“You have the traits of a great astrophysicist.”
“Oh, thank you!” Don’t let it get to your head.
I view myself as a logical person. I don’t think of myself as the type to dismiss my own accomplishments, I just don’t think I’ve accomplished many things. I politely accept compliments, but I rarely think that they’re sincere or accurate. I don’t get too proud of my work so it will hurt less when it inevitably doesn’t turn out well.
But several days after the above exchange happened between my psychiatrist and I, I realized something. There exist people (usually white men) who think that they’re born to be something, and that they’ve been brought into this world with the skills to succeed at it. Maybe what I thought was “keeping a cool head” or “being realistic” was actually hurting my self-confidence.
Being neurodivergent means being hyperaware of your challenges. You have to know your deficits well if you’re going to be able to advocate for the accommodations and support you need. You need to be able to list off what’s “wrong” with you whenever you see a new doctor or counsellor. But your strengths? They’re seldom brought up.
For example, when I got my psychological evaluation, the report listed page after page of my flaws. Things like poor working memory, low processing speed, inability to focus, doesn’t fit in with peers— they were all discussed in detail. In that report, they also listed some of my strengths, but they stood out so little to me that I couldn’t tell you what they were. After all, the point of the evaluation was to get my challenges down on paper so I could get accommodations in school. My strengths didn’t matter to the school. They only needed to know my disabilities, so they’d know which accommodations they had to give me.
The problem is this: when it’s required that you spend a great deal of time becoming intimately aware of all the things that you can’t do, you’re going to lose sight of what you could do if you worked hard enough at it.
It’s all too easy to get bogged down by all the diagnoses and symptoms you collect while trying to get accommodations. It’s so easy to start thinking that if you apparently have this much “wrong” with you, maybe you just aren’t cut out to follow your dreams. Maybe you shouldn’t even try.
If you’re in that mindset, it’s not hard to see why you’d be more likely to dismiss your achievements as flukes. You can understand why you’d be inclined to write off compliments as people just trying to make you feel better.
Perhaps if there was a greater culture of accessibility in higher education, I wouldn’t have to spend so much time becoming familiar with the things that I (unlike abled students) can’t do.
If all lectures were recorded and posted online, I wouldn’t have to rely on my note-taking accommodations to have an idea of what happened during any lectures I might have missed for disability-related reasons.
If lecture notes were prepared by the professor and made available online before class, I could follow along more easily during class and not have to worry about missing vital information because I can’t focus for an entire two-hour lecture. If midterms and exams weren’t timed, I wouldn’t need an expensive diagnosis proving that I require more time than an abled student.
More broadly, if disabled students didn’t need to have medical professionals document everything that they can’t do in order to get accommodations— and therefore get a chance at passing their classes— then they could spend more time focusing on their strengths. And then they could, in turn, build the confidence required to fight for their place among their abled peers in higher education.
Astro Autistic 