I’m a college graduate!

Okay… I’m biting the bullet.

Hello. Welcome back. You may have noticed that I have been on hiatus for a month. I’m breaking this hiatus to write this blog post, mostly because I’ve been thinking to myself for the past handful of Tuesdays that I should really write a blog post. I haven’t gotten around to it yet, for reasons I’ll do my best to explain in this post, but I’m doing this now because I don’t want to continue thinking that I should be doing it when I’m not doing it.

So here we are. On my blog. Actually writing a post. I’ve never taken a break as long as the one I just took for the past month. Today, in fact, marks exactly one month since my graduation ceremony, since it was on May 21st. I didn’t choose to break my hiatus on this particular day on purpose, but I do think that the timing is sort of fitting.

The last time you heard from me, I was doing my very best at summarizing my senior year of college “in review.” As anybody who has read this blog for more than a few entries would know, I do the whole “things in review” thing a lot. I did it for each of my four academic years of college: freshman, sophomore, and junior along with the aforementioned senior-year post, and I’ve also done it with summers, and fall semesters. The wrap-up posts at the end of different parts of my completion of college have been helpful in keeping me on track with what the actual purpose of this blog was to begin with.

You may ask yourself, what was the purpose of this blog? By the way, I’m speaking in the past tense not because this blog is something which no longer exists, but because the establishment of the blog was something that happened in the past. As I wrote way back at the start of my freshman year, I started this blog with the original intent to document my experience as an autistic person going to college. That was it. That was the original purpose, and there wasn’t much detail beyond that.

I’ll be completely honest, since there’s been no shortage of me roasting, cringing at, or otherwise reflecting on my past self on this blog, and tell you the following: I didn’t have a plan when I started this blog. I had no idea how often I was going to post, or what kind of things I was going to write about. The way I wrote on this blog for the first six or so months sort of reflects that lack of a plan. I came up with topics on a week-to-week basis, sometimes delving into uncomfortably whiny territory, and sort of just wrote from my own experience. While it might not have been the most organized thing in the world, it was authentic to the adjustment to college that I was undergoing, and for that reason, I think that it was effective.

I think that the biggest success of writing this blog for the entirety of being in college was just that: the authenticity of it. Anyone who was reading along on the blog pretty much experienced all four years of college right along with me. I made it a point to note pretty much anything that happened in my life that was either a.) major enough to constitute a milestone, like declaring a double major or getting into grad school, or b.) relevant to my having autism. The vast majority of the posts fell into, as I’m sure is no surprise, category B.

One of my timeless refrains throughout the time I spent writing the blog while in college was that starting this blog made me so much more aware of the multitude of ways in which autism impacts my life, even in a mundane, day-to-day way. Something that I’ve really gotten through my head as a result of the reflection necessary for the writing of this blog is that my brain is just simply wired in a completely different way than what’s considered “normal.” I’ve learned, over the past couple of years, that it’s okay to accept my autism as an explanation for why something is inexplicably difficult for me when it feels like it shouldn’t be. I don’t meant to sound like I use my autism as an excuse, because I’ve forced myself through a lot of experiences which were otherwise pretty unpleasant for the sake of trying to adjust to the real world. But I do know, now, that autism just makes my life a lot more complicated. I’ve realized that it’s the reason behind a lot of things which were previously unexplained for me.

That’s been a comforting thing, for sure, because at least it gives me answers to some of the questions I was asking myself throughout high school, but it also is a difficult thing to sit with. Hand-in-hand with this realization has come my awareness that some of this is never really going to get easier. I wrote awhile back about my own frustration with the lack of resources available to autistic people, particularly autistic adults who are trying to make the jump from being a disabled/neurodivergent adolescent to being an adult in the ‘real world.’ The ‘real world’ is something that I’ve long since said is not built for people like me. But the reality is that I’m growing up in it, so I’m going to have to figure out a way to deal with it.

Anyway. All of this has been a lot of reflection. I think that the month removed from the blog gave me a bit of opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness of writing the blog weekly for the past four years, and what I got out of it personally. I said at the start that this blog was for ‘journaling’ purposes, more or less, but I’ve realized that my blog is also informative, even if to a relatively small number of people. I want to continue to run this blog for both of those reasons. I’ll tell you more about what my plans are for that at the end of this post.

But for now, let me shift gears a little bit, and tell you what I’ve been up to for the month that I’ve been away.

I’m a college graduate! My ceremony was really nice and thankfully only a little bit emotional; I think I got most of the really emotional stuff out during the last few weeks of actual school. A fun fact: I graduated college on the same day, at the same time, as my younger brother graduated from high school. It’s safe to say that my family was not happy about this, and neither was I. We were able to have a joint graduation party the following day, so all’s well that ends well.

So I graduated. The diploma is within my sight line in my bedroom right now. In fact, I graduated Magna Cum Laude, which I’ll count as an accomplishment. Because this is my blog about my life, I can even brag a little bit and tell you that I was given the departmental awards from the academic departments of my two majors. For someone who never thought she was cut out for college to begin with, this was honestly really huge.

So what happened next? I unpacked (most of) my stuff, and then summer set in. Like I said, I didn’t mean to take a hiatus. In fact, I meant to write a blog post as early as the Tuesday after my graduation ceremony. It was supposed to be some kind of broad reflection on college as a whole, and I’ll write that post at some point, but not right now. I wound up not doing it at the time I planned to, but I don’t even exactly know why. All I know is that, in true executive dysfunction fashion, one week of no blog became two weeks, and then two became three, and so on, and now it’s June 21st.

If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t spend the past month of my life doing nothing. My family keeps joking with me that I don’t have a “real” summer job, because the summer job I do have is a work-from-home one; I’m helping one of my undergrad professors with a research project that I’ve worked on since I was a sophomore. I’m also working as a church musician on weekends and at intermittent weekday occasions, which is something I’ve also done for a long time. I’ve decided that this is the summer of the “side hustles,” and it’s working out pretty well for me.

The other big thing that I’ve been doing for the past month, though, is worth noting if for no other reason than I’ve written about this on my blog before. I did a long lament awhile back about the effects of being neurodivergent on being a “creative” person. For myself, being a “creative” person pertains to writing, which is something I’ve done since I was probably eleven and started writing my infamous Club Penguin fan-fictions. (See my post giving a timeline of my special interests if the previous sentence made you chuckle.)

I pretty much spent the latter half of college on a hiatus from “serious writing,” or writing with the intent to pursue publication. I wrote plenty during this time, mostly working on self-indulgent stories that helped me with character development, style/craft, and continuing to have a creative outlet— but, as I’ve written about at length on this blog, the pandemic took a lot out of me, as did difficulties with my mental health, which have been a longtime “byproduct” of my autism. For this reason, I took a break from “serious writing,” which I think was necessary for my growth as a writer.

So why am I bringing this up? Well, because starting around spring break and continuing into right now, I’ve been “seriously writing” again. The past month of my life has been dedicated to completely hyperfixating on a novel that I’ve been actively writing since March, even though the idea for the story dates back to when I was in high school. You should know that High School Madison came up with a solid ten or so ideas for novel-length stories, wrote about half of them, and kept the other half for safekeeping (or because they were super underdeveloped at the time). The one I’ve been working on this spring and summer was part of the second half.

I won’t go on a tangent about the story itself, because then we’d be here for another ten paragraphs. Instead, I’ll tell you the reason I feel that this is relevant to this blog in particular: the story is about an autistic kid. It’s also about music and being famous on the Internet and a bunch of other stuff that I won’t get into, but the main character being autistic is really important to me, and I’m happy that I got my writing bug back.

I’ve now been going on for quite some time, and somehow I feel like I’ve managed to say very little in this blog post at all. I’m glad, at least, that I wrote it. This isn’t the end of this blog, by the way. I know that I kept going back and forth on whether I wanted to use the end of college as the end of my blog, but I don’t want to leave this blog behind entirely, especially because I think that the process I’m about to undergo— the transition into actual, post-college adulthood, as an autistic person— is an experience for which my reflection will be valuable and relevant, even if for no other reason than to keep track of it for myself. As I said at the start of this post, I want this blog to be both personal and informative. I hope to keep that up.

I do think that the posts this summer will be slightly more intermittent than you’re used to. I don’t know if I’ll be doing a post every single week. But I do want to start it out that way, so for now, expect to hear from me soon. As always, here’s where else you can find me.

And by the way… thank you for reading. If you’ve been with me for awhile, thank you, especially, for coming on the journey through college with me.

Next Time: A little fast-forward to the latter half of the summer.