in this very interesting state of recognizing that college is only four years, and I got my four, and they’re over now, and my college isn’t the place I can be anymore because it’s no longer the specific time and place for me. At the same time, I miss college. I don’t miss it in the sense that I want to go back— like I said, the time and place for me to be at college is in the past. But I miss the experiences I had while in college.

There’s also something else going on, which is very much related to my nostalgia for my college experience. Make no mistake: I loved college. I wrote, at length, on this blog about how much I loved my college, particularly in the time when I was preparing to say goodbye. But I find myself wondering, now that I’ve been out for awhile, how much more I would have loved college if I had made the best of it for the first couple of years.

I’ve told you before that I only felt I was “getting used to” college right at the point that COVID hit. I wrote a post about that, which I’ve come to link many times over the course of reflecting on my college experience, that I think really illustrates that whole idea of “you’re finally settled in, now go home” really well. I often find myself wondering how my college experience would have looked if COVID had never happened. Obviously, this is a hypothetical. COVID did happen. I made the best of my experience given COVID. But I find myself jealous of other people who have gotten or will get to experience college in its full four years, without the interruption of COVID smack in the middle of it. I find myself thinking: wow, I really loved college. Imagine how good of a time I would have had if we were never sent home.

And like I said, this is just a hypothetical. We did get sent home. But I think my “problems” in terms of inhibiting my own college experience had begun long before COVID. I made terrible use of my freshman year. When everyone else was settling in, making friends, and getting involved, I was locking myself in my room, struggling with my mental health, and refusing to put myself out there. This isn’t to say that my mental health struggles were confined to my freshman year, because, as posts on this blog will demonstrate, that is very much not the case. But I think my freshman year was a “failure” in that I let everything get in the way of “settling in” at college.

Now, you might say: Madison, let your past self off the hook! She was doing her best. And yeah, I get that. My past self probably was doing her best. But I regret the way I spent my freshman year (and the first bit of my sophomore year, although things did start getting better then) because I see it now as wasted time. COVID, which I could never have seen coming, took my sophomore year (and parts of my junior year) away from me, but I took my freshman year away from myself.

None of this can be changed, so there’s no real use dwelling on it. But I will say that when I look back on college, all of my fondest memories are from my senior year and the latter half of my junior year. This was when I was really enjoying myself. And these are the parts I miss most now.

I’ve been at this awhile, and I’m not sure if any of it is coherent. I guess this has turned out to be mostly a reflection post, rather than anything informative. I do hope it gives you an idea of where I’m at in terms of reminiscing on college, now that it’s been awhile. I’m completely certain that my friend’s warning, about the fact that it would “hit me” six months after graduation, was dead-on correct. This has absolutely contributed to my struggles with mental health this year.

In sum: I was really proud of myself at the end of my senior year of college. I felt like I had become a version of myself that it took a lot of years and a lot of effort to be. I don’t feel like that person anymore; I feel like I’ve made backward progress, like I’ve regressed. I miss the “person I was” while I was finishing college. I wish I still had that confident self-understanding. Now I feel like I’m in the real world, and I’m just muddling my way through it.

But that’s enough for today, and, like I said at the start, I don’t want to get too emotional. I’m going to sign off for now and come back in two weeks, when I’ll finally write something specific that isn’t just broadly reflecting on my own life the way I’ve been doing on this blog ad nauseam pretty much every time you hear from me.

Here’s where else you can find me.

Next Time: On the “disclosure moment” in grad school so far.

What’s New In Special Interests?

Alright, I promised you a post before March 1st, and here I am! I recognize that I’m proverbially rolling in on two wheels in terms of getting the end of February, but in my defense, February is a short month. And given the fact that the gap between this post and the last one I wrote is only two weeks rather than the many months of the previous gap, we’re going to count that as a big win.

I’m going to take a slight detour from “standard” blog content this week. I guess you could argue that there hasn’t been much of a “standard” in the past 6+ months of blogging, since I’ve barely written, and when I have written, it’s been to apologize for not blogging, vent about being overwhelmed, and/or to make false promises about getting back on a schedule, rather than doing anything specifically focused to a topic. I do have ideas for more focused posts which will come to you in the future, but today is going to be a little different.

I’ve done this kind of post maybe one or two times before. When I wrote weekly on this blog while in college, I normally dedicated my posts to doing one of two things: 1.) telling a personal story that somehow relates to the way autism impacts my life (spoiler alert: autism impacts pretty much every area of my life, so there are ample anecdotes to get blogging content out of), or 2.) doing a “general information” post where I would write broadly about a topic, normally some kind of trait, experience, or difficulty that’s shared by the majority of autistic people in one way or another. I want to return to doing both those things on this blog, and I will in the future.

For now, though, I’m doing something else. I guess this post falls more on the end of “personal anecdote” than “general information” post, but it’s very much tied up in my experience of being autistic, so don’t think I’m throwing you a complete curveball here. As I alluded to at the very end of the post from two weeks ago, what I’m going to do today is the following: I want to talk a little bit about my writing.

And because it’s been so long, I think a refresher is in order. I have written very briefly on this blog about my writing. I did a little bit of rambling in this post, the first one I wrote after graduating from college, when I appeared after an unplanned month-long hiatus to explain that the book I was working on had taken over my life. I’ve mentioned here and there that I’ve been writing in the time since it really started to pick up. I haven’t gone into that much detail. Today, I would like to go into some more detail.

So, for anyone reading this who might not know: I write fiction. The genre I write in is mainly young adult fiction, or novels marketed toward a teenage reading audience. This has been a major part of my life since I was a freshman in high school, and, before then, I wrote other things— mainly stories about whatever my special interest was at the time. This did vary, but to give you an example, I spent a good four-year period in middle school writing stories about my special interest, the online game Club Penguin. I say this not to make fun of my past self, but to give an example of how writing has always been “tied up” in my special interest.

You can go to the post linked above if you want to read more about the way my special interests have developed throughout my life. I also wrote here about the relationship between the autistic tendency to hyperfixate and the involvement in “fandom,” or being a really invested fan of a piece of media (such as a video game). In the interest of not getting too tangential, I won’t put myself on blast for writing Club Penguin fan-fiction any more than I already have in this post, but I will say that— and I have said this before— since my special interest in Club Penguin ended, circa the transition to high school, my special interest has been my writing.

The level of obsession has ebbed and flowed. It’s very interesting to now be able to reflect on college and notice the level on which my “investment” in my own writing changed based on the state of my mental health. To give you a very brief overview, here’s what it looked like:

While in high school: I had written six novels and a few novellas. None of them were good, but all of them were very close to my heart. I tried to become a published author, and failed. In hindsight, this was a good thing. My writing was nowhere near ready. What I did well in high school was teach myself to create good characters. Because of the way my autistic brain works, I get very invested in developing my characters. This has always been true, and always will be.

Freshman year: I entered college in the middle of a revision of one of my favorite projects from high school. I finished it in November, and then… basically stopped writing. The transition to college hit me hard, as this blog knows, and I couldn’t get back into my writing once my mental health started to suffer.

Sophomore year: The terrible writing drought had continued throughout the summer, and it pretty much stayed just as bad for various reasons until a little ways into the fall. I started a story I’d been toying with an idea for about a year prior, and once that floodgate opened, it opened hard. It was in a slightly different “category” than what I wrote in high school, and I never considered it “publishable”— but it did help me work on craft. When COVID hit, I got into writing short stories, which was fun and helped pass the time in quarantine, and it further honed my craft.

Junior year: I wrote a little here and there, but then my mental health got bad again, and I had to stop. The drought that resulted was very bad. It lasted over a year, and created this post. I felt like I would never get my special interest back.

Senior year: For the first half of the year, I was writing here and there, but not consistently. I wrote this post about the “perfect storm” of executive dysfunction and writer’s block in February of my senior year, a little over a year ago.

And then something very magical happened.

To this day, I cannot tell you why it happened the way it did. I only know that it happened. When spring break of my senior year of college hit, I tapped into a special interest writing bug so intense that I hadn’t felt the likes of it since high school. This was maybe even more intense than it felt in high school. Not only did I come up with new ideas for stories, but I finally saw visions for how to fix some of the old ones.

So because I finally felt capable, I started writing again. This was most certainly the best thing I’ve done for myself in years.

The time from March 2022 until now has been the most productive writing time of my life so far. I’m clinging to this good feeling with every ounce of my effort, because I’m absolutely terrified of losing it. If I lose my special interest again the way I did in college multiple times, I don’t even know where that will leave me. Considering how difficult grad school is, writing has been my escape. Since November of 2022, I’ve set a goal to write every day by tracking my word count. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of days where I’m busy and don’t have much time, but even a paragraph counts toward the goal to write every day. Not only has this maintained my creative continuity, but it gives me a little piece of special interest joy every day, even if it’s quick.

I’m closing in right now on the final act in a manuscript I’m working on. Provided I finish it by April 25th, this will be the third manuscript I’ve written in a year. Since the beginning of 2023, I’ve written 107,904 words— not including academic writing (which I do a LOT of), posts for this blog, or miscellaneous notes that don’t count toward my tracker.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because this is my autistic brain on my special interest. I don’t exaggerate when I say that my writing has been the major source of my joy for the past year, and I hope with all my heart that I can hang onto this for as long as possible. Special interests take over your life. It’s an absolutely indescribable phenomenon; you have to be autistic to understand it. I’m sorry that I can’t do it more justice, but I hope my rambling has at least given you an idea of how important it is to me.

I also started this post with the intention of telling you specifically what I’m working on. I haven’t done that. And I’ve now been typing for almost 3 single-spaced Google Doc pages without even touching on the publishing piece, which is its own beast, and definitely has to get its own future post. This is all making me realize that I have a lot to say on this topic, which I think is a natural result of being very invested in a hyperfixation. They really don’t exaggerate when they say that autistic people could talk about our special interests for hours.

I guess I can give you a preview of what I’ll write about on this topic in the future: first, all the novels I’m working on now are about autistic teenagers— because that’s what I needed when I was in high school, and I could never find it. Second, trying to become a published author is so difficult. It’s also the thing I want more than anything. I’ve been working very hard at it, but there’s an element of luck in the process that no amount of effort can guarantee you. We’ll have to talk sometime about being autistic and obsessed with reaching a goal you’re probably more likely to win the lottery than reach.

But for now, I think I’m done. I’ve been going for awhile, and I’m satisfied with my delivery. We’ll see how coherent this post is to anyone besides me, I guess, when I put it up. If you’ve read this far, I take my hat off to you. This was not the most riveting content.

Nonetheless, I’m glad I wrote it. I’ll have more soon! Here’s where else you can find me.

Next Time: Now that I’ve been out of college for 6+ months, I have some reflections from the other side.

An Update

Oh, come on. You didn’t seriously think I’d left the blog for good, did you?

…Well, okay. Actually, in your defense, it might have been easy for one to be led to that conclusion. After all, I’m surfacing on here for the first time in, like, six months. I did not intend for the break I took from the blog to be that long, but then again, you’ve heard me say that before, in posts from last summer and even this past fall where I promised you more consistent content and then promptly did not deliver on it.

I don’t really have an excuse for breaking those promises, aside from the fact that various circumstances in my life caused me to break them. The point is that now I’m here. And even though I’ve never taken quite as long of a pause from this blog as I did from October until right now, I’m also coming back to it rather than abandoning it altogether. I think that does count for something. Rest assured that I never really intended to leave this blog dormant entirely, so, despite the long pause, I was planning to do this (as in write on it again) the whole time. I just… wasn’t entirely sure when I was going to get around to it.

I’m getting around to it now.

So here we are! It’s Tuesday, fittingly. It’s also Valentine’s Day, but don’t worry. I’m not going to subject you to any terrible holiday specials this time. I have no desire to write on anything related to Valentine’s Day on the blog right now, not because I’m fundamentally opposed to the holiday or anything like that, but because it’s just not part of my current breadth of material to cover. I need to address more basic things, like “where have you been for the past 6 months, Madison?,” before I transition back into the monstrosities that are holiday specials.

In summary: while it does happen to be Valentine’s Day, that’s also the last I’ll be mentioning the current holiday in today’s post. Instead, I’m going to answer the question I posed above. Where have I been for the past six months? And what gives? Why am I back, yammering on in your email or on your browser or wherever you’ve run into this post?

Well, the short answer is that I stopped writing for a long time because I wasn’t sure what to write about, and then I felt guilty for not writing, so I’m coming back and writing again. The long answer is, as you might be able to guess, longer. I’m going to do my best at explaining the psychological explanation for me taking a 6-month break from the blog that I never actually intended to institute permanent hiatus on.

As you know very well, I started this blog for a specific purpose: to document being autistic while in college. As you also know, I graduated from college in May of 2022. My graduation began a summer-long hiatus punctuated by occasional posts updating you on my writing, AKA my special interest, and also apologizing to you for not writing more often. Around this time last year, I’d found out about my acceptance to graduate school, and I started my first semester in August of 2022. I proceeded to write very intermittently for about a month, usually surrounding the topic of being deeply overwhelmed and resistant to change, and then I wrote a glorified vent of a post in October, and went off the map.

Now I’m here. In February. Coming back to the blog, so I can reinstate some sense of normalcy in my life.

This isn’t to say that everything in my life has been completely abnormal since I started graduate school. If you read any of my handful of posts in the fall, you’ll know that I had a pretty rough go of a transition. I can’t lie: it’s still kind of rough. But because it’s now February, I have one entire semester under my belt, and I’ve at least gained a valuable skill: understanding the logistical and practical workings of graduate school enough to be familiar with my own schedule as it operates on a day-to-day basis. This has always been an important step for me in major transitions, and I experienced a similar adjustment when I started out as an undergraduate. It does make it easier to get through your average day when you understand what’s going to happen within that day.

The question, I guess, is whether I’m “used to” graduate school yet. I would say the answer is probably both yes and no. I’m “used to it” in that I know what to expect (see above), which, again, is important, and helps to minimize routine-related anxiety— but I don’t think I’m what you would consider “settled in” yet. If you’ve read way into the history of this blog, you’ll know that it took me a year and a half, right up until COVID hit, to “settle in” at my college. Of course, when COVID hit, we had a whole other host of problems on our hands, but by the time things got back to “normal,” I was feeling settled into that environment.

In graduate school, I’m learning a whole new environment. It’s been the most difficult transition of my life so far, and that’s saying something, considering the rough go of it that my freshman year of college was. I’m learning a lot about the way autism impacts every single part of my life and daily functioning. It’s not just obvious things like sensory issues, social difficulties, and mental health— autism impacts everything about the way I go about my day. You’d think I would have realized this sooner, given that I’ve been blogging about living with autism for four years and some change now, but I guess you really do learn new stuff every day.

I’ve said before on this blog, and I’ll no doubt say again, that the more I reflect on my experiences with autism, the more I realize the extent to which autism serves as an explanation for the way I experience virtually everything. From the good to the bad, the major to the borderline insignificant, and everything in between— autism is everywhere in my life. In my more difficult moments over the past few months, I’ve joked with my relatives that “autism is ruining my life.” This statement makes no sense, obviously. The autism has always been there, and it’s always made my life difficult in unique ways. I’m just noticing it more and more, particularly in this transition period.

I don’t want to be so ambitious as to say that I can cover all the various things that have contributed to my 6-month blogging pause in this one post, especially because I’m conscious that I’m already nearing my usual limit for post length, and I’ve pretty much just rambled for two Google Doc pages. What I will do is give you a comprehensive life update, to make up for what you missed, and then I’ll explain where we go from here.

• If it was not already obvious, I finished my first semester of graduate school. It was very hard. I disliked the change very much. To my own credit, I performed really well academically— in fact, my grades, when they came back at the end of the semester in December, were better across the board than any other set of grades I’ve ever earned, including during undergrad. I took this to mean that, despite how hard it was, clearly the semester had gone well in some way, and I was doing something right.

• Winter break was from mid-December to mid-January. I didn’t do much, but what I did do was write. Over the course of the fall, I worked on my second novel of the calendar year— I’d written the first in the spring, from April to the start of June, and I wrote a little about it in this post. I’m now working on my third in a one-year period. It feels really good to have my special interest back, after considerable time spent without one.

• In doing some reflection, and also remembering various clinical events in my youth, I’ve realized that I have OCD as a “comorbidity” of my autism. I actually have a diagnosis from when I was very little, but it was part of my botched autism diagnosis saga, so I sort of forgot about it and discounted it for a long time. This has helped me understand a lot about the specific way in which I become anxious and obsessive about things. That doesn’t mean it’s gotten any easier to deal with that— it’s still one of the worst feelings I experience— but I’m grateful to at least have the language for it.

• My second semester of my master’s program has been going on for about four weeks. As I said a little earlier in this post, I’m mechanically adjusting to the environment. I’m still working on “settling in.” Because my program is only two years, I’ve reached the conclusion that I might never settle in. But I think that’s okay. If I can replicate the academic success of last semester, I’ll consider myself to be doing a pretty good job.

• I’m applying for a part-time job that I really hope I get. My interview is this week. Cross your fingers for me!

The very over-simplified explanation for why I spent so much time away from this blog was not because I didn’t want to write, but because I felt like I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to have any wisdom on living with autism when it felt like my autism was slowly killing me. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but that’s how it felt for parts of the fall semester. I still feel pretty overwhelmed, but I’m coming to the conclusion that writing this blog has always been a good way to filter my feelings in a healthy way— and maybe help other people understand, even if only a little.

I’m not sure whether I’ll go back to writing every single week. That feels like a commitment I’m not sure I can make, given my schedule, my schoolwork, and my tendency to get deeply overwhelmed given this new and confusing state of my life. However, I am committing to not go on any more 6-month hiatuses. Or even 1-month hiatuses. I’m going to write on here often enough to keep it going as a somewhat coherent documentation of my experience. I think we need adult narratives just as much as we need college narratives when it comes to living with autism, so I’m deciding to do that.

In the meantime, I think I have at least a loose idea of what I want to write about next time. You’ll see me then. I’ll get another post up before the end of February, but I’m not 100% sure on the timing yet. Tuesday is actually a terrible day to be doing a consistent blog, since Tuesday is my “get schoolwork done” day this semester, so I might change the blog day at some point in the future. For now, just know you’ll hear from me soon.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for reading. I really appreciate you taking the time for this post, despite my long absence. Here’s where else you can find me.

Next Time: I actually want to talk about my writing. Sorry. Brace yourself for rambling.

Thrown Off

Okay… I have to write this post. If I don’t write this post right now, at the moment I’m thinking about it, then I’m just going to put it off for the millionth time, and then, a few days from now, I’ll inevitably tell myself hey, you should write a blog post, and then just not do it, and be back at square one. Additionally, I have to write this post because if I don’t write this post, the gap between the last time I had a blog and the next blog will just keep getting wider and wider, and, well… we don’t want that.

So I’m writing this post. I’m not sure it’s going to be the most coherent post that ever hit this blog. In fact, it might be one of the least coherent. But I’m writing it, and I’m going to try to put it up tonight, and I think that’s what matters.

It’s October 19th. You last heard from me on September 1st, at which point I was admitting that the difficulties of adjusting to a brand new schedule thanks to starting grad school were definitely hitting me. I was also very optimistic in the post on September 1st, thinking that I was going to be able to get back into the posting-once-weekly routine that I stuck to for the entirety of undergrad. As evidenced by the fact that it’s now October 19th and I’m writing on this blog for the first time since then, that clearly isn’t happening. I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep, so I won’t tell you that I’m going to get back into the posting-once-weekly rhythm, at least not at the moment. I will tell you that I want to write this post now to make a point about why I’ve been gone so long.

And, well… there isn’t one big, groundbreaking reason. The reason I’ve been gone so long is very simple. Starting grad school has been an incredibly difficult transition, and nothing feels right. That’s why I’ve been away from this blog. I’m having an incredibly difficult time. In the weirdest way, I think I might be having an even more difficult time with this transition than with starting college. I know that doesn’t make any sense at all, since I’m living at home, not in a dorm, and I should have been able to fall into this routine way more easily than with the beginning of undergrad, where literally everything was new.

Except… it’s not easy. It’s the opposite of easy. I want to do my very best to summarize some of the things I’ve experienced over the course of the past month and a half, but I’m not even sure I’ll be able to do this justice. This will be my best attempt, and we’ll see where we wind up at the end of the post.

I’ve started graduate school. You already know this, because, at the time of my last blog post, I was in the thick of the first week of classes. As I mentioned then, I started out pretty strong on Day 1, and then the newness of everything sort of “caught up with me” on Day 2, and it was getting really stressful right around the point I wrote out that post and put it up. I wrote a post on the eve of starting grad school, but I don’t think the me who wrote that post fully comprehended just how weird I was going to feel once classes actually started.

It’s now about halfway through the semester. People keep asking me how I’m doing. Earlier in the semester, I felt pretty comfortable admitting that I was having a hard time with the transition, but my answer to this question now has taken a form that’s mostly a lie: “Oh, I think I’m getting used to it!”

I am not getting used to it. I just say this to people to be nice. No one, with a casual how’s school question, is signing up to hear about how your disability is making your life completely miserable because you apparently can’t handle basic change.

I don’t want to sound like a downer, because this is very much a first world problem. There have been no major, external problems in my life since starting grad school. I’m lucky to have the opportunity to go to grad school in the first place. This was what I wanted to do after graduating from college, and this is the path I chose. It’s not even the act of attending grad school that’s causing me to feel the way I feel right now. It’s the fact that things have changed. It’s the whole new routine of my life, and it’s the fact that I’m now entering the ‘real world,’ the start of actual adulthood, and I feel by no means equipped to deal with anything in the real world.

But I don’t think, even as I’m writing this out, that this makes any sense at all. I want to try to walk this back a little, and explain in less emotional terms what I’ve been experiencing since school started.

To put it very simply: I feel completely thrown off. This happens to me whenever I experience a major routine change, but I think this is the most severe it’s ever been in my life. The next, closest thing I can compare to this is the way I felt when COVID hit, and my schedule suddenly looked very different than it had. But this is very different, because I’m experiencing this huge change in my schedule with a consciousness that this is permanent. I will never go back to the way my routine was as an undergrad— something which I got very, very used to, and came to feel comforted by. This is my new normal, to use a COVID term. And that’s the part that my autism is having so much trouble with.

Purely from a comfort standpoint, I recognize that there are elements of my current situation that could be worse. For example, as already mentioned, I’m living at home while attending school. This is hugely preferable to the alternative, which would be living in an apartment by myself. Even though I pretty much had dorm living down to a science while at college, that was a very different situation, since it was, in essence, “temporary,” and I still considered my permanent address to be my parents’ house. Moving back here has been a return to a familiarity that existed all through undergrad; the only difference is that I’m not going back and forth between here and a dorm.

So that isn’t a problem. The problem is everything else. I keep thinking that I miss the way I used to be, while I was an undergrad, because I had finally reached a point as an undergrad where I really felt like a socially functional human being, and, to be very blunt about it, I’m just… not that, anymore. I barely even text people back, and it’s worse and more apparent now than it ever was during school breaks as an undergrad. I am, in essence, ruining every relationship I have with people outside of my family, because I’m in a complete communication shutdown.

Why am I bringing any of this up? Because, I’m realizing, this is what happens when an autistic brain experiences a gigantic life change. I’m starting to think that I genuinely cannot handle the real world. I know that this sounds very melancholy, but it’s more or less a reflection of the way I feel. I know that I’ll be fine, and that I’ll eventually “get used to” this, because there’s legitimately no other option— but I have no idea what the path toward that is going to look like. If the past month and a half have been any indication, it’s not going to be quick.

For the first time in a long time, I’m genuinely ashamed of being autistic right now. The entire process of trying to adjust to this new life has been so mortifying. I cried in public yesterday, on campus at my school, and I could feel people looking at me funny. The reason I was crying was I ran into a problem which required fixing and created stress, but I assure you that a neurotypical person would not have cried over this. This isn’t the first time this has happened. I cannot get it to stop.

To be honest? I am completely lost as to what to do next. Like I said earlier, I know that I’ll be fine— but I think I’m in a very difficult place right now, the likes of which I haven’t been in awhile. I can’t think of any other way to describe this other than that I feel so incredibly thrown off. I wonder if maybe this is the way I felt when I moved away to college, and it was just too long ago for me to vividly remember. I feel like I would have remembered feeling like this. This is why I think this is something new.

I want to write more about this, but I think I’ve exhausted my motivation for the day, so I’m going to put this up and hope for the best. I apologize for the lack of coherence in this post, but maybe this will give a good and honest glimpse into the brain of an autistic person who’s in the midst of an extremely difficult period of adjustment.

Here’s where else you can find me. I’ll write again soon, but I’m not sure when. I’ll try not to take another six-week hiatus.

Next Time: A LONG hiatus ends.

When Change Hits You

You might have to forgive me in advance, because I have the strong suspicion as I sit down to write this post that this might turn out to be one of those blogs that’s more meant as therapeutic for myself than informative for you. I sincerely apologize. I will also do my best to ensure that this is not the case, but you really never know what can happen, especially on this blog. I should issue an additional preliminary apology for the fact that I’m attempting to write this blog in the twenty or so minutes between right now, when I’m starting it, and the time when my first class of the day starts. I’m going to make my best attempt at getting it done before class kicks off.

So… hello. I’m writing this while sitting in a classroom at my grad school. I guess this was sort of implied, since I already told you I’m waiting for a class to start, but you never know. It could have been a Zoom class. (By the way, very thankfully for my attention span, I don’t actually have any Zoom classes this semester.) I’ve gotten here very early on account of living an hour’s commute away from my new school and wanting to avoid getting stuck in really terrible traffic, which, while it means I have to wake up at an ungodly hour, also does help me actually get here on time.

And it’s the third day of school. For me, anyway. In actuality it’s the fourth, since classes started Monday, but I didn’t have a class until this time on Tuesday morning. I want to make an attempt at writing, in a very broad sense, about this transition. As you know, since you heard from me last week, the lead-up to this transition has been very overwhelming. I told you that you wouldn’t necessarily hear from me on Tuesday of this week, since I correctly anticipated that Tuesday would be a busy day because it was my first official day of classes— but I did promise you a post, so here we are on Thursday. I think that waiting a few days to write this post has actually helped contribute content to the post I’m about to write. All things work out for the best.

So, to begin: I’m back in school. I really took a lot of time for myself this summer, which was very nice, but has sort of given me whiplash in that the re-establishment of a school schedule coming to me all of a sudden has definitely and completely changed the routine that I was previously used to. With this said, I think that this transition has been made a little ‘easier’ by the fact that I’m not starting a full-time job or entering a completely different environment where I know nothing about what to expect. Even though this isn’t the same school that I attended for the four years of undergrad, it’s still a school, and I, as a person who has been going to school my whole life, know how school works. It’s true that grad school is different than any other kind of schooling a person would have had up to the point that grad school starts, but there are still classes, instructors, assignments, and other things that I’m used to.

Make no mistake, though: I’m very much aware that this is not the same place I’ve been for the past four years. I was thinking briefly about the fact that the transition into college was super difficult, and, in fact, was the reason I decided to start writing a blog. I was trying to draw comparisons between that transition, and the difficulties experienced by the me of four years ago, and the transition I’m going through now, from college to grad school. In some ways, those things are similar— but I think there was one marked difference four years ago. I didn’t have a bad high school experience, and I liked my school for what it did for me— but I didn’t miss high school once I got to college.

I think things are a little different here, because I have something to miss. I wrote at length toward the end of senior year about how much I was going to miss being at my particular college, and now that I’m somewhere else, I’m definitely feeling that more. Yesterday, for example, was Wednesday. I wrote a handful of times about my experiences leading music ministry in college, and although I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of my schedule with that while I was there, I will tell you that Wednesday was an important day of the week in that respect, and I got extremely emotional yesterday at the knowledge that I won’t be in that position in that exact way ever again.

But I don’t want to get too much into that, because I think it’ll just make me upset. What I actually want to focus on in this post is the following: the first day was fine. Yesterday was rough. I think it’s finally hitting me that my life is changing in a big way.

And I mean yesterday was really rough. I think that the first day was a little easier because there were a lot of moving parts, and I was preoccupied with making sure I got to class on time, found all the rooms, and had everything I needed. Yesterday was a little easier logistics-wise, but it was emotionally terrible.

To give you a useful example of how bad it was, I’ll tell you this: I cried in public yesterday. It was during church, so I guess that’s better than just doing it randomly in class, but it still wasn’t ideal. I can’t even begin to tell you how deeply embarrassing it is to cry in public when you’re already overwhelmed and you just wish you would stop feeling like that. I feel like this is a deeply autistic experience that I’ve had many times, especially when I’m having trouble with change or transition.

Luckily for me, I didn’t really have to interact with anybody while I was in my state of public emotional distress yesterday— except for a very kind nun, who probably noticed that I was crying but didn’t acknowledge it directly, and just said hi instead— but I was thinking about it while it was happening, and I reached the conclusion that I wasn’t even sure what I would have said if someone had gotten concerned and asked me what was wrong. Honestly, I’m pretty sure that I would have just gotten more upset if confronted about my distressed state, so it’s for the best that I didn’t run into too many people while I was crying. I remember sitting there and thinking that I just couldn’t wait for the day to be over.

It’s the third day of school now, and I’ll be honest: I’m still not feeling great. I think I’m still so in the thick of how I feel that it’s hard for me to summarize or describe it, except by writing this very incoherent blog post. There might be a small benefit in me writing this in real time, that being you’re getting the true, authentic picture of what an autistic person goes through during a big transition like this one— but on my end, it honestly doesn’t feel so great. I want to try and summarize some of these feelings in a more coherent way at some point in the future, but not today.

Class is starting in about five minutes, so I need to wrap things up. If there’s one thing that you take away from this post, it’s that I react to change in a very emotional way. I’m definitely going through that right now, and I’m feeling the growing pains. In a future post, I’ll talk about how embarrassing that is, and how ill-equipped I am to deal with it.

For now, here’s where else you can find me.

Next Time: I take an unintentional hiatus again, and come back to explain why I’ve been struggling.

One week till grad school!

First of all, you should be proud of me. This is now the second Tuesday in a row, after last week, when I’ve actually delivered on a blog post that I promised to write. As you may already know, I sort of went on at length last week about various points related to executive functioning, routine, and the fact that returning to consistency on this blog is a way for me to maintain some level of familiarity in an otherwise very fluid schedule. I’m writing this post now because, in true executive-dysfunction fashion, I’ve spent most of this morning doing absolutely nothing at all, and I can’t stand to do nothing anymore. Writing this will technically check something off of my unwritten ‘list’ for the day, so here goes nothing.

Also, I should apologize. I misled you last week, in the “Next Time” note at the very bottom of the post. I mentioned that I was going to use today’s blog post to attempt to address the recent struggles I’ve been having in the writing field, which is something I’ve gone into vaguely in the past on the “creativity” side, but haven’t really touched the “publishing industry” aspect of. Although I intended to do that today, I think I’m going to hold off. It’s not so much that I have a reason to delay this, but more that I have another idea to write a post, and I think the second idea is more timely as of this exact moment.

So anyway. That was a lot of words to get to the point of what I’m trying to say, which is: I’m not going to blog about the writing stuff today. Because of the way writing is, there will definitely be a lot of opportunity in the future for me to touch on that on this blog. Instead, today, I want to talk about the particular way I’m feeling right now as I anticipate the start of grad school, and how that’s been impacting my state of mind in these last few weeks of summer.

When you last heard from me, in the first proper post following my update earlier this month where I mentioned I’d be getting back to weekly blogging, I took the opportunity to explain in a very long and rambling way that my schedule this summer has basically been nonexistent. Although I have a job where I work on the weekends, the majority of my time this summer has been for myself, which, as I mentioned, has been great for creative writing reasons as well as for the general purpose of rejuvenating, ahead of the start of classes for grad school. As an autistic person, spending a summer on my own time without a structured schedule has felt both complicated and incredibly freeing.

But the truth of the matter is: summer is now coming to an end. A week from today, provided I get into the classes I want to register for, I’ll be on campus at my new school, experiencing my first day of grad school. I don’t think it will come as a surprise to pretty much anyone who either knows me or has read this blog for awhile that I am extremely nervous for this transition. I went through a lot of growing pains when I first started college, and it honestly took me pretty much right up until COVID hit to even feel comfortable on campus.

I’ll do the math so you don’t have to: that’s almost two entire years. My master’s program is, in total, two years long. So by the same logic, this transition is going to take so long to adjust to, that there’s a strong possibility I’ll be just about ready to finish up with the program by the time I finally get comfortable. And yes, okay, the argument could be made that undergrad was different because I was living away from home and the routine displacement was a lot more severe, so of course the transition was extremely hard. But I think something that I’ve been realizing recently is that once I got adjusted to undergrad, that life became my routine. I got extremely used to living away from home for most of the year, while spending breaks and summers at my house. I’ll be living at home for graduate school, so I have the benefit of not having to adjust to living in a whole new place. But I’m still moving from one very familiar school environment to a new one, and I know it’s going to be a lot.

To give you an idea of how the anxiety and anticipation for this transition is affecting me, let me give you a small picture of the past week of my life. I’ve been trying to “get my ducks in a row,” so to speak, for the start of classes, and anyone who has ever started at a new school will know that this requires a lot of enrollment paperwork, onboarding modules/virtual training, and checking small tasks off of a long to-do list. It’s become very obvious to me recently that my autism makes it really difficult for me to intake information when the various to-dos and tasks are all over the place, rather than being listed out in one clear way. Even though I’m pretty sure I have everything taken care of in order to start school, the scattered nature of the enrollment tasks has left me constantly anxious over the past few weeks that I’ve left something out.

I can tell that even the way I wrote the last paragraph conveys my stress over pre-orientation to-do lists, because I’m pretty sure it’s not coherent. I don’t remember feeling this way about this particular part of starting undergrad, maybe because my parents were still handling some of that for me at that point, but maybe also just because I’m feeling the weight of adulthood really starting to sink in.

More broadly, I’m extremely nervous for this change. There are so many unknowns associated with starting at a new school, and I’ve been known to completely spiral into anxiety (and sometimes even write entire, badly crafted novels) over these transitions in the past. I’ve made it no secret on this blog that I hate change, even when that change is in the form of an exciting new opportunity, like grad school. The reason for this is that change alters my routine. When I’m used to something, it’s so hard for me to get excited about the prospect of that thing changing, even if the change is something that has to happen and/or is inevitable.

So, the bottom line right now is this: I have way too much to think about. I’ve definitely noticed my own stress levels picking up for the past couple of weeks, and today, as I stare down the one-week-remaining countdown, I can tell that it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. My hope for the stress dying down is that I’ll feel better once I understand “how things work” in terms of my day-to-day routine with classes and my job at grad school. Once all of that is set in, I should be able to move from the anticipatory anxiety stage into the adjustment stage, and from there on out, things should get a little less stressful.

For now, I’m feeling very anxious. This has begun to interfere with most other parts of my daily functioning, which is something that normally happens to me when I’m experiencing high levels of stress. For example, I’ve been completely unreachable on a social level. I’ve written at length about the concept of going off the map socially before, and the fact that I’m just flat-out awful at maintaining communication with people, which makes me a pretty bad friend— but right now I feel completely socially paralyzed, because of the level of stress that I’m experiencing. I can’t even bring myself to send texts right now, and there have been multiple instances recently of me missing emails because they get buried in my inbox and I get overwhelmed by the amount of incoming information.

For a person who doesn’t understand what it’s like to be inside my head, this may make it sound like I’m either being lazy or just ignoring people because I feel like I can’t be bothered, but I promise you that it’s so much more complicated than that. If I were able to communicate with people like a normal human being, it would probably make my life a lot easier. As it happens, I have an extremely difficult time with that, especially when I’m already on-edge for other reasons.

All of this is probably coming across as extremely scatter-brained, and I apologize. I’m not sure how many times I can reiterate the fact that I’m very nervous for this transition, except to tell you this one last time. I think that writing about it in cycles the way I’ve been doing for several paragraphs is just contributing to my stress, so I should do the best thing for myself and call it quits for this particular post. I hope that, if nothing else, this has given you a glimpse into an autistic person’s brain while processing an impending, major routine change.

The next time you hear from me, classes will have begun. I’ll have plenty to say about the initial onset of the transition, I’m sure. I have orientation this coming Friday, which is arguably a scarier concept than the actual start of classes themselves. We’ll see how it goes. Either way, I’m going to write again next week. Maybe not on Tuesday, but definitely at some point next week.

Here’s where else you can find me.

Next Time: A report on the official start of grad school.

Permanent Vacation

Not only am I doing this post on the specific day I said I was going to last time you heard from me, but I’m even writing it a day in advance. You should seriously be proud of me. After an entire summer of not writing on this blog, I’m back into the swing of things very quickly. Actually, not to turn this into a total autism teaching moment before I’ve even properly introduced the post, but I think writing on this blog on Tuesdays has been such a consistent part of my routine for the past four years that it felt weird not to do it during my summer hiatus. If anything, getting back to this now feels natural.

So, hello. Sorry to start you off with that. I guess it was relevant. I’m back on a Tuesday, after a brief interlude for a random post on a Friday. I was honestly getting super restless about not writing on this blog, and I guess I finally cracked. It’s not that I was actively avoiding writing on here; I was just really struggling to come up with things to write about. I was also definitely taking the time (and yes, it wound up being a lot of time) to process being out of college.

It’s been almost three months since my graduation ceremony. I wrote at considerable length about the idea of getting ready to graduate college, and the fact that I very much didn’t feel ready to take that next step into the “real world” and accept my transition into autistic adulthood. I also wrote after the fact, with the post I put up in June, about some of my reflections a month removed from the graduation ceremony. I think that I definitely have a lot more thoughts about the way my autistic brain has handled no longer being an undergrad, and I’ll plan to share some of them on this blog as I get back into writing here weekly.

But for now, I don’t actually want to write about that. At least, not directly. Instead, I want to fill you in on what I’ve been up to this summer. I can’t exactly account for not having written on this blog, because I think in order to do that, I would have to have some big, concrete reason for taking a two-month hiatus, and I… sort of don’t. I mean, I do have reasons. It’s just none of them are really that big of a deal. In the past, if I’ve skipped a blog post, I usually give you some kind of reason for it, the way I did here. Because I skipped, like, eight weeks’ worth of blog posts… I don’t really have a good reason.

But I do have some general reflections. And hopefully, after this blog post is over, you might understand a little bit what I’ve been up to this summer.

I will now address the title of this post. Apparently, Permanent Vacation is the name of a movie, but I got it from the back of one of my brother’s shirts. In reality, the title of this post comes from a joke I’ve been making with my family all summer, that I’m on “permanent vacation.” Given that two weeks from today, I’ll be in classes at grad school, this is not technically true. But this summer has felt a lot more like a “vacation” than most of the other summers since I got old enough to need a job. Bear with me now while I go on a brief digression. I promise that I will eventually tie autism into this post. In true short-attention-span autistic fashion, I’m taking forever to get to the point.

I touched briefly on my summer job situation when I wrote in June, but to give you an idea of what I’ve actually been doing for these three months away from school, I started out with more responsibilities than I have now. I had a remote, work-from-home job for the first month of summer, helping out one of the professors from my college with the last bit of a research grant. Once the money had run out from that, I was sort of “on my own” effective immediately. The only “job” I’ve had for the remainder of the summer has been church music, which I did during the school year as well. And even though that’s a perfectly good job that I don’t intend on stopping, the “hours” for a job when you’re a church musician are… pretty much one hour per day, twice a week, unless you get lucky and there’s an extra church day in there somewhere. For example, when this post goes up, “yesterday” (as in Monday) was an extra church day, so I go to work on a day that wasn’t Saturday or Sunday.

But as you can imagine, even though it is a job, being a church musician doesn’t take up a significant amount of time, at least not when stacked up against actual part-time summer jobs, like the one I held for two summers at a farm stand or even last summer’s eight-week research job.

You might be asking yourself, well, Madison, why didn’t you get a “real job” this summer? And the answer is… honestly? I was really burned out when I finished school.

I mean really burned out. I don’t know if I ever actually directly addressed this, but I was working a lot at my primary on-campus job during the entirety of senior year, more than I ever had before. Coupled with the fact that I was working on senior theses, applying to grad school, and trying to enjoy my last year of college… it made me feel extremely busy, all the time. I think, by the time graduation came around, I was so done with working that I sort of needed the time for myself to “recover.” When I saw the opportunity to take the research job for the month of June and continue doing my church music until grad school started up, I decided that would be a good course of action.

More than anything, I think the reason I’ve spent this summer the way I have is because I was really desperate for some “me time.” This was especially the case on the heels of the last two or so months of senior year, when I was feeling really inspired to work on my hobby of creative writing for the first time in awhile. I think I wanted to really take advantage of feeling inspired to work on that while I knew I had the time to do so, and this summer felt like the perfect opportunity. I’ve written a little bit on this blog on the fact that I stake a lot of my worth as a ‘creative’ person on whether or not I’m producing anything creative, and when it comes to my writing, I always feel really good about myself when I’m actually able to write, and brain block doesn’t get in the way.

On that count, I would say I’ve succeeded. I’ve written almost every day this summer, and not even just random stuff that I hate but stuff that I actually enjoy writing and reading back when I’m done. Up to this point, I’ve pretty much kept my writing as a concept off of my blog because I haven’t felt that it’s necessarily directly relevant to my autistic experience, but I want to change that moving forward. This isn’t to say that I’m going to turn this blog into a “writing blog,” but I think there are many situations related to my writing that make me very aware of how autism impacts my life.

I’ll say more on that later, but for now, just know that I’ve really felt fulfilled in that sense this summer. And that honestly means a lot to me, because this is an area in which I’ve really struggled in the past, especially while I was going through undergrad and often felt like I had all the creative energy sucked out of me by the academic, social, and emotional pressures of being a college student. Moving forward, I feel a lot better about being able to balance writing with my life outside of writing, and I think that this summer has really been the reason for that.

But anyway. I’ve written two entire pages in Google Docs and haven’t really gotten to the point of why “permanent vacation” is at all relevant to being autistic, except for the digression about writing. The point I’m trying to get at is this. I’ve written it before, but it’s worth repeating: “me time” inherently leaves room for a struggle with executive dysfunction.

And, look: I’ve had a little bit of that this summer. There have definitely been a handful of days where I wallow in self-pity at the end of the day because I realize that I haven’t been nearly as “productive” that day as I would have liked to be. Executive functioning difficulties mean that you can sometimes lose an entire day to your brain’s chronic delay on functionality (not a clinical term, but my attempt at explaining), and it’s frustrating beyond words. I think I’ve been a little better about avoiding it because I’ve felt so inspired to work on my writing this summer, which eats up a lot of time and very much feels “productive”… but even that isn’t foolproof. I still struggle.

The issue, of course, is that having all of this precious time on my hands has made me reluctant to give it up. After all, it feels great to have a lot of free time, and my impulse as a creative person is to fill that with working on creative things. To an outsider, such as my family members, this can look like being lazy or simply “not wanting” to do anything. In reality, I think that my reluctance to structure my schedule this summer has come from a place of wanting to spend as much time as possible working on my writing and other things which I normally would have less time to do. I don’t know if this makes sense the way I’m explaining it, but it definitely makes sense to me.

Something that has cropped up more recently, though, which I’d like to continue writing about in my next post, is the idea that having a lot of free time leaves your brain open to emotionally overworking itself. My latest fixation has been stress. Since pretty much the start of August, I’ve been extremely stressed out about a number of things, among them starting grad school soon (which will be a gigantic transition), fear of the dentist (it’s a long story), consciousness that I’ve been completely socially isolated and not necessarily wanting to change that but feeling very guilty about it, and the process of trying to pursue publication with my writing, which is a whole can of worms I won’t open today. All of this has been building up in my head, and I’m aware that it’s probably going to get a little worse before it gets better.

My current state of mind can probably be chalked up to this: trying to avoid executive dysfunction as much as possible, while also trying not to let the building stress in my head get in the way of me enjoying my last two weeks of summer before it’s time to get back into a structured schedule. I’m only marginally succeeding. I guess, at least, that’s something.

So I’ve left you with a lot of thoughts in this blog post, probably not all of them coherent, but I hope this might give you something to chew on until I write my next post next Tuesday. And I actually do mean next Tuesday. Unlike my false promises in June. Now that I’m back into the swing of this, it definitely feels normal again.

And who knows? Maybe this small return to normalcy will help with my upcoming transitions. Which I’m still scared about, by the way. But here’s where else you can find me, and I’ll see you next week.

Next Time: The stress of starting grad school is really starting to hit me.