Member-only story
My Lonely Experience Navigating Professional Development
I’m too disabled for the broader world but not disabled enough for the disability services.
If you are not a Medium member, you can read this story for free here.
As I continue to live with my parents in complete and utter professional limbo nearly four years out of college, I figure I would shed some light on my journey toward building a career so far as a multiply neurodivergent adult without intellectual disability. Things started out for me in a cliche fairy tale manner as a young child. Since I was hyperlexic and hit many developmental milestones quite early, I had just about everyone in my life believing I could save the world by the ripe old age of four. I continued to fuel that fantasy for everyone, myself included, until about my third year of undergraduate studies. I graduated high school two years early with a 4.2 GPA, self-studied calculus in middle school, attended a very selective pre-college music program, got a full ride to one of the schools involved in the Varsity Blues scandal, was a Davidson Young Scholar (basically Mensa but more pretentious and exclusive), and spent four years in an internationally touring band.
Then, all of a sudden, I could no longer coast on my 99.7th percentile working memory, coveted SAT…
